Home-Start West Berkshire are pleased to announce a new appointment to a new project. Marie Llewellyn joins us to support our Resilience Families Project. Our scheme has developed strong partnerships with social services, local health professionals, midwives, health visitors and other voluntary organisations identify families in need of support. This project is a collaboration between Home-Start West Berkshire and West Berkshire Children and Family Services. The Contact, Advice and Assessment Service (CAAS) is the entry point for all professionals and members of the public that wish to make an enquiry with regards to a child or young person they have concerns about. If the concerns do not meet the threshold for CAAS, the case progresses to the Multi-agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH).
MASH supports the CAAS team as a central point for the screening, gathering, sharing and analysing of information about children in West Berkshire who may be at risk of harm or who may need support services. The MASH Team has a range of professionals from different agencies who are all co-located in West Berkshire. They include colleagues from the police, health and CAAS social workers. Currently Home-Start is an example of a virtual partner alongside Education, Swanswell, Family Hubs, Probation, CAMHS and the Youth Offending Team. This project sets to integrate Home-Start within the MASH team to maximise the impact of joint agency working and identification and support of the most vulnerable children and families, creating a community workforce that identify families needing support at an earlier stage before problems are harder to reverse.
Home-Start West Berkshire has led from the front on issues such as Postnatal Depression, delivering interventions since 2010. Our ability to build trusting relationships with hard to reach groups speaks for itself. At the start of support, 10% of our families are subject to Child in Need or Child Protection Plans, 77% of families report feeling unable to cope with their mental health and 15% report feeling stress caused by conflict in the family with 9% acknowledging domestic abuse. Working with these groups and the collaborative working, which is already taking place within the MASH team, has highlighted the need to shift the way in which public sector and the voluntary sector work together in more timely way to create long-term resilience for families with children from 0-11. This project will support and empower children, young people and families
Long-term difficulties faced by parents can affect their ability to meet the needs of their children and typically, these families become known through a CAAS referral. By the time intervention is required, difficulties are often entrenched and more complex to reverse. The aim of this project is to move away from an intervention model to a strengths’ based model where the family design their own solutions.
This project aims to address how we predict those that require early help, developing a strong community workforce to identify and support families at risk of early stages of inattention and neglect. The collaboration of the MASH team is our starting point to creating an intelligence gathering operation that highlights families and children in need of solution focussed support. Rooted in the community, our Family Coordinators will connect with other statutory and voluntary partners to find innovative ways to seek out families and children to address previously overlooked needs. to tackle and achieve their own solutions to their problems, providing the skills to problem solve in the future.
We welcome Marie into this exciting role which we hope will shape our working relationship with our statutory partners to improve life chances for children impacting their whole childhood.