Building the evidence base for supporting late entrants to care: Part II
In my last post, I talked about why ‘late entrants to care’ was selected as a priority area for Brent Care Journeys. In this post, I will describe the lessons learned from getting our Discovery research up and running, and the impact of Covid on our plans.
To start the Discovery work, we set ourselves a research question: How might we understand and design for the unique needs of late entrants into care?
The primary aim of a Discovery is to create enough evidence to make a decision about what to do next.
As our research question was about understanding experiences of a very specific population, we needed to take a qualitative approach to draw out the richness of experiences. Identifying the multiple stakeholders in this system, we aimed to speak to a research sample consisting both of professionals (from all levels of seniority) within Brent LA who would in any way interact with late entrants, as well as a number of late entrants themselves.
We knew we wanted to speak to young people from a range of ages to reflect some of the different experiences within this group. We also wanted an equal split of male and female care leavers, as well as ensuring we were hearing from young people in a range of housing options (e.g. semi-independent accommodation, foster placements) and those who had entered care for a number of reasons (through the youth justice system, as unaccompanied asylum seekers).
Qualitative research is enormously beneficial for getting an understanding of why things are the way they are. It is also useful for understanding people — their experiences, interactions, hopes and fears.
In terms of a research process, we began by looking at our whole sample; that is, care leavers in Brent who had entered care for the first time at or after the age of 16. Data provided by colleagues in the Local Authority in December 2019 showed there were 124 young people who entered care for the first time at or after the age of 16. Due to our ways of working and data protection, we made an approach to as many of these young people as we could via their primary worker (i.e. their Personal Adviser).
We therefore set ourselves a target of speaking to 20 young people and 10 professionals. This was in honour of prioritising our ‘experts by experience’ and placing care-experienced young people at the heart of everything we do in Care Journeys. For young people this represented approximately 16% of the population of late entrants who are currently care leavers. While there is much debate about reliable sample sizes in qualitative research, this was a target we set ourselves which would be reviewed constantly by the team to ensure we were capturing the variety of experiences late entrants might have had. As there was paucity of evidence to start from, this was really exploratory and reflective in practice.
Research materials were sent out and interviews began to take place with professionals from December 2019, and slightly later with young people (due to the recruitment process happening through a third party) in February 2020.
We also spent a large amount of time at Brent Civic Centre — the main office building for children’s services. The challenges of this were:
- Young people might not want to meet at the civic centre where the team was co-located with Brent staff;
- The lack of private and anonymous space to have truly deep conversations about personal experiences;
- Having to find and book rooms in a corporate, office-like environment.
These factors all impacted on our timelines for starting interviews with young people.
Although we had to make a compromise on the interview location, it wasn’t without its surprising benefits. One young person told us about a housing workshop they were about to attend, so we waited for young people to finish. It was a perfect opportunity to speak to them when they were milling around outside at the end of the workshop and it helped us secure a few more interviews and spread the word about the Care Journeys programme.
Young people were offered a voucher as recognition of the time they had given to be interviewed. Being involved in the research was only one way for young people to be part of the Care Journeys work; project workers have been building up their practice (which we describe as ‘Here and Now’ support) so that any young person who was involved in the interviews could also be supported in a practical, flexible way. This was in recognition of the emotional commitment they had made to tell us all about their experiences at the interview.
A brief example of how this worked in action: a young person agreed to come and meet us for an interview. They brought with them a fine letter they had received from the council for littering. As a young person at college, £100 can be an impossible amount to pay in one go, and can significantly impact their finances. As we were in the Civic Centre for the interview, our project worker took the fine letter to the desk of the right team and arranged for the young person to be able to pay in £10 instalments. The privilege of knowing how to navigate the system here is evident, as well as the power dynamics between professionals and young people. The movement going forward is all about empowering young people to take these actions themselves while knowing where to get help when they need it; a model of interdependence.
Hearing from young people: challenging ourselves to be better listeners
A snippet of a conversation with one young man who had entered care late as an unaccompanied asylum seeker made me stop and reflect.
We had been talking about how the system readies young people for leaving care. As late entrants, this often felt rushed: quick in, quick out. Young people said that it felt like professionals were testing them to see how ‘ready’ they were to leave care and live independently — something young people themselves said they considered ‘positive destinations’. What does it mean to be ready to live independently? Do any of us really live “independent” lives?
Young people told us professionals were looking for evidence that they could support themselves, from paying bills to cooking and cleaning.
When some of the young men we spoke to said it was not part of their culture to cook and clean, I began to question what this experience might have been like for young women from the same cultural backgrounds.
It was at this point I realised we had not spoken to any young women who entered care late as unaccompanied asylum seeking minors. With the help of our project worker, we made sure this gap in the sample was fixed and we did indeed speak to three young women who were able to clearly articulate their experiences. They offered us powerful and unique insights into their journeys, including how important it is that care is personalised to them and their heritage (more on the findings, later).
Along came a pandemic
So by the time the first national lockdown stopped us meeting people face to face in March 2020, we had spoken to 10 young people and 11 professionals. We were short of our target. We had to stop all research activity and think of our Plan B: how would we be able to complete this phase of research in a way that respects the lives and new worlds we find ourselves in?
We also looked at our participants so far and wanted to hear more from those still in the youth justice system (secure estate). Visits and therefore research can be restricted in this context, so we wanted to ensure we had given enough prominence to this group. Considering we couldn’t take a pen in to record their responses, this presented a unique challenge.
During lockdown I elected one of the project workers — who has a very experienced understanding of the youth justice system — to carry out face to face interviews independently. This was based on two considerations:
- It was April 2020. Young people were going through a confusing time; this is particularly so for young care leavers who are still finding their feet in a new world, for example they may have just moved into their own flat, or they may be living in shared accommodation with others. They had a lot on their plates; their priority was to keep themselves safe. We didn’t want to do anything to compromise their safety.
- We had done a full day’s worth of interview training with our project workers in Brent, and they had been alongside me in every interview — asking questions, following up with young people, making sure they felt safe and felt they were able to open up to us and share their experiences.
With these skills, and given the context, I was confident the project worker could complete the remaining interviews by themselves.
By June 2020 we had successfully spoken to 16 late entrants and 11 professionals. The task of analysing 27 hours worth of interview data was no small feat.
We stopped data collection here for two main reasons. One being purely practical in terms of what could be feasible in a national lockdown, and secondly because we were getting to a point of saturation on certain key themes emerging from the analysis.
Read on to the third and blog post in this series to find out how we turned this volume of rich interview data into meaningful insights, plus find out more about what we learned.
Follow me on Twitter @SohilaSawhney and my team @BarnardosLab to find out when the third and final post is up!
