Embarking on a New Systems Enquiry
In November 2020 The Children’s Society was awarded funds from the Home Office Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) Support Services Transformation Fund. One of six grantees, we are thrilled to have been awarded this funding and given the opportunity to test new ways of working to support child victims of sexual abuse and their families.
Boosted by reading Christine Cawthorne’s blog, I continue my commitment to being more open and transparent with the work I support and lead within The Children’s Society. It is my intention for us to capture the journey of this new programme — with written and visual documentation of the progress and learning along the way. This blog kicks that off.
Our work has ambition to reach further than just delivering a service response to young people and their families. It will take the form a systems enquiry, allowing us to identify systemic challenges which contribute to CSA, and providing a platform for our practitioners and young people to enable, poke and provoke positive change.
We hope to work with the other grantees to share learning and approaches — as well as identify ways in which together, we can activate systems change.
To start the collaboration, it was great to connect with Gemma and colleagues at Green House last week to hear the start of their journey. They too received Home Office funding and are embarking on an ambitious programme working to change and influence policy and practice with a particular focus on pre-trial therapy.
Our programme has two parts, we are going to straddle direct work with young people and their families with tackling big, sticky systemic problems. Our objective is to improve outcomes for children and young people who have experienced sexual abuse through the development and delivery of short-term interventions with support for them to navigate local systems.
With small teams working in Nottingham, Newcastle and Devon we will:
— Provide early-intervention risk and needs assessment, emotional support, advocacy and long-term support planning for children and families following sexual abuse.
— Bring national systems change leadership to oversee delivery and gather insight and patterns into the trends/issues faced by the children and young people supported. We will bring together experts and convene communities of practice to identify development and change opportunities in the systems that support children and young people.
We have started recruitment to gather the team and are excited to welcome some new faces to the team in the coming weeks.
With the support of Pauline Roberts our systems enquiry has commenced. Pauline is supporting the team to gain insight into the systems in each of the three delivery areas in order to understand the context and dynamics within which the programme will operate in. It is our intention that this work will deepen our understanding of the systems we operate, in order to optimise service delivery and work to strengthen the system.
We are also excited to be working with Deon Simpson and Jenny North from the Dartington Service Design Lab who will help us develop a Theory of Change for the programme that will build on our systemic understanding of the local areas. We aim to formulate the key outcomes we are looking to achieve and identify systems-change priorities to focus on. The Theory of Change will also include detail on how the outcomes and impact of the programme can be measured.
The mobilisation of a new programme is always energising, with so much potential ahead and work to be done to support young people. I am really looking forward to seeing how this new journey unfolds.
