All of us at West London Zone have been deeply distressed by the tragedy at Grenfell Tower. We are currently working out what the implications for our work might be and how to best support our community over the long term. You can read our full statement here.

West London Zone represents a partnership of local organisations all working towards the same goal: that the children and young people in our area grow up safe, happy and healthy.

We do this by helping charities, local authorities, schools and children’s centres deliver the best possible support to the children and young people who need it most.

Over the next 10 years we aim to have an impact on 13,000 children and young people across three square miles of inner West London, and change the life chances of the children in our Zone for good.

As a ‘Collective Impact’ initiative, our approach was designed together with local people to better utilise the assets that already existed in the area. This means that we work with local schools and children’s centres to identify the children and young people aged 0-25 most at risk of negative outcomes. Then with the support of our frontline Link Workers, each person (and their family) is provided with individually tailored interventions from the partnership of local charities we work with. Behind the scenes, the WLZ ‘backbone’ team organises the partnership, manages finance and analyses the data collected by our team on the ground.

WLZ works with the best local, regional and national charities supporting children and young people across the range of issues – from learning to well being and character. They work towards a set of shared goals, with shared values and shared measurement. Being part of WLZ does not compromise partners’ independence but it does mean there can be ‘one team’ around the child or young person – rather than multiple agencies working in isolation from each other.

WLZ is evidence-led. This means that we use data to proactively identify the children who would benefit most from our support, to monitor the progress of our children (together with data from local authorities, schools, children’s centres, and employment agencies), and to tailor our provision to the unique needs of each individual child. We then produce visual ‘dashboards’, which show how each child and each charity partner has progressed over time.