Children 1st Practice Profile
The PINS team met with Sandy Corlett and Karen Hancock at the Children 1st South Edinburgh Family Support Team. Through discussion with Sandy and Karen more was learnt about the Family Support Team and their work to promote pupil inclusion.
Firstly, a short project profile:
The Edinburgh Family Support Team provides intensive therapeutic and educational support to vulnerable children under 12 and their families living in south east Edinburgh.
In partnership with the City of Edinburgh Council Working Together Service, the team works with children who are experiencing significant social, emotional and behavioural difficulties to help them remain in their own family, school and community. The team also provides a Sure Start service to the parents of very young children, aged 0-3, through intensive family work or group work support.
The service is funded by Children 1st, the City of Edinburgh Working Together and Sure Start Services.
The service works to:
- Provide individual and family work to help children to address difficulties.
- Provide support in the classroom for children in difficulty and at risk of exclusion and to assist school staff to provide a supportive learning environment.
- Support parents and carers to promote positive family relationships.
- Provide group work programmes for children, to raise their self esteem and confidence, and to develop their social skills.
- Provide help for families to use local resources.
The key features of the service are:
- Early intervention
- Intensive flexible holistic support in school, home and the community
- Close collaboration with parents, school and local agencies
And now more from the interview:
PINS: Could you introduce yourselves and tell me about the service you provide, what’s your approach?
Sandy Corlett: I am the Family Support Team service manager and have been since it started around 6 years ago. I originally trained as a social worker and have worked with both children and families in the voluntary and statutory sector. I manage and lead the Family Support Team which is a multi-disciplinary team made up of social workers, family support workers, primary school teachers and volunteers.
The service is for pre primary school and primary school aged children. Our remit is to work with children between the ages of 0 and 12. For pre primary aged children our funding comes from Sure Start. The majority of our work is with primary age children and the funding for this comes from both the local authority and Children 1st. We are very keen to maintain the role of Children 1st in this joint service as it means we retain a degree of autonomy in terms of how we operate and run the service e.g. having more scope to innovate.
The funding and emergence of the Family Support Team really came out of a desire to reduce the large number of secondary residential school places which the council was funding. These proved extremely expensive, particularly when no places were available within City of Edinburgh and the authority had to start placing young people in other local authorities. There were further concerns about placing young people away from their own communities and so this led to a rethink about how to best meet the needs of young people having difficulty at school, at home and in their community. At the same time there was a shift towards intervening earlier in the lives of young people, at a stage where problems are often less developed or entrenched. In light of this, Children 1st received funding to start up an early intervention team which is now the Family Support Team and which is part of Edinburgh's "Working Together" strategy for increasing support to prevent exclusion.
Our referral’s mainly come through head teachers and the Pupil Support Groups that are used in this authority. These groups are made up of a range of professionals and workers who have worked with the young person and are in a position to discuss their behaviour and situation with parents or carers. The Pupil Support Group might include the head teacher, class teacher, link worker, educational psychologist, community health nurse, social worker and a support worker.
Our cases loads vary greatly depending on the time and intensity of the work we are doing with any given young person. We take a holistic approach where by we attempt to work around the interrelated areas of the home, school and the community. We are fortunate in that we have staff who are skilled and qualified in working in these areas which means we can utilise the right skills and experience which fit with a specific piece of work. In practice this often means we will have staff with teaching experience to lead within the school and staff with social work expertise to take the lead in work with the family. We often have more than one member of staff working with one young person and their family.
Karen Hancock: I am a qualified teacher and am employed through the council to work in the Family Support Team. I previously worked as a primary school teacher in local authority schools and have experience of teaching a range of ages from nursery to primary 7 and have also been with the project since it started about 6 years ago.
Practice Issues
PINS: What are the current pupil inclusion practice issues for your agency?
KH: I’d say the pressures on teachers are a big issue. That, and teachers can find accepting help a challenge. The pressures on teachers are enormous and they have to work for the majority of the pupils in the class. Because there is such pressure on schools to achieve targets set by the Scottish Government it often leads to attention being focused on the majority and they are limited in the time they are able to devote to the more able children and the vulnerable children at the bottom of the class who might not be coping.
SC: I’d also highlight the issue of engaging parents, particularly parents who don’t want to or are finding it really difficult to change. Their life experiences are often very difficult and they can find it difficult to get motivated to help to improve their children’s chances. Engaging fathers specifically can be a problem. It often takes a lot of energy, time and commitment to get fathers to come on board.
SC: Like any service which works in partnership with others we also have excellent relationships but do encounter difficulties associated with working collaboratively. For instance, misunderstandings and lack of knowledge of other disciplines, lack of experience of working together, problems with communication and problems around which worker ‘holds the thread’ of a particular case.
