Phoning up to make an appointment, how hard can it be?
We’re building an approach with a local authority to see if we can make a transformational change to the numbers of care-experienced 19-to-21 year-olds who are in ‘positive destinations’ (basically, do they have something meaningful going on with their days?). Our approach has different strands — ranging from long-term insight from systems mapping, a focus on the all-important transition to independence, and working directly in the ‘here and now’ with 19-to-21 year-olds who aren’t currently in a positive destination.
In this post, I’m talking about the pilot we’re working on for the ‘here and now’ work — aiming to go live by September.
Starting with data
Firstly, we’re obtaining data and thinking through what it tells us. This includes the ‘903’ data that all Local Authorities have to report on to the Department of Education. The data uses Employment, Education and Training (EET) as its focus. The statistics seek to categorise young people into one of the following categories: in some form of EET; not in some form of EET due to illness or disability; not in some form of EET due to being pregnant or a parent; not in EET due to other circumstances.
Local Authorities have to report the ‘activity status’ of each ‘formerly relevant’ (consider that language… ‘formerly relevant’…) young person aged 19 to 21. It’s a snapshot of the position on their birthday.
Our first pilot will be small. This data cannot tell us which young people to reach out to. The people who were classed as being in EET on their birthday might not be any more. Or, even if they are, it might be transient work that a young person feels isn’t meaningful. The young people who are not in EET due to being a parent might want to start something relating to meaningful work, or they might not want to — they might just want to focus for now on being the best parent they can be.
And what about those not in EET due to illness or disability? What do those young people want for themselves? What are their dreams, hopes and capabilities?
We’ll want to meet young people in all of those categories and invite them to be part of what we’re trying to do. I think the learning from this — about what their stories are, and how that compares to their classification should be massive.
Learning from other services
Secondly, we wanted to learn from four or five of the other services in our charity who support care-experienced 19-to-21 year-olds. All of them have evolved differently, with various commissioning or grant relationships, different demographics, and they’ve had little chance to compare notes. So we spent a day asking Ayesha, Heather, Lisa, and Tommy to tell us what they’d learnt about making an impact.
They were great. They evidenced the fact that our staff are constantly innovating — changing what needs to be changed in order to try and make things work. But they also had lots of frustrations about the systems their work fitted into, and how much harder this could make what they were trying to do. That’s why we’re trying to build a new type of collaborative agreement with two local authorities — so we can work to change those systems and address those frustrations.
Our Here and Now team — a blend of service design, strategic impact and young people themselves — have started to think about what we’ve learned, and how all of that looks when we put it together with our other influences and our own discovery work. Some really important principles emerged to inform our design.
Relationships, not transactions. Ability to flex thresholds and eligibility. Conversations, not assessments. Digital to enable, not replace. Strengths and assets, not just needs and problems. Small caseloads (shorthand for giving workers a platform to have informal and daily communication with young people). Openness and honesty. Turning up on time. Sticking to your promises. Being genuinely interested. Helping motivation; for example, neuro-linguistic programming or life coaches. Committing to a learning approach (and accepting that this will mean young people and services make mistakes and need second chances). Being trauma responsive. Speech and language therapy.
And yes — being holistic. Moving away from the compartmentalised own goal that a lot of multi-agency working now is. If you try to talk to someone about what they want to do with their day, who they want to be, what their strengths are, and what they need some help with — how can that end up not needing someone prepared to talk about the whole picture?
We’re more interested in principles and traits than the search for ‘the model that works everywhere’. The fact that successful models from one place often don’t travel well seems to be something increasingly underlined by the evidence. Not that the wheel needs to be re-invented every time either. It’s about being a learning organisation. What seems to work? What doesn’t? What are our care-experienced experts telling us? What’s the context we’re trying to apply our work into?
Next, we’ll work alongside young people (the experts) to bundle this up into an approach. How do we invert the so-called ‘80:20’ so that actually our people are out there ‘relationshipping’ for the 80 and in the office ‘adminning’ for the 20? Can we do this and satisfy our own internal policies and procedures? How will we measure impact? I’ll be arguing for us to utilise rapid cycle testing. We should be able to show that at any stage we’re asking intelligent questions, collecting some data that responds to those questions, and changing the service to respond to what we think that data tells us. And then starting again.
It’s made me think about lots of care-experienced young people I’ve worked with previously. One of them was Jonnerz (not his real name). His reputation preceded him, and in terms of his age group (17-year-olds) he was pretty near the top of the local street hierarchy. But he was likeable, he showed just enough glimpses of the other sides of himself to hook you — to give you that sense that he was one of those individuals who the odds were stacked against, but if someone got in there with a right time/right place/right people reach out — he might have half a chance.
He wanted some help getting in touch with an organisation, and making a phone call to book an appointment. Our relationship was good enough for him to tell me that he didn’t know what to do and he asked me if I could make the call. I encouraged him to make the call instead. Three times he got halfway through and hung up as nerves and not knowing quite how to handle the situation got the better of him. The fourth time he nailed it — it was just one more of those reminders you see all the time about how what’s going on behind the exterior can be so very very different from what you see up front. I think we’ll see a lot of versions of that during the ‘here and now’ approach. Watch this space.
Richard is an Assistant Director in the Barnardo’s Strategic Impact Team, responsible for a programme of work to deliver better outcomes for more care-experienced children and young people.
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