Targeted youth support: redesigning services - improving support for young people in care

Issue

The South Tyneside team with responsibility for children and young people in care was aware that other agencies and initiatives could help it improve services for these children and young people, but it didn't have the time to identify these agencies or to enlist their support.

Background

South Tyneside already had a number of initiatives in place to support young people including:

• Youth Offending services panel called South Tyneside Early Prevention Panel (STEPP) for assessing young peoples' needs
  
  
• A substance misuse service called Matrix and family support workers. Matrix workers were working with young people in children's homes and a clear referral system was in place to ensure assessment on admission.

Although young people in care benefited from these services, the approach of the services was not coordinated so the benefit was more limited than it might have been.

Actions prompted by TYS

The targeted youth support (TYS) process prioritised the need to identify at-risk young people at an earlier age to improve their outcomes and reduce the current strain on services. Representatives from a wide range of services and agencies formed a TYS change team to look at how this might be achieved.

A particular priority is children in residential care. The TYS change team has provided staff working with children and young people in care with a structure that helps them work collaboratively with other services to develop prevention and early intervention strategies.

To ensure its work is based on good practice and proven experience the team is communicating with early-intervention pathfinders in York and Telford.

Benefits and results

Benefits so far include bringing existing work streams together, for example:

• The work of Matrix is extended to include sexual health assessment and planned support from sexual health workers
  
  
• The children in care team have provided the teenage pregnancy coordinator with accurate figures on pregnancy in young people in care or leaving care. This helps them to coordinate better support and guidance on sexual health.
  
  
• Closer working with early years teams is helping develop skills for family support workers to work with older age group families

I struggled at first to see if the whole TYS change process was worthwhile, but I'm glad I went with it because I now know more about what is going on and can verbalise the need for early support and see how it fits with my work with young people in residential care.

Rhona Carr, children in care team residential manager and change team member

South Tyneside is also currently rolling out the common assessment framework. This will further enhance communication and collaboration between services and increase coordinated support for children in care and those at-risk of needing care.

The local authority

South Tyneside is an urban deprived metropolitan borough authority. Its statistical neighbours include Sunderland, Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, Salford, Sheffield, Portsmouth, Tameside, Stoke on Trent and Blackpool.

Click to read more case studies on redesigning services to help young people with particular needs.