KH: On this point a particular problem has emerged in respect of staff having the expertise to do what is required. At the Family Support Team we are lucky in that we have workers with a variety of expertise and experience. We have staff who are used to working with families and also staff who have the skill set to work effectively with young people in school. We believe in retaining this level of expertise and utilise workers in the environment they are most comfortable and productive in.
I am lucky in that I am employed through the council so I still retain my terms and conditions as a teacher. As I understand it though, not many qualified teachers are making the move and becoming generic project workers. While some of the teachers I have spoken to are envious of the work I do they are not prepared to lose the terms and conditions they have in teaching. This is an issue as there is an imbalance of qualifications and experience within those taking up generic project worker posts. It has implications for the type of work and service which particular projects can offer.
It makes for a better service if you have workers with both education and social work experience on your team. They can share ideas and advice and it also is most effective in terms of offering the holistic service which we believe in.
SC: Another issue we have relates to working with mental health services with a specialism for children and young people. They are a really useful service but, it is often very difficult to persuade child psychiatrist’s to come into the community to assess children. It can also be very difficult for us to work out if such expertise is needed for a particular child. Not all children with emotional or behavioural difficulties need specialist psychiatric services and psychiatric labels can be counter productive. We have a community mental health nurse.
KH: Going back to schools I would add that schools can be a little impatient in terms of expecting results. Most of the schools we work with are very understanding and flexible but on occasion we have found that they expect rapid changes in behaviour and learning which we believe are both unrealistic and counterproductive. I would add to this the issue of some of the young people we work with spending unproductive time within school. Our aim is to help young people cope better within school and enhance their learning potential. It is important that they are not just sitting or waiting in corridors and outside the head teacher’s office. They need to be in class, coping in terms of their interaction with others and with the curriculum.
Good Practice
PINS: What is the best way to positively impact on the life of young people and limit their chances of being excluded?
SC: We work closely with allied professionals who are very effective at identifying children early. Parents, health visitors and nursery nurses have all identified children at an early age. In our area, the local authority children and families social work team have a very large case load and this is why our service plays a key role.
SC: We are lucky in that we can devote a significant period of assessment time which helps us explore the issues of children who are referred to our service. This gives us the opportunity to build relationships with the young person, their family and the school. We find this time really productive. It is very useful in getting to the roots of problematic behaviour and helps to identify the areas in which the young person needs help and support. We spend a lot of time gathering information which might include visits to the family, interviews with the young person, speaking to teachers and other professionals who have been involved in the young person’s life. We also spend time observing peer interaction, for instance in the playground or the classroom, which is really useful in gaining an understanding of the child.
The assessment phase allows us to identify issues, barriers to inclusion in school, to establish a baseline for measuring change, to decide on appropriate interventions, to engage positively with parents recognising them as experts in respect of their child and to find out the child’s view of the world through speaking to the child. Some of the assessment tools we commonly use are the genogram, ecomap and the parent hassle questionnaire (more about these tools at the end of the profile)
In most cases we identify an array of often complex issues which need attention. The assessment phase is also about looking for strengths and positive relationships and influences which we can build on.
KH: We have found that the parent’s relationship with the class teacher, head teacher and the school in general are crucial to any positive change. Families often have a negative experience of school and education. This often stems from there own childhood and is reinforced through the difficulties their child is experiencing. In such circumstances the relationship between the family and the school can be very weak. We actively attempt to build this relationship as we feel it is vital in bringing about change.
When we first try to engage parents they are often anxious and defensive in respect of the school and feel as if they are being criticised and judged. This is where we try to do a lot of work in an advocacy and mediation role. It can also be the case that teachers have a very limited understanding of family circumstances and it helps if they are willing to listen and take the time to learn a little about the family and also the problems they are experiencing. This clearly is of benefit in terms of the child’s interactions with the teacher and especially how the teacher relates and understands the child’s behaviour. It can shift the teacher’s opinion greatly. We will often arrange meetings between the parent, the teacher and ourselves to help build relationships. In some cases we can even get teachers to come on home visits and speak to the child and the parent(s) within their home which is great in developing a more positive relationship and level of understanding.
KH: It is important to support classroom teachers so that they can both get a better understanding of why a child is displaying disruptive behaviour and to give suggestions as to how to effectively managing this behaviour in the classroom. It really helps if the teacher is willing and has the time to be involved in the planning of any strategies. This might involve a combination of both suggesting strategies, doing whole class inputs and working with the child 1 to1 or in small groups within the classroom. I will often work with young people around things such as how to manage their feelings and how to interact more positively with their peers.
