Covid-19 response offers lessons for improving children’s services

Over the past two months, children’s services organisations have developed new provision and adapted existing interventions, practitioners supporting vulnerable children and families have embraced online working and taken on different roles, while sector leaders have grappled with maintaining services when large chunks of the workforce have been off sick or furloughed.

Few parts of the children’s services arena have been left untouched by the Covid-19 pandemic, but, as lockdown measures ease, the focus has shifted to analysing the effectiveness of the response so that lessons can be learned and emerging good practice identified and continued.

Here, CYP Now highlights some of the good practice being delivered.

Resource hub, Birmingham Children’s Trust

Birmingham has the largest children’s social work department in the country. Since April 2018, care services have been run by Birmingham Children’s Trust, and shortly after the lockdown was imposed, it set up a resource hub to offer emergency resources and financial support for vulnerable families.

The hub was staffed by seven trust employees and volunteers from businesses in the city who created a distribution network to safely hand-deliver food parcels, toiletries, resources and emergency payments or money, and supermarket vouchers if families were able to safely shop themselves.

More than 600 families and young people have been supported by the hub, and Marcia Myers, senior learning and development officer at the trust who has been managing the hub, says many of them are young mothers caring for children on their own.

“They were all families that were known to the trust and on the edge of care,” she says. “They were at home looking after children in difficult circumstances. In addition to essential household items, we gave them learning resources such as quizzes to do with the children.”

Birmingham has 2,000 children in care and 800 care leavers aged 18 to 25. The resource hub worked with the leaving care team to ensure care leavers were kept in touch with so that those who were struggling financially were able to get food and emergency payments.

More than 600 families and young people have been supported by the hub, and corporate parenting manager Natalie Loon says the trust is looking to build on its success for the future. It has struck partnerships with a dozen local employers and public agencies, with a partnership board set up to “move this forwards”.

“We can see there’s a need and we’re looking at how the hub can continue once lockdown has ended,” she says. “We want to enhance our corporate parenting offer and are looking at offering life skills and training for care leavers.

“There’s been a lot of learning from this and it has taken us in a direction we are excited about.”

Loon adds that the support offered through the hub will likely change as the needs of vulnerable children and families change.

“It’s going to look different every month, but I don’t think it will go – we are going to do all we can to support these families,” she adds.

Children’s centres, Wirral Council

Children’s centres provide an important access point for many local services for vulnerable parents, so when the lockdown was implemented and some settings were closed, families were left struggling to access support.

In Wirral, the council needed to suspend classes and close some centres, while setting staff changed their delivery, replacing face-to-face classes with virtual online classes published on the centres’ My Child Can Facebook page. Readiness workers film their class demonstrations to share on the page just like the regular timetable.

Within two weeks, the Facebook page had 114,000 impressions, a 170 per cent rise in engagement on the page and over 12,500 video views. The page has more than 5,000 followers, and the initiative attracted partner agencies who joined forces to promote messages to parents around safe sleep support and mental wellbeing.

Paul Boyce, corporate director for children’s services, says: “Our children’s centres provide a fantastic support network. In the face of the health crisis, they’ve stepped up to make sure they can still offer this support.

“The virtual offering with the online classes are keeping centres connected. I’m proud of the team and I’m sure the parents and young children are enjoying the classes.”

Youth services, Creative Youth Network

In Bristol, targeted youth work is delivered by Creative Youth Network, a charity employing 65 staff and which last year worked with 9,000 young people.

A majority of its work is one-to-one support, most of which has switched to being delivered online. For new referrals to the service, staff made introductory videos that explained who they are and how they work. Working with young people online doesn’t present the same “barrier” as if they are referred for sessions in person, says Kate Gough, the network’s youth services director.

“Working online gives an interesting insight into the family home – we can see interactions and hear more from parents; it sometimes flags up safeguarding issues,” she says.

“We’ve also moved into open-access small group work with, for example, groups of young carers, girls and LGBTQ young people. All of our youth workers have received online safeguarding training around protocols for using Zoom, TikTok and Facebook platforms.

“One of our busier youth clubs said they have found they are having better quality conversations with young people when accessing online support because there are fewer distractions for the young person so they are more engaged.”

To supplement the online support, youth workers have been delivering resources and have even supplied disadvantaged young people with tablet computers so they can access sessions. “For a young person new to the service, it’s a good way for the youth worker to get to know them,” says Gough.

An issue to emerge early on was that of young people flouting lockdown restrictions by groups gathering in public spaces. Gough says the network worked closely with the police and council community support officers so that when this happened, detached youth workers were despatched to “have discussions with young people and ensure they didn’t misunderstand the restrictions”.

