Signposting

HAF2021 Signposting

Supporting people to access support beyong our programme

We work with parents and carers through a micro-consultation process that enables us to identify and provide targeted support to enable our programme participants to thrive.

Challenge

Lockdown has pushed many families into hardship and there are many unmet needs and underlying challenges that are impacting on peoples lives.

What we are doing

We deliver micro-consultations every day with around 15 families.  In addition we are working more intensively with families through one to one and group appointments. We are also tailoring our family sessions to address the needs parents and carers want us to. Further, we liaised with other local organisations to widen access to support structures that parents may not currently be accessing.

Stronger Families session

We linked up with Stronger Families to promote access to support for parents wanting to get back into work.

 One to ones

We're delivering one to one sessions to help parents resolve challenges around schooling for their children, including interpreting school reports and discussing barriers for learning. We also ran a family session on supporting learning at home, resolving some of the conflicts parents and children were having in getting homework done.

 Case study: Leanne

Leanne didn't really like school, especially maths.  She had some complicated living arrangements but dad was always supportive and she enjoyed coming to our HAF2021 programme.  From early on in our HAF2021 programme we had to intervene because Leanne displayed in high risks behaviours, sometimes putting herself in danger with reckless actions. We also noticed early on in the first week that Leanne wasn't paying attention to what was written on the whiteboard during the academic sessions. So when it came to answering questions she wasn't able to access higher level dialogue in the classroom. This impacted on her understanding of the topic. 

We talked to Leanne and she said she couldn't see the board properly. We learned that she was sat at the back of the classroom at school and couldn't really see the board. So we spoke to Leanne's dad and suggested they get a free eye test at a local optician. Leannes glasses arrive in two weeks. We're hoping it will help her catch up with her learning by accessing more of the visual prompts and board work.

By supporting Leanne and her dad to resolve this issue, we built up some more trust with the family and this allowed us to tackle her high risk behaviour. We doubled up on our development support, intensifying our efforts to co-create the programme with her so that she felt ownership and was empowered to behaviour better. By the following week, Leanne was no longer putting herself at risk when she was on our programme and began to engage more with our staff and other children.

Share by: