Reorganisation enhances Westminster early help support

• Family hubs help struggling families navigate support available while inclusion teams tackle high school absence

• Three years after the changes, exclusions have fallen and re-referrals of families in need have also declined

ACTION

Early help services in Westminster have been recognised for delivering a targeted, innovative approach to helping families with wide-ranging needs, including those with complex difficulties.

An Ofsted inspection of Westminster Council’s children’s social care services in 2019 rated its work in this area as “exemplary” with low re-referral rates an indication of how interventions result in “sustained improvement” in children’s lives.

Inspectors praised the service for carrying out informative assessments and providing a wide variety of evidence-based interventions, as well as its integrated partnership work.

Two particular elements of the council’s early help offer – its family hub service and school inclusion team – are good examples of its “planned, cohesive and seamless” partnership arrangements.

Both approaches were initially piloted from 2018 following an extensive reorganisation of the service two years earlier, says Madhu Chauhan, the council’s head of early help.

“We were quite a large early help service with a mixture of family support workers, social workers and education welfare officers. There was a big change to the way early help was defined,” she explains.

The restructure saw family hubs created at existing children’s centres consolidating the service to three main sites located within the most deprived areas of Westminster.

“We already had children’s centres working in partnership with community-based groups so it was about galvanising these organisations to think collectively about the offer being made locally,” Chauhan says. 

Bringing together these groups with professionals such as health visitors and school nurses has resulted in the service operating under a more “unified culture” sharing the same behaviours and values, she adds.

“We can utilise our resources more effectively and not duplicate work by going for the same kind of projects,” she says.

“We want to deliver a service that doesn’t require parents to have to continuously repeat their story – that’s the main aim behind it.”

Families are encouraged to attend the hubs where they can be signposted to professionals offering support and advice for particular issues such as housing or health.

Using a consent-based approach, families help to co-create a package of support that has been tailored to meet their needs.

The service uses a “family navigator” – a new role created within the hubs – that co-ordinates networks around families helping providers to support them into the services they need.

It is based on a “care navigator” approach used by GPs to help families access care as well as community-based clinical support, says Chauhan.

The council launched a second pilot – the school inclusion team – in response to escalating numbers of school exclusions in the borough, one of the biggest challenges to its early help service.

Data for London and England in 2017/18 shows the exclusion rate in Westminster was 5.97 compared with national averages of 5.08 and 4.43 for inner London.

This figure increased in 2018/19 to 6.28 in Westminster compared with 5.36 nationally and 4.45 for inner London.

Chauhan says the inclusion team pilot was a way of introducing a more intensive offer to schools allowing pupils dedicated time with a qualified practitioner.

“We wanted to tackle that trajectory of exclusions and to help schools think about where behaviour that creates a problem in the classroom could be germinating from,” she says.

“The pilot was a recognition that where children are repeatedly excluded they end up with poor self-esteem and it’s not just them that’s affected. You’ve excluded the whole family too.”

Adopting a “whole system” approach also enables better communication between schools and families needing specialised support.

“It’s often about that disconnection between home and school and trying to repair some of that relationship. And then it lends itself to the whole school thinking about its behaviour policy and how they manage their staff training,” she adds.

The inclusion team is jointly led by a senior early help family practitioner and family therapist in addition to three family early help practitioners.

For the year 2020/21, the council spent around £200,000 on the project which covered the cost of training, consultancy, voluntary sector mentoring and its team of practitioners.

Underpinned by a trauma-informed approach, the team works with schools and families that have children at risk of exclusion or struggling at transition points.

Schools can make their own referrals with many pupils identified as needing support in years five and six but also in years seven and eight.

“We do get years nine, 10 and 11 pupils and there have been some successes but it’s more effective if you identify in schools those pupils that are emerging,” Chauhan adds.

The council delivered trauma-informed training to several schools that took part in the pilot which it followed up with a kitemark that recognised achievement in this area.

Many schools in the borough have since been awarded bronze and silver awards for their trauma-informed practice.

“The work has helped us to stop the escalation of children being excluded and becoming school refusers or non attenders,” says Chauhan.

“It also addresses those children that aren’t being managed at home and are left to their own devices and end up getting involved in unsuitable activities.”

IMPACT

In 2019, referrals to the early help service hit a high of more than 379, of which 224 were for boys, before dropping to 270 during the first year of the pandemic in 2020.

From July 2020 to June 2021 the figure increased back up to 325, of which 181 were for boys referred to the service. Figures to June 2022 show there have been 210 referrals, of which less than half were for girls.

Chauhan says these referral rates are routinely examined as one means of assessing the impact of the early help service.

“We look at the rates of referrals going up that require [being] “stepped up” – so it’s early identification of safeguarding rather than at point of crisis.

“Another output is those families that come back after having received support – so the re-referral rate is a way of gauging that,” she explains. Chauhan adds that data analysis of numbers of families seen and cases closed where outcomes have been achieved allows for emerging trends and needs to be identified.

“Essentially, we are trying to suppress the need for people to go into the statutory arena and it’s hard to quantify that,” she says.

“There’s also the softer type of work that goes on where every interaction can be an intervention – a drop-in where an early years practitioner is chatting to a parent about teething or weaning. That’s still an intervention even if it’s not classified.”

External validation of the service was also achieved when it was shortlisted in the early intervention category at last year’s CYP Now Awards.

Read more in CYP Now’s Early Help Special Report