City Region Deal Project Provides Vital Support to Fife Families Throughout Pandemic

The Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal’s Intensive Family Support Service is helping families in areas affected by low employment levels and higher poverty rates cope with the Covid-19 crisis.  The pandemic has created new challenges and worsened existing issues such as food insecurity, poor mental health and low income. These barriers create further disadvantage for children and young people. This means support is needed now, more than ever.

In Fife, ‘Making it Work’ for Families is being delivered to support vulnerable families with S1/S2 pupils living at home. Fife Gingerbread and partners provide holistic family support to lone parent and low-income families. Developed ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic, the project has been adapted so that it’s delivered safely and effectively.

Laura Millar, Fife Gingerbread, said: “Problems beyond the classroom affect the ability of children and young people to be in school and ready to learn. Working with families is the most effective way to make real, positive change. The programme has been re-introduced at a challenging time for lone parents and families in need. It is a privilege to get to know families and provide support that we hope can be a catalyst for change. There is an opportunity to work across the City Region and continuously improve our approach to deliver the best possible support.”

One in five children live in poverty across Fife, but this rises to almost one in three in some places1. ‘Making it Work for Families’ is focused where child poverty issues are most widespread, starting with families connected to Levenmouth Academy and Viewforth High School.

Fife Gingerbread, Citizens Advice & Rights Fife, Clued Up and Fife’s Intensive Rehabilitation & Substance Misuse team are working together to provide support to meet the needs of families, including: 

• Emotional support for parents/carers through 1-1 support

• Support for young people focused on wellbeing and personal development

• Financial inclusion activities, income maximisation, housing support and budgeting

• Crisis interventions to ensure families are safe, warm and fed

• Training such as confidence building, cooking and career development

• Connecting families to job opportunities across the City Region.

Fife Council Co-Leader David Ross said: “The Intensive Family Support Service within the City Region Deal is a great opportunity to bring together a wealth of expertise and approaches across Edinburgh and South East Scotland to improve the lives and opportunities for our region’s families.”

Fife Council Co-Leader David Alexander added: “The Intensive Family Support Service’s ‘Making it Work for families’ programme has adapted to provide vital support to vulnerable families during lockdown and help end disadvantage. By reaching out to families most in need of support and helping pupils attend school Fife’s children and young people can make the most of their education.”

Over recent weeks and months most support has been delivered online, with families supported to overcome digital exclusion barriers.

Bridging the gap between school and home life
One Fife family was referred by a high school during the first lockdown in 2020. The young person in the household was having difficulties engaging with and attending school, and had not been participating during school closures.

During an initial home visit the 39-year old lone parent revealed health conditions that were impacting on the family. Family relationships were often strained, and this was something the parent wanted to improve on.  After that, weekly contact via phone or video calls provided essential emotional support. This support was tailored to the individual, with a combination of texting, messaging and video calls.

The family was struggling on a limited budget - so providing a financial review and practical advice supported the family and relieved a great deal of  financial strain.

As well as practical support – making sure the young person, aged 14, had a device to engage with online learning during lockdown – a focus was  on reducing feelings of isolation during lockdown. A dedicated youth worker supported them with their mental health, confidence, self-esteem, emotions and helping them achieve their aspirations through a trusting and non-judgmental environment.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the young person and their worker met on a weekly basis to go for a walk. Changes were put in place to encourage positive thinking and school attainment. This has included video chat to support the young person with home learning challenges whilst not in school. 

During this second lockdown the family continues to receive support through mental health services and financial and budgeting advice to achieve greater financial stability. The young person continues to get help in building their confidence and aspirations and is now engaging well with school and is much more positive about their future.

Contact Information

Jenny Murray

Communications

Fife Council

03451 55 55 55 ext. 44 26 06

Jenny.Murray-crm@fife.gov.uk

City Region Deal help for family support services

Intensive family support services across South East Scotland are receiving a boost from the City Region Deal.

The Deal’s Intensive Family Support Service will help families in areas of chronic worklessness and poverty, bringing together the third sector and all six local authorities in South East Scotland with research expertise from the University of Edinburgh.

The first phase has launched in South East Scotland, covering Edinburgh, East Lothian, Midlothian, Fife, Scottish Borders, and West Lothian.

Capital City Partnership has engaged leading charities Children 1st, Barnardo’s and Fife Gingerbread to partner with local authorities in delivery of the services.

Rona Hunter, Chief Executive Officer, Capital City Partnership, said:

The Intensive Family Support Service within the City Region Deal is a great opportunity to bring together a wealth of expertise and approaches across Edinburgh and South East Scotland to improve the lives and opportunities for a number of families. Harnessing local efforts under a regional framework, it establishes how we can make a difference in the long term to bring about sustainable change. I’m looking forward to seeing the project develop and for further knowledge to emerge so that we can continue to improve pathways out of poverty and inequality.

Focus areas include: supporting lone parent and low-income households affected by worklessness; helping adults to provide a better environment for their young people; and ensuring families can benefit from job opportunities created through the City Region Deal.

Families will receive support for core issues that affect everyone in the household to create stability and increase independence. They will receive help to engage in employment or employability-related activities, and receive advice on welfare and income maximisation.

Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Infrastructure and Connectivity, Michael Matheson said:

City Region and Growth Deals will be a crucial part of our economic recovery from coronavirus (COVID-19) as we work towards a fairer and more inclusive Scotland. We are investing £300 million over 15 years to the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal across transport, housing, culture, innovation and skills to help achieve this.

The Intensive Family Support Service will demonstrate that we can achieve more by working together in partnership and in turn, be able to provide support and opportunities for those that need it most in these challenging times.

