Me My Family My Home is ambitious. It seeks to make significant
improvements to the lives and support received by children, young
people and their families, moving to a single 'whole life, whole
family' approach.
Funded by the Department for Education, the project focused its
energies on supporting six local authorities and their partners to
develop new support packages for children and young people with
complex needs and complicated home lives. This group included:
children and young people in the care of the local authority,
- those receiving high cost and fully funded support from
health;
- young children where there was an understanding that if things
weren't tackled early on that everyone was concerned about the
longer term;
- and children and young people placed away from home due to
child protection concerns.
The project set out to redesign support starting back at the
beginning by supporting children, young people and families to
share their life experiences and experiences of support to date,
then, using this work starting to design a new plan of support
which centred on thinking whole life and whole family. For many of
those involved this centred on the local approach to EHC plans,
however for some it centred on the LAC process and thinking
differently about the support offered to the child, young person
and those closest to them.
It has been a year of incredibly hard work on the part of many
in the six areas; some of it producing great results for children
and families and at other times creating a great deal of
frustration with systems and processes that deflect the energy of
people away from centring on what will work best for the child,
young person and/or family.
The report available sets out the work, the learning and key
recommendations to getting started on tackling support for those in
the most complicated of situations. We explain a very simple way of
understanding how things need to fit together, 'A Framework for
Keeping it Simple', and include an interview with one of the
forerunners of this approach, Jenny Dalby from Middlesbrough.
The project has started to make significant improvements for
children and those who care and love them, but there is a long way
to go and quite a bit of hard work to make lasting change; there is
nothing in legislation that makes this approach not applicable in
any number of situations so as we say, it's really a case of
'just getting on and doing it'.
IMPORTANT
The report is downloadable as a printed version, however the
online version enables you to click on links signposted with the
audio icon 
and listen to the reflections and learning for many of those
involved. When you click on the audio icon it will take you to a
'Soundcloud' page and the audio file will play. To return to
the report simply click on 'back' and you will find yourself back
at the beginning of the report. We haven't yet worked out how
to return to the exact place that you were reading but this means
we can include the voices of many involved and we think is an okay
if clumsy compromise.
This is really important to us all; the year of work has been
taken forward by a whole community of people from families, young
people, managers and frontline workers to those at a senior level
in NHS England. Please take this chance to listen to the people
involved.
For further information about this work which has
now been contracted as part of the NHS England Integrated Personal
Commissioning programme, please contact nic.crosby@in-control.org.uk
To view the online interactive report, click here. Or click on
the INTERACTIVE download below.
To download a printable version, simply click on the
PRINT version of the report below.
To visit the page of audio files on Soundcloud,
click here.
Last Updated : 12 July 2016. Page Author: philippa.barker.