One thing which is important is to put in place a set of achievable targets for the child to work toward. At first this might just be small, though often significant, targets such as sitting in their seat or finishing a piece of work. These can be reviewed with the teacher and the child and they are something to build on. We would also argue that workers with teaching experience and qualifications are best placed to support and provide help to classroom teachers in the classroom rather than an auxiliary or class room assistant. This is particularly important for children who are completely ‘turned off’ to learning and who present the most difficult behaviour to manage.
SC: It is important to identify children who need special education as early as possible. In our experience schools may make enormous efforts over quite a long period of time to keep children in mainstream schools who in the end need a special school placement. We make a conscious effort to push for special education at an early age if we believe it is necessary. We have witnessed children who have never been given the extra support that special education affords and then go on to mainstream secondary schools and get little, if anything, from their school experience.
SC: The early identification of young people who have a learning difficulty is important. On occasion we have found that these are masked by contributing emotional and behavioural problems. On top of this, it is also the case that learning difficulties fall within the "normal" range, as assessed by educational psychologists. We are conscious of this and often give additional educational support even if assessment has suggested that it is not needed.
KH: We find that many of the parents have good relationships with the nursery staff but this is not always replicated when children move into primary school. We are working closely with nursery staff to identify children who are particularly vulnerable. This means we can inform P1 teachers so that they can know what to expect and what needs certain children have from the first day at primary school. We can also work more closely with the parents of these children and help them to form a relationship with their child’s new teacher. In some cases we will also work to negotiate the retention of certain children in nursery for another year if we feel this is appropriate.
SC: As a service we have begun to actively seek referrals of girls. This is because we have historically had a gender imbalance in terms of the children we work with. It is most often the case that boys cause problems at primary school and this is through loud, aggressive and visible behaviour. We are conscious that some girls do not cope in primary school and this manifests in different ways such as withdrawn and non engaged behaviour. This can lead to much more visible problems in secondary school so we now target an event spilt between boys and girls in terms of referrals.
SC: We also work intensively with families and try to support them to build more positive relationships with their children and their school. Most parents want to support their child and want them to be successful at school. In some cases the relationship might have become quite negative but we can still find some positive feature that we can build on. In some cases it is a case of supporting the parent in terms of discipline and boundaries. The aim is to build parents confidence. Some times they are going through very difficult circumstances such as the death of a close relative and they are finding this difficult to cope with.
We use a variety of approaches, for instance Video Interactive Guidance with parents. This involves filming their interactions with their child and editing the footage so that it only shows the positive interactions. We show this back to the parent and it can be really moving for them watching all the good things about their relationship with their child. It takes the focus away from the negative and the problems and is a great way to help with motivation and support. This can also be used to record peer interactions or teacher-pupil interactions to show teachers how they might be able to change to help with their relationships with disruptive pupils. Examples of things which are uncovered through V.I.G are tone of voice, eye contact, smiling and taking the time to listen.
SC: Family Group Conferencing is also an approach which CHILDREN 1st has taken a lead, are piloting and are very keen on. It is used in statutory social work and shifts the balance of power back to the family in terms of decision making and finding their own solutions to their child’s behavioural problems. It involves getting all the family members who play a significant role in the child’s life round a table with all the professionals and workers who are also involved in the child’s life. During this meeting everyone has an opportunity to speak and raise their thoughts and opinions about how best to resolve the problems the child is having. After everyone has had the opportunity to speak all the professionals leave the room and it is down to the family to discuss the situation and make decisions in relation to what they see as an appropriate course of action. If it works correctly than it can be very empowering and an opportunity for the family to take control and motivate them to work to support and improve their child’s behaviour. It is based on the premise that the parents and family are primarily responsible for the child and not the family support team or the social work department. I think this gets muddled and it is good to use opportunities to reaffirm roles and responsibilities.
Developing Services
PINS: What do you think needs to be done to improve the outcomes for the young people you work with?
KH I think schools need to have more flexibility, more opportunity, in terms of meeting the needs of all young people in school. Some children are totally disengaged with the curriculum as it stands. This is not to say these children do not have potential. I have worked with children with very developed and advanced skills, but they are not a success within school. Some children have brilliant problem solving skills, are really creative or are great doing practical tasks but find little that they can relate to at school. I think there needs to be more for these children within school which they can hold on to and feel positive about. Far too much emphasis is placed on meeting targets and setting tests for young children.
More information about Genogram:
http://www.genopro.com/genogram_components/default.html
Ecomap:
http://www.uic.edu/nursing/genetics/Lecture/Family/ecomap.html
Parent Hassle Questionnaire:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2004/04/19284/36216
