Ensuring children's life stories are at the centre of direct work

[Introduction]

This is a Research in Practice podcast, supporting evidence informed practice with children and families, young people, and adults.

Julie: Hello, and welcome to this podcast on Norfolk's Life Story Approach. I'm Julie Wilkinson, senior research and development officer at Research in Practice, and I'm joined today by Lizzie Hills, practice lead for family intervention and looked after children at Norfolk County Council. So, welcome Lizzie, hello.

Lizzie: Hello.

[Norfolk County Council’s approach to Life Story Work]

Julie: It's really lovely to have you here. You and I, we met virtually, didn't we, at an online workshop on Life Story Work led by Simon Hammond from the University of East Anglia, and what I was really interested in, Lizzie, was that you posted in the chats about some of the innovative work that you've been doing in Norfolk, and I got in touch with you and was really keen to find out more about this, to tie in with some other resources on Life Story Work that we're producing at Research in Practice, so it would be great if you could start by telling me a little bit about what you've been doing in Norfolk.

Lizzie: In Norfolk, we have, like most local authorities, our practice framework, and we have seven ways of working within that that cut across the whole of Children's Services. And as of this year, one of those ways of working is our Life Story Approach. It is a way of being with children and families that tries to reframe our thinking from Life Story Work, which we obviously always will still do, to thinking about what that means for children. So in terms of their life stories, it's more important that we understand the story of their life and that they understand the story of their life, rather than us thinking about, 'What work are we doing to help them understand that?' It just reframes that narrative a little bit from product to process a bit.

Julie: That's really interesting, so it's more about the approach rather than thinking of it as a single action Life Story Work product.

Lizzie: That's right. There's always times when you will do specific pieces of work with a child or young person, particularly when they've experienced trauma and you're doing some targeted therapeutic work with them. But what we hope to do with our Life Story Approach is think about each child's life as their Norfolk story, and to create an understanding for them of all of the difficulties they may have had in their life, which may be the reason they've come to get support from Children's Services. And how all of the work that we're doing with children involves asking them about their story, we talk about children's wishes and feelings from the first point of any assessment in family support or in social work, all the way through to when there's the corporate parent, we're working directly with children. But as part of that, we want them to understand their story at different points as far as we're able to do that, and also to understand the professional intervention that's led to that. So why they have someone coming to help them with things, and what everybody's role is, so they understand the difficulties in their family, the strengths in their family, and also who around them is helping them and their family to work their way through that.

Julie: Yes, that's really interesting, so from what you're saying, the work starts at an early stage, the approach starts at an early stage of working with the child and their family to help them understand their story. And that is a very interesting approach, and I'm just wondering what the inputters behind that approach was.

Lizzie: It's very much a combination of things that all bubbles up together at the same time. One of our heads of service worked with our In Care council, and asked our young people, what did they want us to focus on getting better at? And one of the suggestions was Life Story Work, and they gave us really direct ideas about how we could support them to understand their life stories, those young people that had been in care. And at the same time, our senior managers were thinking about how we can always improve, do things differently, and in particular take the best of everything that we're doing, and create more consistency around that. So thinking about our professional curiosity, and how to get messages across to the whole organisation about thinking of children's stories. So when we brought together the voices of our children and young people and the ambitions of our leadership, that led to our focus on My Norfolk Story, and a Life Story Approach across the organisation. We have an animation that was put together by our In Care council, together with the participation team that support them, and they created the scripts. We had a professional animator create the pictures, and they spoke the words as well. So we're really proud of being able to hear from them directly, and share their ideas in a way that helps us focus on their life stories continuously when we're working.

Julie: That's a very interesting point about working with the Children In Care council and with the senior leadership team. Were there any other influences on the approach that you developed?

Lizzie: There were, the starting point was from Norfolk, but we didn't stay in Norfolk. We had the opportunity to really research and get to know some of the leading approaches to take the best of what there is, and make sure that, although we're starting with what our young people wanted us to do, we were looking outward and making sure that what we were doing was in line with National and International Good Practice. And also taking as many ideas as we could about what that would practically look like. Our biggest influence from all of that was, I think Richard Rose, who is a social worker but an author and a trainer, and an international expert in Life Story Work. He's provided training for Norfolk for some years in Therapeutic Life Story Work, and we really benefited from talking to him about the work that he's done, and in particular, how we could, without diminishing the need for Life Story Work, use many of the principles across the whole system with all children and young people, to make sure that we're holding life stories in mind at all times. The other significant influence was, I think Simon Hammond, who's based at UEA, and has done research into Digital Life Story Work.

We know that we do a lot of direct work with younger children, where we're doing worksheets and booklets and practical activities that are tangible, but we also know that we need different approaches for young people who might be spending more of their time with digital devices, and be less interested, but not always not interested, in writing something down, and talking to Simon was helpful in thinking a bit more widely about what we could do practically with young people, when they want to talk about their life stories, explore their life stories, how we can support that so it feels like their story rather than produced in a format that somebody has given them. We want to make sure that for young people, their stories are owned by them, and that means having them in a format that they would choose.

