Two Islingtons: Understanding the Problem - Islington Council

More documents

Recommendations

Info

care, education, health and family support. Bilingual family support workers have targeted Somali, Bangladeshi and Turkish communities and have made a measurable difference to widening access to children’s centre services. Islington’s admission’s policy ensures that 30% of care and education places in every children’s centre are allocated to vulnerable children who are in need and who have been referred to the centre by social workers and health professionals. 2.14. The NEET’s engagement programme is on track to deliver most of its targets for contacting and engaging young people on programmes. However, the proportion achieving accreditation and entering EET is slightly lower than targets would indicate should be the case. Agreement was reached with City and Islington College to offer a guarantee to all those 16 and 17 year olds who may have not yet taken up EET or who needed to reconsider their pathway. This ‘January Guarantee’ provides additional access to courses starting from January 2010. The official NEET’s count (Qtr3 2009/10) was 7.8% which is the same as the previous year and above the central London average of 6.2%. 2.15. Considerable progress has been made towards positive change in comparison to our neighbours over the last 5 years. The level of NEETs has reduced by nearly 10% from October 2004 which is faster than the London average of 6%. Progress has also been made towards reducing the number of people we don’t have information about. We are continuing to stabilise this and as at September 2009 this stood at 4.2%. This performance is as a result of a number of on going actions, for example, targeting of the most at risk groups through data analysis, implementation of processes and procedures for tracking of young people within certain timescales as part of every personal adviser’s work and the Career Start project which provides employment and work experience opportunities for looked after young people and care leavers. 2.16. We have a good understanding of the inequalities that exist in educational attainment as there is a wealth of data collected and analysed on a regular basis. Addressing inequalities in achievement is one of the main challenges facing the Council and its partners. Despite year on year improvements overall in attainment results we continue to under-perform in comparison to the national achievements and inequalities continue to exist between different equality groups within the borough, particularly between different ethnic groups and the genders. We know that 95% of our NEETs are from families on out of work benefits highlighting the issue of intergenerational worklessness and that there is also a high proportion of White children who are NEETs. The Children and Young Peoples plan details how these inequalities are to be addressed. The Children’s Services Ofsted self assessment document (July 2010) provides the needs assessment for the plan which will be completed by April 2011. 3. Family Based Interventions & Direct Support 3.1. Islington Council has launched a new volunteering project in partnership with national charity Community Service Volunteers (CVS) called Think Family. The project is a volunteer scheme aimed at supporting vulnerable families in which a parent or carer has mental health problems and where there are children under the age of nineteen. Volunteers make regular visits to families and offer non-judgmental practical and emotional support to help them improve their family life. This could include a range of tasks including helping socially isolated families access local services, enabling children to take part in activities, offering support with parenting skills and practical household tasks and being a role model to children and parents who might not have many in their lives. 4
3.2. This project is a fairly new initiative and therefore the impact upon vulnerable families is yet to be assessed. However, so far through the Think Family scheme 61 ‘whole families’ and 23 young carer ‘whole families’ have received direct support. The Whole Family Assessments (WFA) assess families with complex needs related to parental mental illness. 3.3. The Packington Families Project is a partnership between Children’s Services and Housing which tailors support and advice to families on a range of issues including money advice, finding work and training, parenting, housing, health, school and activities for children and young people. The involvement of Housing means the project identifies and engages families early on rather than when a crisis arises and the “think family” approach ensures the whole family gets the support it needs regardless of which agency they contact first. The project focuses on the Packington Estate and is based on resident consultation, local data and agency knowledge that showed that as well as being in the 5% most deprived areas of the UK, a larger number of families had additional needs including poor school attendance and high dependence on benefits. Families could be identified through one of the project’s 17 partners or could self-refer through outreach, community events and a weekly drop-in. 3.4. The approach is based on a model of integrated working in use across the children’s workforce, which uses the Common Assessment Form – CAF (or in this case a family CAF); this includes strong information sharing arrangements and a common language across practitioners to support the families and a lead practitioner to hold the ring in a team around the family. Integrated working is fundamental to how we undertake earlier intervention with children, young people and their families. Over 800 practitioners have been trained since the integrated working programme started in 2007, most of them in universal settings 3.5. In total the project has engaged with 26 families since it launched in February 2009, exceeding the project target of 20 families. Outcomes for the families to date include: • Income maximisation; around £5000 in grants and one-off payments have been secured, over £200 of debts have been cancelled and over £600 per week has been secured in additional benefits for the families, • School absenteeism of children in these families has reduced, • Anti social behaviour issues have been successfully addressed for six families who were identified as being involved with youth-related ASB. There have been improvements for all families, including fewer or no reports of ASB, engagement of parents with the process and providing support to prevent Notices Seeking Permission going to court proceedings. 3.6. The Free School Meals pilot has taken place in 6 primary schools, providing meals to all 3 to 11 year olds. Take-up of school meals within these schools increased from 62% to 82%. The project will now roll out to all primary and nursery schools. This should benefit parents on low incomes earning above the threshold for national criteria. The impact of this initiative is yet to be assessed but it is anticipated that the long term outcomes will include an increase to family incomes, which will impact significantly on those families who are sat on the poverty margins, as well as behavioural improvements at school and long term health benefits for the children. 3.7. The Rocket Science report ‘Consumer Debt in Islington’ (Jan 2010) sets out the picture of consumer debt across the borough. Postcodes were analysed against 5 consumer debt 5
Page 1 and 2: www.islington.gov.uk/fairness Two I
Page 3: 2.6. However, recently released (pr
Page 7 and 8: • During 2009/10, the Islington C
Page 9 and 10: Being Board (SEW). ACL also works i
Page 11 and 12: ut with extra security measures suc
Page 13 and 14: of health such as the economy and e
Page 15 and 16: disability family carers’ group.
Page 17 and 18: levels of behavioural difficulty an

Two Islingtons: Understanding the Problem - Islington Council

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?