Gough is already incorporating lessons from the past two months into her planning for the future, with one idea being to set up a Big Brother-style diary room in some Bristol schools “so youth workers can talk to young people who don’t feel comfortable talking at home”.

Gough adds: “Seeing how some of these young people have no problem talking via a screen, we will be making much more use of online methods.”

New roles, Kent public health

Pauline Harlow is one of many in the children’s workforce to take on new roles during the pandemic. A specialist community public health nurse with a background in school health, she was temporarily moved to the adult services nursing team – one of 354 clinical staff at Kent Community Foundation Trust to change roles during the pandemic.

Harlow normally works with children aged four to 19, with complex health needs or emotional health needs, and admits to being “a little apprehensive” about working in a new area.

“I was unsure how my paediatric background would be put to use within adult urgent nursing care, but I have found that I had lots of transferable skills and communication skills which have been enormously helpful, particularly working with vulnerable adults and end of life care,” she says.

“It feels strange to not be working with children and young people, but I feel privileged at this moment to be able to provide care to those that need it most.”

For Marcia Myers, the move from her trainer role to managing Birmingham Children’s Trust’s resource hub, was a chance to use her organisational skills in a new environment.

“The training had stopped, so I wanted to use my skills in a different way,” she explains. “We pulled everything together within a week, and put the procedures and referral process in place; I’m really proud of that.

“I’ve been in this role for seven years, so maybe it’s time to use my skills in another way; I’ve enjoyed working with young people again. I hope to be part of the future of the resource hub and am excited about the prospect of seeing it grow.”

It is not just frontline staff who have stepped up to the plate. With routine inspections suspended, 250 Ofsted staff have been redeployed to 105 local authorities to help undertake a number of different roles. For example, 16 non-inspector Ofsted employees formed a virtual team to support the recruitment checks for adult social care staff in London, which has contributed to over 600 staff being recruited and deployed across settings. In addition, 30 staff have been approved as foster carers, and 80 to provide “lighter touch” support to children.

These examples illustrate the lengths providers have gone to to maintain services for vulnerable children and families. It is likely that the experiences will shape services for years to come.

LEADERS’ VIEWS: Lessons to be learned from the coronavirus pandemic for the future shape of children's services
 

Dr Carol Homden, chief executive, Coram

The children’s services sector needs to respond to three main challenges to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 and address the long-standing trends threatening to blight the opportunity of the next generation.

1. Services must “catch up” to address the inevitable rise in referrals, and ensure open access support for children and young people at a time when the ecosystem on which they depend – after-school activities, youth centres, and community services – are under strain.

2. It must champion a new focus on social wellbeing – so building young people’s confidence, relationships and cultural capital is as important as attainment.

3. All parts of the children’s sector – public, private and third sector – must demand and justify an increase in resources for children by ensuring best practice is the only practice, by making consistent entitlement a reality for children across health, education and social care.

Just as the government has mobilised with an unprecedented peace-time effort to save jobs through the furlough scheme, we now need to galvanise and deliver an equivalent commitment to the next generation.

Leigh Middleton, chief executive, National Youth Agency

The response to the pandemic has been varied across the regions, size and nature of youth services. There has been a dramatic switch to digitised youth work, borne out of necessity to stay connected to young people and creative in their content. There will be no rowing back from that provision, as for some young people it provides greater access to support, friendships and activities.

Yet the digital divide on broadband, devices and data means that any such provision is not sufficient in itself, but can be complementary to face-to-face provision going forward. Also, peer groups, drop-in services, a safe space outside the home, confidential advice and guidance require youth centres and services to re-open.

Where youth services have been able to maintain detached youth work through lockdown, they have proved a valued source of support for young people, often aligned to outreach for schools, policing and public health for the safety of young people and others.

Modelling services and youth work provision in the “new normal” world post-pandemic, there is likely to be an increased role for detached youth work and outreach from schools, community facilities and pop-ups.

Andy Elvin, chief executive, Tact

A director of children’s services recently raised the question of how many of our interventions were based on professionals being unable to manage their anxieties as opposed to our intervention actually being needed. The changes forced on our practice by the pandemic has required us to confront this question. In the care system, we are undertaking professionals’ meetings, home visits, support sessions with carers and children, supervisions and foster carer recruitment online – and, by and large, it is working well.

After this is over, we will of course return to face-to-face working, but not wholly. This is because our carers, children and young people have enjoyed not having the obvious manifestations of the system impinge on their lives. Many foster families have found benefits from the system not intruding so much. Children’s emotional health has improved in many cases. Children will have to return to school, and we will always need safeguards in the system, but we cannot ignore what we are learning.

Are we intervening because we are sure that we can substantively improve a child’s life and transform their outcomes, or is it because we are worried about the professional consequences for us of not doing so?