Councils get funding to boost children's access to 'trusted adults'
Nina Jacobs
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Projects that support vulnerable children by helping them to build close relationships with trusted adults in the community are to receive £13m of government funding.
The Home Office said projects operating in 11 local authorities had been chosen to receive a share of the Trusted Relationship Fund, which will support early intervention work with children and young people at risk of abuse or exploitation by criminal gangs.
The projects will support vulnerable children and young people by ensuring they have positive adult role models such as youth workers, police officers, nurses and other professionals.
Councils receiving a share of the funding include Barnet, Bradford, Ealing, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Hackney, Hounslow, Northampton Borough, North East Lincolnshire, North Somerset, North Yorkshire and York, and Rotherham.
The funding boost follows a Home-Office commissioned review by the Early Intervention Foundation, which found that a lack of trusted relationships was a consistently cited contributing factor in cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation.
Victoria Atkins, minister for crime, safeguarding and vulnerability, said the government was determined to support at-risk children through projects across the country.
"Early intervention is so important to give vulnerable young people the best chance in life and we will make sure that those most at risk will have a positive adult in their lives," she said.
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The minister this week visited one of the projects earmarked to receive a share of the funding in Rotherham, which is being delivered by Barnado's and commissioned by the council.
Barnado's chief executive Javed Khan said the new funding would allow the charity to build on what its project had already achieved, and to support more children and young people to escape sexual exploitation.
"Barnado's is committed to breaking the damaging cycle of exploitation and violence that young people can get caught in," he said.
Other projects in line to receive the funding support vulnerable young people by delivering street-based youth work and work with excluded young people to divert them from criminality and back into education.
Schemes that provide specialist support to children with special educational needs and disabilities, as well as those that work with parents and foster carers to improve family relationships, will also benefit from the funding.
Donna Molloy, director of policy and practice at the Early Intervention Foundation, said evidence had shown that positive relationships with a trusted adult could support the development of children's skills, coping strategies and confidence.
"For young people vulnerable to child sexual abuse or exploitation, there is a strong logic for thinking that trusted relationships between a practitioner and a child can act as a protective factor," she said.
"This new funding provides a great opportunity to test this, and to build the evidence about which ways of working are most effective in building trusting relationships with vulnerable children."
