Charity Profile: Family Action, Swaffham

The Centre for Empowering Practice is conducting research into the Personalisation Agenda and person-centered practice; assessing the potential impact and change that could be caused & the hopes fears and expectations felt by the voluntary sector.

Our aims are: to raise the profile and awareness of voluntary sector organisations delivering services in East Anglia; to promote choice and enhance person-centred practice, and; to drive the personalisation agenda providing more choice.

This information has been gathered through an interview by Ben Blunt (Person-Centred Action Researcher & Trainer, Centre for Empowering Practice) with staff at the Family Action Project in Swaffham (Norfolk), asking them to talk about; the basis of the support that they provide; their interpretation and application of person-centered practices; Assessment forms & Common Assessment Framework (CAF) and Outcomes models & producing evidence.

Interview with:

·  Clare Peak, Project Manager

·  Chris Goddard, Family Support Co-ordinator (Counseller)

·  Laura Brown, Family Support Co-ordinator (Registered Mental Health Nurse)

·  Don Saunders, Community Involvement Worker

Basis of the Support Provided:

Clare Peak: - The foundation of our work is based on attachment theory, and in terms of the therapeutic intervention a lot of it is based on building relationships with the parents and being person-centered.

Chris Goddard: - It also helps that we are ourselves are a multi-disciplinary team; we all have our strengths. Laura is a trained Mental Health Nurse, Elaine is a Social Worker, Clare is a Social Worker, and I’m a trained Counsellor.

Q: So as a team you have a multitude of skills and experiences that you can offer?

Chris Goddard: - Also past experiences. I’ve been a Homelessness Advisor before, a Welfare Officer in a large college, and we all have this kind of background with a wealth of experiences that we can draw on.

Person Centered Practices:

Chris Goddard: - I think that we have the freedom to be creative in the way that we work and offer support to families. I think that this is really important; we don’t have a lot of the restrictions that the statutory services have.

Laura Brown: - In line with personalisation; I think it’s about people getting what they want from services like ours, not what we think they want. I worked with a family where there was a 10yr old boy and I asked how he’d like to spend the time we had and he asked that we take his puppy for a walk. The whole hour of this walk was really therapeutic and he disclosed numerous things that he hadn’t disclosed to anybody before; this was because he was doing something that he wanted to do.

Clare Peak: - That example is very good, taking the dog for a walk. I can think of another example, our Young Careers Group. When the Youth Service were involved in delivery, the risk assessment that they had to do when they were a statutory group prevented them getting involved in trips out, whereas although we have to do a risk assessment the hurdles we have to go over are fewer and we’re able to offer more experiences.

Laura Brown: - You can be person centered and creative within the restrictions of procedures like safeguarding as long as you are imaginative, you can still allow people to have what they want.

Clare Peak: I also think that in terms of engaging with some of the more difficult families - the so called “Hard to reach families” - it is sometimes being able to respond to them. We may do an assessment and identify what we think is a particular need, but they may say that is not a problem and identify a different problem. We may not see the link with any of the issues we have identified but by supporting them with the issues that they have identified and by building a relationship of trust with them it allows the other issues to begin to be worked on.

Chris Goddard: - We quite often will get a referral for a child, but we will end up working with the whole family. The referral may be for the child’s behavior, but when we look into it we see that there are issues which perhaps deal with the family, debt, homelessness, drug & alcohol all manner of things. So we can try to bring in other agencies to work with the family, we may undertake some therapeutic intervention ourselves, we may work with the parents as it may be that while these are presenting issues the children’s lives won’t improve; so we look at the whole thing.

Don Saunders: - And not just to look at the person telling you something, to look behind it and see the full picture. Because at school they often just look at what the face of things are and not what is going on behind it; we can do this. Because we are a team, one of us may be working with the child, one with the parent and another with the extended family so we can also support each other.

Q: Is trust a big issue for you?

Laura Brown: - We have less issues building trust than statutory services because we are in the voluntary sector; we can often get involved with the families which wont allow statutory services anywhere near them.

Don Saunders: - We’ve worked very hard here embedding ourselves into the heart of this community, it’s a town of around 7000 people so it’s not as hard as some areas but we are embedded right into this community.

Clare Peak: - We have been in the position several times where you work hard with a family to engage and support them, but in the end you do need to make a Child Protection referral to Children’s Services. This is a hard thing to do but sometimes you have to do it. That’s the other side [of the work that is done] which can be a challenge. Where we can see there are risks we have to act to do something about it.

Q: How are services identified for the families and/or children?

Clare Peak: - Coming from them [clients] what they think they need and building on that really, some of it we can provide ourselves; a lot of what Don does is organize activities [for the clients], networking and mentoring.

Chris Goddard: - Don actually also does a lot of activities in the holiday times as well, like cycle skills and activities days. The police have got some evidence that crime and antisocial behaviour has reduced when these activities are being run.

Q: Are the activities free?

Clare Peak: - They are cheap, but I don’t think that they should be free. Even if the amount that families pay is only 50p it’s recognition that nothing is actually free. We don’t want to make money out of it.

Chris Goddard: - Also through a small contribution they are buying into the engagement which is really important.

Don Saunders: - We’ve never had a problem with it, sometimes we have a family who turn up and they’ve got 6 children so we do the Tesco thing of pay for 3 get 3 free!

