Children & Young People Now
April 2011
Comment
Christine Davies CBE – Director – C4EO
Children’s safety, wellbeing and achievements are closely linked to the quality
of their relationships with parents and carers. These relationships can be affected
when parents or carers have health problems or relationship difficulties.
There are an estimated 150,000 young carers in the UK. Thirty per cent are believed
to be caring for adults with mental health needs. Between 200,000 to 300,000 children
and young people are thought to be living with a parent whose drug use is problematic,
with 1.4 million living with at least one parent who drinks excessively.
Often, parents and carers need advice and emotional support, which can be provided
without referral to specialist services. Other types of support include counselling,
parenting skills training and financial support.
However, the fear of stigmatisation has proved a strong deterrent to the take-up
of these services, with children suffering as a result. The fear of seeking help
is a real challenge for services and agencies, so C4EO has published three research
reviews to help those working in this field.
The research highlighted shows that embedding targeted services within universal
provision, such as schools and family health services, minimises the fear of stigmatisation
and helps maximise effective engagement.
Schools-based programmes for parents and carers have been shown to be effective
in improving children’s behaviour, educational outcomes and family relationships,
and reducing the likelihood of substance misuse. Community-based programmes, which
have a multi-agency approach and well-trained workers, are also effective.
Using the media to engage hard-to-reach families and using both practical and therapeutic
interventions simultaneously are seen to improve children’s wellbeing, reduce juvenile
crime and, potentially, the likelihood of children being taken into care.
We hope these three reviews of evidence and effective local practice help support
all those working with families, parents and carers.
Making the difference
Newcastle Measuring the performance of family support
Newcastle identified a need for better information about family and parenting support
to measure the performance of services
Data collected by services can be used as evidence of their effectiveness to ensure funding
“We wanted to ensure we were using the resources we had to make the greatest impact,”
explains Sue Miller, lead specialist practitioner for family support and parenting
at Newcastle City Council.
The council used Think Family funding to employ a dedicated performance monitoring
officer – Steve Foreman – who has been in post since December 2009. His role includes
working with services to improve record-keeping, introducing new systems to collect
evidence, and analysing information gathered.
The work covers council-run services and those commissioned by the council from
different providers. This has already improved understanding of the support families
are getting and the difference it makes, says Miller.
Crucially, it has provided evidence that schemes such as parenting programmes and
family intervention projects are having an impact and saving money by stopping problems
escalating.
This information has helped improve partnership work around family and parenting
support with organisations such as schools and has had an impact on funding decisions,
although the data has not yet led to services being closed or funding reduced. “It
has helped make the case for continuation of funding in particular areas and when
we’re talking about what to fund in the future, it gives us evidence to help people
make those decisions,” says Miller.
“It has also helped us think about why some families have not engaged with programmes,
what we could do differently, and how we target our provision.”
More detailed analysis will be possible in the near future, says Foreman. “To really
learn lessons and see patterns you have to build up evidence over time,” he explains.
It is important to explain what you are doing to frontline staff, he adds. “This
is not about checking up on them but about showing what they’re doing makes a difference,”
says Foreman.
“Part of the challenge is that it is sometimes not easy to capture that, especially
when you are talking about families with complex problems.”
Key points
- Ensure frontline practitioners understand the value of performance monitoring and
how it can help them
- It works best when aligned with the services it is investigating, with real understanding
of what they do
- Communicate findings clearly to commissioners and providers
- Performance data has lessons for all, including adult services, so share findings
widely
Need to know
Data Social mobility relies on information gathering
If the government’s pledge to improve social mobility is to succeed, then reliable
data is crucial, says Simon Rutt, head of statistics for the National Foundation
for Educational Research and C4EO’s data lead.
A key plank in the government’s reform plan is the new £2.5bn pupil premium, which
will be targeted directly at pupils on free school meals and children in care with
the aim of improving their educational outcomes and future life chances.
Meanwhile, the Department for Education’s £125m Education Endowment Fund will allow
schools and other organisations to apply for extra funding to support innovative
work to boost the performance of disadvantaged pupils in England’s poorest performing
schools.
The collection and analysis of data is an important part of these initiatives and
can help local authorities and individual schools ensure they are targeting funding
where it is most needed, says Rutt.
“The endowment fund project and the desire to improve social mobility are going
to be heavily reliant on data and on reliable measures of deprivation and social
class,” he says.
When it comes to gathering information about children and young people of school
age, eligibility for free school meals has been regularly used as an indicator of
deprivation as the entitlement is only available to families receiving particular
benefits. But there is a catch, explains Rutt.
“As a measure, this is heavily reliant on individual families actually claiming
their free school meal entitlement,” he says.
“Families that do not claim would not be included. At a national level this would
make very little difference, if any, to estimations of national outcomes, but at
smaller levels, particularly at school level, this may have a larger impact.
“The ability to track pupils, combining information from a variety of sources, is
therefore going to increase in importance.” A number of local authorities have already
been able to combine traditional educational data with benefits and other local
health-related data.
Other factors that might influence how well children do include parents’ educational
attainment, their occupations and attitudes to education – but this kind of data
can be hard to obtain.
“Not all pupils on free school meals end up with low levels of achievement and not
all children born into comfortable middle-class families end up as successful barristers,”
says Rutt.
“We need reliable data that allows us to investigate the complex relationship between
all these factors as it is only by understanding these relationships that we can
analyse the impact of additional funds and resources on changing outcomes.”
Where to go next?
Knowledge review reports
Three new reports investigating successful work with families, parents and carers
are now available in the publications section. The knowledge review documents cover
effective work to improve children’s wellbeing by supporting parents’ physical and
mental health, improving relationships and tackling domestic violence, and look
at the impact of parenting and family support.
Send good practice to C4EO
If you are part of a service or project that is getting great results for children,
young people and families, then C4EO wants to hear from you. The organisation is
continuing to seek out examples of good practice across all the key themes it is
investigating, to help share lessons, improve services and highlight positive change
for children. Examples
of good practice collected so far.
Excellence and evidence
Presentations from C4EO’s Excellence and
Evidence training workshops are now available online. The series of events
took place following a national consultation with directors of children’s services
and others from the sector to help identify key priorities in each region. Using
the results of the consultation, C4EO created training events specific to different
regions.
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