Julie: So you involved the Children In Care council, the senior leadership team when thinking about the approach. Did you also involve the workforce?

Lizzie: We did, and that was a huge influence. Once we had our approach organised, in what our approach would look like practically, we knew that we had people that have a particular specialism or interest in supporting children to understand their life stories, and we have some people that have trained specifically. And we brought them together in a range of focus groups to talk about the best of what we do. A lot of the work that we're doing, focusing on children's life stories, is not new at all, but by sharing the best of what we do, and the most creative ideas across the organisation, we're perhaps sparking people's imaginations to try things, and we're sharing some of our practitioners’ really amazingly creative skills. As part of that, they talked about how they do things and what they do, and we collected a range of practical examples that give us concrete ideas to try out across the organisation.

Julie: That's great, and that's really important around sharing creative ideas, because some people think that they're not creative, and it's good to be able to get those creative juices flowing, so to speak. And you talked about gathering practical examples, so have you pulled that together in any way?

Lizzie: We have a toolkit which- it doesn't include all of our examples, because we don't have something big enough, but we have practical examples of not just written work that you would do with children and young people, whether that's words and pictures about a difficult time in their life, or for a child in foster care. Photos, and lots of comments from all the people that know him, about how exciting it is that he's part of their family, and things that they've enjoyed doing with him. We have practical ideas that are a little bit more interactive, so we have workers who have done some sort of gardening activity with children. To help them understand children's needs, we had a worker who produced a little grass head, where with the young person, she went round every week and they watched the grass grow after the young person had watered the grass head, and they talked to the grass head, and it helped them talk about how you have to keep providing water if you want something to grow, and that helped them understand how for him, there were times when he'd been looked after when he was little, and there were times when he wasn't, and it wasn't good enough that he was only looked after some of the time, because he wouldn't have grown properly. So practical ideas like that to help understand life stories have been really helpful in making sense of the impact of early difficulties.

[How the approach works in practice]

Julie: So you've talked quite generally about the approach, but how does it actually work in practice? Can you give me some details around that?

Lizzie: Some of the work that we're doing is not in some ways that different from what we've always done. We work with children, we ascertain their wishes and feelings, we work with their families and their networks to explain, what are the difficulties that mean that they have helping people involved, they have a professional network as well as a family network. Looking at all of that through a Life Story lens, makes us realise the importance of explaining really clearly for children, giving them something to hold onto that they can look back on, and also ensure that our narrative isn't a professional narrative or a family narrative. It's very much a shared conversation, which doesn't always mean that everybody agrees about what the difficulties are, and what needs to happen. But it means that everybody's voice is part of the story. As part of that, we also, obviously as corporate parents work with Children In Care, and we've got a renewed focus on talking about life stories.

It doesn't just mean having a book or a product, although that is often important, particularly when children are moving to adoption placements or kinship placements, or other permanence placements, but thinking about the individual conversations that we have is really important. You could be on a car journey past a beach and a young person will say, 'My auntie from London used to take me there, and she would always buy me the most expensive ice cream, not the cheapest ice cream.' And those little moments are part and parcel of what we all do as social workers, as practitioners. But holding onto those moments and collecting them together means that we can then curate a little bit of that child's life story for them, and share it with them, and share that moment with them, and amplify it back to them. So being more aware of those moments as well as the product is important.

Julie: Those moments are really important and those conversations that you have in the car can provide a real insight into how a child is feeling, and their wishes and feelings, and that just made me think about, as you were speaking and you were talking about ascertaining their wishes and feelings and having these shared conversations, whether you have any kind of specific examples around practice which may or may not be innovative, but which really gets to the heart of ascertaining children's and feelings, and what they're thinking about and feeling.

Lizzie: As part of our Life Story Approach toolkit, we have not only a range of consistent tools that can be used to explore All About Me activities, self-esteem activities. And how you're feeling what you want. But we also have tools around exploring feelings, because we know that life stories are often chronological, they involve facts, they involve information about what's happened and the people in your life. But one of the things that we also are trying to make sure we're including, is the work being done with children and young people on what the impact on them is, of their life story. Not just so that we're recording it and making sure that they've got an idea about what we understand, so we know them as well as we can do. But also so we know how they understand feelings, to try and build some emotional literacy, to help them think about the connection between what's happened to them and how they feel, and how that can then lead to them getting support in some areas, or just to be aware that some parts of their life have been hard, and that's not okay, but they can get some help if that leads to them having some big feelings that are difficult to manage at times.

Julie: And what would be in that toolkit, for example?

Lizzie: We have lots of things around naming feelings and understanding feelings. We also have tools around life past, life journeys, mobility mapping, and different approaches that take a bit of a linear approach. But if we had to think of one tool or way of working that we use around our Life Story Approach, we use Signs of Safety as our overarching practice model, and words and pictures is something that we do most often with children before they may come into care, also in care, but to explain a story, to include everybody's perspective in language that is clear and straightforward, and agreed with their family network, and to help them have an ongoing narrative about what's going on, what people think, what help they're getting, and what might happen next.

