How Do You Know If Resilient Families Practice Makes a Difference? 

We use two ways to understand whether and how Resilient Families practice makes a difference in helping create the conditions for change for families:

Returning Families

Every month we look at the percentage of families who stayed free from any further early help or social work intervention 12 months after they finished work with us. We look at this because if our work has gone well with a family, and they left us stronger and feeling more resilient, we hope that they wouldn't need any further help.

At March 2020, 87% of families worked with by early help services had stayed free from any further early help or statutory social work intervention 12 months after closure.  In March 2018, it was 86% and in March 2019, it was 90%. 

Relationship Feedback Form
We use our Relationship Feedback form to tell us whether families found the relationship with their family worker helpful and valuable, and in what ways. We ask families for this feedback regularly so we can see how the relationship changes over time.

Families are overwhelmingly positive about their relationship with their family worker; here is a summary of the feedback received from October 2019 to August 2020:

Our Early Help Coordinator Team at front door use a similar feedback form, and have equally positive results, despite having only 10 days to work alongside a family. Here is a quote from a parent helped by a Coordinator:

I felt listened to, made me feel less of a useless parent, comfortable and supported. She enabled me to shift my own mindset in a personally very empowering way.

Here are some more quotes from parents feedback about family workers:

Positive and enduring change for families is of course down to many different things, not least the hard work and commitment of the families themselves. But these two methods point to the positive contribution that Resilient Families Practice makes for the families we work with, through the thoughtful and compassionate skills of our family workers and early help coordinators.

We have much more to do to get feedback from children and young people about their experience of working with us, and this is something we're working on.