Children’s professionals develop local projects to aid Covid recovery

The recipients, who will receive an average grant of £9,500, are fellows of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. Each year the trust awards funding to fellows to find and apply the world’s best solutions for the UK’s most pressing problems.

This is the second round of Covid Action Fund grants that the trust has awarded – last June, £155,000 was given to 21 urgent projects responding to the crisis. This latest round will support longer-term schemes, with a third round of grants planned later this year.

Lessons learnt from the fellows’ Covid-19 projects will be gathered by the trust to create a national resource and knowledge bank of learning and recommendations for wider sharing.

Many of the schemes include help for vulnerable children and families, but the three featured here specifically focused on supporting children and young people.

Home-schooling model

Helen Minnis, Professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Glasgow, has worked with colleagues, schools, disease modellers and families to develop a Scottish Model for Safe Education which provides a safe home-schooling alternative in Scotland should further lockdown and school closures become necessary.

It uses “closed childcare clusters” where two to five families share home schooling and socialise only together, reducing social isolation and maximising parental economic activity. School hubs for the most vulnerable would remain open.

During the first lockdown, families found it difficult to manage home schooling with other priorities such as work, causing stress for parents and children. With further school closures due to outbreaks likely, Professor Minnis will conduct research with schools and families across the UK to investigate whether the model could be replicated to other regions.

She will develop the model for urban, rural and ethnically diverse contexts, providing tailored guidance for schools.

Domestic abuse response

Cases of domestic abuse have risen during the pandemic, with the Child First Trust charity in Essex reporting a 19 per cent rise in requests for access to family support and counselling for children and young people.

Sacha Brakenbury from Colchester is the founder of six education charities including the original Ipswich Town Community and Education Trust, all focusing on supporting disadvantaged and vulnerable families. She works with local schools which, on reopening in September, reported increased evidence of children’s trauma.

Brakenbury will use her grant to develop a long-term, school-based pilot programme in north east Essex and Mid Tendring, supporting around 13,000 families, particularly those at risk of abuse. This will involve collaborative research with 30 schools on local incidences of domestic abuse, and development of a page on each school’s website to invite self-referrals to core services in a safe way.

Parental support

Experts predict an exponential increase in the needs of parents and infants as a result of the lockdowns and social distancing restrictions. This will particularly be the case for parents who have undergone multiple adverse childhood experiences, single-parent families, care leavers, victims of domestic abuse, alcohol, drugs or sexual abuse, those with poor mental health or who are struggling to bond with their babies.

London-based psychotherapist Yvonne Osafo, who specialises in infant-parent psychotherapy (IPP), will use her grant to launch a year-long infant-family clinic pilot project providing 10 low-income and high-risk families with free infant-parent psychotherapy.

The pilot will involve developing organisational structures and operations; providing specialist IPP supervision to clinicians; training staff; establishing links with potential referrers to develop a network around perinatal mental health teams, community paediatricians, health visitors and GPs; and establishing an online presence and visual identity.

Osafo wants to establish a specialist clinic, working with infants up to two-years-old, and train a specialist IPP professional workforce.