Page 364 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 19 February 2019
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The SSBC vision is simple—to grow our children together with love and respect. Every aspect of the programme has children at the heart with parents (right from pregnancy) leading the way, supported and guided by experts.
Parents were vital partners in designing the SSBC service offer, with some clear messages: they want services close to home; they want services more joined up; and they want government and service providers to use language that is respectful and strengths based. Now parents are co-producing new services, sitting on boards and interview panels for new staff, and even delivering family mentoring. It was a pleasure to meet some of these parent champions.
From Nottingham we travelled to Leeds, also for two days. The focus of this visit was Leeds’s 10-year journey to become a restorative city and a child friendly city. This is a multifaceted approach which no doubt some members are familiar with from the children’s mayor and voice and influence team who ensure that children’s voices are heard across the range of council responsibilities to the commitment to restorative practice in schools and across the child protection and care system. The commitment is not only whole of council but it seeks to engage the wider community. There are now 850 child-friendly Leeds ambassadors and annual child-friendly Leeds awards organised by children and young people.
Since making its initial commitment in 2008 Leeds has restructured its child welfare services to be more place based, changed its processes to be built on conversations about issues rather than thresholds, introduced a range of both restorative and therapeutic approaches to supporting families to keep their children safe at home and placed children squarely at the centre of practice, service design and planning. In Leeds it is children and young people who interview applicants for senior positions in children’s services.
It is not possible to do justice to the lessons shared with us in Leeds in the time available but the cultural change they have achieved has seen a 15 per cent reduction in looked-after children, while the rest of England has experienced a 12 per cent increase. As senior officials emphasised, children and families are still getting support, just a different type. And services continue to adapt and improve. Leeds was an early adopter of family group conferencing or family meetings, which are now embedded across the system, not just for families at risk of having children taken into care but also to address issues early in the life of a problem, including an outreach service to victims of domestic and family violence.
A new service, restorative early support, sees multidisciplinary teams working with families to achieve the goals they set for themselves through structured conversations that help them identify both core challenges and the strengths they can bring to bear in addressing them. Materials to support these engagements have been co-designed with families and individual families score themselves on their progress against their goals.
Throughout the conversations in Leeds we returned to the challenges of cultural change, workforce and practice development and the importance of leadership. Children’s services has sought to embed the restorative practice ethos of working with,
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