Challenge Prize Blog 1
Health Inequalities Challenge Prize – Blog September 2023
The project has gotten off to a positive start. We received a referral prior to the schools breaking up in July, not long after we were awarded the funding, so it was great to be able to work on this over the summer and deliver a positive outcome. We have now reopened for referrals in South Cambs following the summer break and we think I imagine we will soon identify the rest of the referrals for the pilot prior to the funding period ending in November.
We have been working on further refining and developing our model over the summer months – we have started to embed this across the organisation based on what we have learned already and how a flexible funding approach is essential in responding to childhood trauma and the difficulties families can face from this, particularly when it is intergenerational in character and linked to financial deprivation and disadvantage as well. In September, we trained our entire team in this model to ensure it is systemically embedded across our organisation, so we already feel that the impact of this funding is wide. Indeed, we refer to this model as our ‘panoramic’ approach to supporting children and families and more information about this will be published on our website in due course.
Excitingly, we have also recently begun a collaboration with the Rudd Centre at the University of Cambridge and have begun talking to them about the evidence base for our model. One of the challenges small charities such as ourselves frequently face is around building an evidence base for the interventions that we offer and deliver. This is particularly the case with this current pilot project as flexible funding is an approach, based fundamentally on trauma-informed and therapeutic principles (and the shared decision-making model used within, amongst others, the NHS – see Elwyn et al. 2010). But it is an approach, not an intervention as such, and, therefore, very difficult to investigate clinically when the flexible and bespoke package of support provided to each child or young person is so different (for example, music therapy and swimming lessons vs dramatherapy and parkour!). We are talking with the Rudd Centre about this problem and looking at the evidence base which informs our model – it is, for example, fundamentally embedded in the principles in Section 8 of the Children Act 1989 which we feel is a strong place for us to be starting from!