Chris Goddard: - I run an adult group where we feel that it gives a lot of empowerment and some of the group have said how being part of the group has improved their health, so it’s addressing a lot of the issues like loneliness.

I’m really passionate about empowering older people. These are people who can be very isolated, they come once a week we have coffee and then we do different activities like belly dancing and other fun things. We try to have a completely varied program of activities, we invite helpful organisation like the police, fire service or the Stroke Association to come in and give a talk, any organisation that may be of help to them. But we also try and do creative things, different types of craft, exercise classes and then we try and do something bonkers like African drumming or Belly dancing. Then we’ll sit down and have lunch together. They’ll talk about absolutely everything.

Clare Peak: - It’s open to everyone so it’s not just for people who have been referred.

Chris Goddard: - It’s run in partnership with Adult Social Services disability team, Family Action and West Norfolk Carers so there are 3 facilitators there. So if during the day anyone has questions there are three of us who can help them.

Durham University was given some money by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to do some research into how charitable organisations were represented in the media, so we were asked to participate in this and make a DVD. Our group participated with a small amount of support; we said that they could choose what they talked about, something they felt strongly about and this would have to be around poverty. We didn’t actually talk about poverty but talked about how people managed on benefits, pensions etc in a rural locality so we did essentially cover poverty. The group chose the topic themselves, they debated it themselves, and we were able to present it in a way that they wanted and to edit it so they were absolutely delighted with it. They then decided “What now”; we wanted to do something with it. One of the things that was highlighted was that a lot of people didn’t know where to access help from so we organized a “Well-Being Fayre” over the summer where we asked lots of help organisations to set their stalls up so that people could find out what help was available. Following on from this we asked what more they’d like to do with the DVD and they said that they would like to send it on to the Prime Minister which is what we’ve done and we’re waiting for a response.

Family Action Assessments & Common Assessment Framework (CAF)

Chris Goddard: - Our assessment forms are such that the information can be lifted off them for a CAF referral, a CAMHS referral etc.

Clare Peak: - They are actually very similar to the CAF, to the extent that when we do a CAF form we can just copy the information over. But a lot of the work that we do is with adults who don’t have children so there is no CAF required. We do our own initial assessment and then a CAF if it’s appropriate.

When we get a referral in we would do our own assessment, we would go along to the family and do our initial assessment. This may be where we identify with the family that a CAF may be the best way of getting on board all the services to support the family. At the moment we have one which is being done for a very isolated parent and his child.

Q: Are you all involved on CAF’s and as lead professionals?

Chris Goddard: Yes, Well we could get involved for any reason or start one if we feel that there aren’t enough services, there could be more or we’d like there to be more services for the family or individuals then we would call a CAF and do the assessment and then call the multi-disciplinary meeting.

Laura Brown: - That’s right, most of the CAF’s we do shouldn’t be held by me but should be held by the Children’s Centres; but there isn’t currently anyone to do them from there. For example, this week I’m doing one on a family with five children under 5yrs old, they already have lots of singular services involved, I am not calling a CAF to get them involved I am calling a CAF to pull them all together so everyone knows what each other is doing and it is a network of support so we’re not working in isolation. OK a health visitor may only work with the baby infant but they still need to know about what I’m doing with the other children. One thing we really struggle with is getting Doctors to come; they just won’t come to the meetings. I have actually had it in writing that they will never come. It’s frustrating though because in this case one of the issues is mental health and it’s really important to what is going on and the whole reason a CAF was called.

Clare Peak: - I’ve recently been to a child protection conference for a family that has been creating havoc everywhere and the GP wrote a long letter which they were really pleased to get – no GP, but pleased nonetheless with getting a letter – and this is at a child protection conference so I don’t think there is an expectation that they’ll start going to them [CAF meetings].

Q: The work that you do as the lead professional, is this pulling it all together and ensuring that the child or family are at the centre of all the support that is being provided – is this quite an onerous task?

Chris Goddard: - It is a lot of work.

Laura Brown: - One of the biggest problems is getting a change of “Lead-Professional” so for instance; if I have initiated a CAF and done my bits, addressed all the required areas and then closing the case with agreement of the family. Getting someone else to take over the next step of support can be a nightmare, so much so that I have had to get the CAF team involved to ensure that it happens. It’s supposed to be a shared responsibility.

Q: Is it the families that ask you to become the Lead Professionals on a CAF or is it simply because you have initiated the CAF?

Clare Peak: - Usually because we have initiated the CAF and nobody else wants to do it. We go along to other CAF’s which people have initiated and offer support, but here we are not the Lead Professionals – sometimes we do take over as Lead Profession if appropriate.

Q: A CAF could provides a scenario where a family who are in receipt of support through public/statutory funding could instead be given control of choosing the services that they access and the Lead Professional could act as a kind of broker to assist them choose their support services?

Clare Peak: - Well that is the theory, but in reality those services would have to be there in the first place for the family to have. We’re a long way off that and the way things are at the moment I cannot see it happening. The only place would be, if for example, a parent for some reason needed a bit of respite, or for things like young carers and people would be buying into young carers groups. But this would mean that every child going would then have to have a CAF to be able to access the funding for the service.