Sarah Galey-Horn, University of Edinburgh, is helping the service look at how organisational and social interactions promote economic mobility in low-income families. Sarah commented:

I see family support programmes like IFSS as part of a broader trend towards community-based social policy that puts human relationships, rather than individual outcomes, at the centre of social services. The research project uses a method called social network analysis (SNA) that focuses on analysing and building relationships that reduce poverty-related vulnerabilities. This approach will help us identify practices that facilitate trusting, supportive relationships with families and to share those practices across the six local delivery partners.

Academic profile: Sarah Galey-Horn

Sarah Galey-Horn is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow in the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education, whose specialist area of research is family social capital and network interventions. The City Region Deal recently spoke to Sarah about how she’s helping to evaluate the Deal’s intensive family support proposals.

Sarah Galey-Horn, University of Edinburgh

How did you get involved with the City Region Deal’s intensive family support work?

I heard about the Train@Ed fellowships and was interested in the opportunity to work in a non-academic setting. After looking into different areas of activity in the City Region Deal, I recognised the intensive family support (IFS) work would be an ideal area to get involved.

I wrote a Train@Ed application based on helping to evaluate the IFS proposals. I have prior experience in network interventions in real-life setting from when I lived in the US, and the City Region Deal IFS project has offered a chance to expand that part of my professional repertoire.

Through this, I’m hoping to build on my previous research in social data use, which is also called ‘network intervention’, within the context of a significant policy intervention. Through colleagues at the University of Edinburgh - who were already involved with the City Region Deal - I contacted the IFS project lead Adam Dunkerley, from Fife Council, and have worked with the team closely since the beginning on the IFS proposal.

How did you become involved in this field of research?

I came to the fellowship from the educational field.  I started as a high school teacher, which I did for five years before going back to school to get my PhD in education policy. In my programme at Michigan State University (MSU) I was fortunate enough to learn from and work with a leading social network scholar, Dr Kenneth Frank, who was also one of my doctoral advisors.

Dr Frank introduced me to network intervention concepts through a lot of his own work. I ended up working on some of his network intervention projects, and not all of them were in education. This gave me a lot of practical experience applying network concepts in policy interventions. It also helped me to learn how to do research outside of my specialisation and work with people from outside of academia.

 Can you provide an overview of the IFS work?

In social and education policy, policy makers tend to focus on individual attributes and measurements, but the problem with that is a lot of the outcomes we are concerned with are the product of complex social phenomenon.

Relationships with other people, are one example. But how do you measure the impact of a relationship? While analysing social networks, which is a widely used method in social science research, is one way. This project uses social network analysis to better understand the influence of relationships on extreme poverty and deprivation in families.

Social networks, such as family relationships, but also workplace relationships and friend circles, are important predictors of individual behaviour because they are conduits for social capital, which are non-material resources. Positive social interactions with others, for example, provide individuals with a sense of meaning, purpose and dignity and provide a barrier against feelings of isolation and rejection associated with economic deprivation. Yet these kinds of social factors are usually not considered by policymakers or programme evaluators when crafting and assessing social programmes; partly, because there has been no way to capture and track social capital empirically.

In part, the IFS programme is about changing that. We want to show how social capital impacts progression for those citizens facing extreme poverty or deprivation and, therefore, that it is a key ingredient for understanding the effectiveness of social policy interventions.

The IFS project is due to start in April 2020, and I’ve been working closely with the lead delivery agency, Capital City Partnership, on how to integrate social network data use. Social network data use has been written into the specifications of the IFS business case.

I’m also working with colleagues at Capital City Partnership and organisations who’ll be delivering the IFS services, helping develop implementation guidelines and training activities. In the longer-term, we are hoping to get funding to develop software for social network data use.

We’re trying to assess the existing IFS measures across the six local authority areas within the City Region Deal, and how we can help to build on that. There will be a period of data collection of about one year before moving on to an initial evaluation of social effects within the IFS programme. We also want to train the relevant service delivery teams in collecting and making use of that data.

What will be the main outcomes?

As far as research goes, the main outcome will be an analysis on the effects of social capital on IFS intervention outcomes. For policymakers, this will provide evidence to support the use of social network analysis to understand the effects of the IFS programme. And I also plan to publish in academic circles as well.

There are practical outcomes are probable but more important and interesting. Mainly that means developing network intervention tools to support service delivery. And that is both at the organisational level and the service delivery level. At the organisational level, we are developing network visualisation techniques to help partners understand how community assets and professional interactions support the IFS programme implementation. Then we want to be able to help IFS use that data to build more supportive and effective networks.

At the practice level, I hope that innovation in practice will be one of the outcomes of increased use of social network data. Social network analysis offers a great model for the study of the diffusion of innovation; how does innovation travel through organisations, why do some people adopt innovation and others not? I want to capture the fact that social workers will be innovating and problem-solving – perhaps not in the traditional technological sense. But innovation can take place in a very practical way in ordinary workplace environments, addressing real-world problems. It’s important to understand small innovations in practice that make a big difference can exist at a micro and localised level – but they can be genius.

This has been a great learning experience for me to find out more about the front-end delivery of social services. Because my previous research has been based on the study of policy interventions, the IFS work has helped me realise the importance of consulting with those at the front-end of delivering services.

Have you ever worked on research for projects within the region where you live before?

This feels like a natural progression for me personally and connects two important areas of my life; my community work for the area I live in and my professional life.

How would you like to develop the work in future?

Further down the road, we want to apply for grant money to scale up our work. If successful in achieving funding for software development, this could be used by social care workers and others. I’m also aiming to develop a series of professional development modules in social network data use. At the end of the process, we hope to have new capabilities to collect this type of data and build a database on social networks. The goal is to have funding secured and modules launched within a year or two of the IFS formally starting.