Change for children
- Published: 04 September 2008 08:01
- Author: Kathy Oxtoby
- More by this Author
- Last Updated: 04 September 2008 08:28
LGCplus looks at schemes, including early intervention, designed to give young people the best chance in life.
One of the lessons to emerge from the Victoria Climbie case was that early intervention is key to preventing a similar tragedy occurring. As a result City of York Council developed a strategy to safeguard vulnerable young people before problems start and, in some cases, before they are even born.
Paul Murphy, assistant director of partnerships and early intervention, says his post was created as a result of the council's belief that more emphasis should be put on early intervention and that this must happen from pre-birth onwards.
"We're trying to analyse the root causes of problems before they manifest," he says.
The council has joined up all of its service threads - from pre-birth onwards - to ensure their collective knowledge is shared to pinpoint problems early on.
When there are concerns about a family, the most appropriate lead practitioner, such as a teacher, social worker, health worker or police community support officer, is identified to advise and support other professionals working with them.
As York is a relatively small city, Mr Murphy says staff are able to identify "with great precision down to street level" which families are most likely to need support.
One way York helps families is through its eight children's centres. The centres were built within the last year-and-a-half as part of the government's Every Child Matters agenda to better integrate services for children and their families by bringing them together on dedicated sites.
Focused on areas where deprivation is greatest, the centres provide a range of services, including literacy and numeracy classes for parents. Social workers and health visitors work at the centres to support families and there are plans for qualified teachers to work there to enhance the educational element of the scheme.
While getting different professions to work together has proved challenging at times, Mr Murphy says the council does not allow professional boundaries to inhibit its approach to early intervention. "We've overcome professional anxieties by demonstrating that better outcomes arise when you work in a more holistic way," he says.
While the benefits of a preventative approach are difficult to demonstrate in hard statistics, feedback suggests it is genuinely improving young people's lives, Mr Murphy says.
"Schools are telling us that the young people who come into reception classes who have been through our children centre programmes are better prepared to learn than those who haven't," he says.
"Recently, I went to a children's centre and a young mum told me she thought the centre was 'a credit to the community' and that it had made a real difference to both hers and her daughter's lives. That's when all the effort seems worthwhile."
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