PROJECT
Creative Life Story Work
PURPOSE
To help care-experienced children and young people understand their personal history
FUNDING
£320,000 from What Works for Children’s Social Care from October 2020 to March 2022 for staff training and delivery at three local authorities
BACKGROUND
Life story work is important in helping looked-after children understand their family background. It is a statutory requirement for all children adopted in England.
Traditionally this is a book prepared for a child to explain how they came into care. Giving children a sense of self can help them settle at home and in school and improve their relationships and overall wellbeing.
South Tyneside Council was keen to improve its life story work and sought the help of charity Blue Cabin, which supports care-experienced children in North East England through creative projects.
The charity worked with Professor Richard Rose, who devised the Therapeutic Life Story Work model, to develop a new approach with a creative element.
Creative Life Story Work (CLSW) was piloted at South Tyneside and two other local authorities – Darlington Borough Council and Gateshead Council – between April 2021 and March 2022.
ACTION
CLSW is aimed at care-experienced children aged between five and 17. The model has three levels for children with varying support needs and takes a therapeutic approach. It differs from traditional life story work, which is often simply a fact-finding exercise, in that professionals are trained to work with children to help them process their experiences and any trauma. Crucially, the CLSW model features input from artists.
Tier 1 features the All About Me creative experience – weekly group sessions over six weeks delivered by an artist working with a local authority staff member. The 90-minute sessions are delivered face-to-face or online to groups of up to six children alongside their trusted adult such as a foster carer.
Blue Cabin hired eight artists each with a different specialism, including graphic design or puppetry. All received training on trauma recovery and attachment. However, if any issues arise during a session, these are referred back to a child’s social worker.
“After every session, the artist and the local authority worker write notes on the child’s file about how they got on,” says Blue Cabin director Jenny Young.
“They can also put a flag on their file so the social worker can follow up and provide support. The sessions may surface something they need more help with.”
Children can choose in advance which artist they would like to work with by viewing online video profiles created by Blue Cabin.
Every week has a different theme, starting with “This is me”, followed by “My favourite things”, “My feelings”, “People in my life”, “Places I have lived” and “My future”. Before online sessions, the child receives a box of art materials in the post.
The art children create during the sessions is a way of documenting their experiences, like a traditional life story work book. “One of the artists uses a cabinet of curiosities,” says Young. “Every child gets a small cabinet with little drawers to keep things in that they designed.” These objects might include a clay handprint, a message in a bottle, a travel journal or badges that explore feelings. Other artists get the children to design a theatre stage or create maps.
Children repeat the experience every six months. They can stay with the same artist or try a different one.
Children who need extra support can do the Tier 1 sessions one-to-one rather than in a group and face-to-face.
Those in need of further support move on to Tier 2 of the model which features the More About Me intervention over three months. Sessions are delivered by a worker with a professional diploma in Therapeutic Life Story Work. Tier 3 is similar but is for children with more complex needs and lasts for nine to 12 months.
OUTCOME
An evaluation of CLSW, by the charity Coram and research company Ipsos Mori, was published by What Works for Children’s Social Care in December 2022.
A randomised controlled trial that compared outcomes for 90 children who took part in the All About Me experience with a control group found no statistically significant differences when it came to wellbeing, placement moves and school moves. This may be because numbers involved in the trial were small.
However, a survey of 168 local authority staff found the majority felt the CLSW model was more effective than traditional life story work. Of the 87 respondents who answered that question, 85 per cent felt CLSW was more effective.
Of about 60 staff actively involved in delivering CLSW, 82 per cent felt it had improved children’s wellbeing with 41 per cent saying it had improved “a lot”. Meanwhile, 78 per cent felt it had improved placement stability to some degree, and 93 per cent felt it had a positive impact on relationships between children and parents or carers.
When asked to identify the main benefits for children, 27 per cent felt it gave them a better understanding of their care experience and 24 per cent said it helped them think about their identity. Other benefits included feeling heard, being creative and spending time with their carer.
Staff were positive about the impact CSLW training had. About 95 per cent reported an improvement in their skills, confidence and knowledge of working with children and young people affected by trauma.
Almost all felt the approach had helped raise awareness of life story work across their local authority and increased the perceived value of life story work.
The researchers calculated the cost per child was £2,673.
WHAT NEXT
Funding from What Works for Children’s Social Care ended in March 2022. Since then, Blue Cabin has continued delivering CLSW with core funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. It launched a CLSW website with resources including blogs and podcasts. Some of these are available for free, while others can be accessed via membership schemes. “We’re trying to build funds to keep this work going,” says Young.
The three councils pledged to continue funding the scheme in full up to August 2023 and all are continuing with some aspects of CLSW going forward.
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If you think your project is worthy of inclusion, email supporting data to derren.hayes@markallengroup.com
EXPERIENCE
Experience creative life story work sessions emotionally engage children
Malcolm Hedley has been a foster carer for Gateshead Council for 27 years. He and his wife have looked after 46 children and have plenty of experience of traditional life story work. “It’s about collecting memories, writing down events, putting a photo album together with some comments,” he says. “It was kind of done for the child, not with the child.”
Hedley has seen the difference Creative Life Story Work (CLSW) can make after one of the children he cares for took part in the pilot.
Oliver* joined the family aged four and is now 16. Hedley says Oliver was comfortable being a child in care. But when his younger sister, who lived with another family, died four years ago, he struggled to cope.
He was offered the chance to do CSLW but initially found the online group sessions daunting. “He really didn’t like speaking in front of other people,” says Hedley. However, he began to open up.
One of the activities involved drawing a timeline including his favourite people or holidays. “I can’t draw very well, so I’d do my drawing first, which would be worse than his, and he’d feel more comfortable,” says Hedley.
Oliver looked forward to the sessions but was worried when the focus turned to “absent people”. The artist guided the children to make paper lampshades decorated with the name of someone they missed and illuminate them with a battery-powered tea-light.
Oliver was hesitant but eventually told the group his lamp represented his sister. “I think he enjoyed doing something to remember her that he could keep,” says Hedley.
Around the same time as the sessions, Hedley noticed Oliver becoming more sociable and outgoing. He can’t say for sure if this was down to CLSW but he believes foster carers should use the approach. “It’s really excellent because it engages the child,” he says.
*Name changed