Julie: And is there any difference in what you do at the early help, early intervention stage compared to what you might be doing once the child is removed from their parents and into care, or adopted?

Lizzie: There are different levels of intervention depending on the level of need, the level of risk, the level of vulnerability. And obviously, all of our work under Early Help Family Support will be with a family's consent. So there are times when we will do different levels of work. The tools we would use, for example, words and pictures, would be the same. When children are in our care, there is so much more that we do because we are their corporate parent, and we know more about them because we walk their daily life with them, 24/7 often. So for example, our foster carers will write their story, and that becomes part of that child's story as well. So we collect so much more information about that child's daily life, their interests, their activities, their preferences.

Julie: And you talked about signs of safety and words and pictures, and obviously stories change as the child gets older, or as they move through care. How do you then adapt those to reflect that?

Lizzie: We're relatively early in introducing our Life Story Approach, so we're still learning, and we will always learn and always adjust and try and make sense of how that happens. Because we know we will have the information available at a point in time, but everybody's story includes unspoken stories, hidden stories, and we are constantly finding out more about the children that we work with, their networks. As part of our training, we include an expectation that while Life Story Approach is everyone's responsibility, we all have a different perspective, we use a quote from Lemn Sissay, where he says, 'Even at a family meal, we'll all have a different perspective of what happens.' And its core for Therapeutic Life Story work to ensure that different perspectives are saw and heard to shape understanding in a coherent narrative. So as part of our starting point, we say, 'Everybody will have a different perspective, and some of us will have a partial perspective of a child's story.' That's why it's important to include competing narratives, even when it may not make sense, you can explain, 'We don't always agree, some of us remember things differently,' but it's important to know all the different perspectives so that you can make your own decision about what's happened, and understand that if there's conflict, we don't push it away and pretend it didn't happen, we explain, 'Not everybody agrees about some things, but that's okay, that's part of your story.'

Julie: That's interesting, so the different perspectives and the competing narratives and capturing those. So, I'm interested then in, how do you go about gathering those different perspectives from different people in the child's life?

Lizzie: We use an approach called Family Networking. We use family networks as the primary support, and the primary connection for every child. That doesn't mean necessarily they're blood relatives, it means who is family to them? It could be their mum's best friend as opposed to a grandparent, but when we talk about family networks we try and involve them as much as possible in all of the work that we do from the earliest interventions in early help all the way through to children in care and young people leaving care. We have family network meetings and we, for example, in our assessments will include scaling questions from anybody who is part of that network and will be part of the support for that child and family.

[Digital life story work]

Julie: So in terms of digital life story work I mean what would that actually look like?

Lizzie: We have a range of different ideas and we're still learning. We've benefited quite significantly from-, at the start of lockdown we had just rolled out a load of technology and I think we were lucky in some ways that we're able to use that to produce far more digital approaches than we would have been before. We were able to go online very quickly at the start of the pandemic lockdown. Some of the ideas that we've used are around Pod Walks, so where you go to places that are meaningful for children and young people and actually in that place think about what it means to them, what their memories are. Sometimes that means using video and audio, sometimes it just means going to an old school, an old address and it's certainly something that isn't new. I did it during some of my social work days; we didn't call it Pod Walk, we just went to check that everything was still there for a young person who wanted to feel that she hadn't left everything behind.

And when you see the emotional impact of revisiting some of those moments it's really quite humbling as well, one of the things that a worker’s done is going to where a child used to live and recording the sound. They used to live near a railway track and that wasn't a noise that they were used to hearing anymore, but just knowing that that was still there it brought back some memories, it made them feel connected with that place. Something that we've done as well is suggesting to young people they make life tracks; we want to talk about emotions and feelings and making sense of some of the really big feelings that our young people have, that's not always easy especially when you can't find the words or there are no words, and one of the things that been quite helpful is linking music with emotions and feelings. So rather than saying, 'Can you tell me how you feel, how that experience made you feel? Here's a handy emotions wheel can you pick it off from that?' Say, 'If you could pick three tracks to explain to other people, to help us understand how you felt this year what would be the songs that explain how you feel?' And that isn't easy to categorise, it's not necessarily easy to measure but it does communicate and explore those feelings in a way that works far more for those young people.

Julie: That is really powerful and what struck me as you were speaking there was around the focus on feelings rather than life story work being just telling the story of what has happened to them, but really going down and focusing on those feelings and I think that's a really interesting and important element of life story work. And that just brings me then onto your other point that you were talking about, Richard Rose and the therapeutic life story work, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit around that and how that whole feelings thing might fit into that as well?

Lizzie: So rolling out our Life Story Approach means that we're taking a long view, so supporting children at every point of intervention with children's services, from our early help service to the adults that were previously in our care as children. And part of that involves skilling up everybody to work with children and young people in a way that holds their life stories in mind. The wider aim is to get everyone thinking about the importance of children's stories for them and for children and young people to understand their stories at the time as well as looking back. That doesn't reduce the importance of, for a small number of children and young people, that they will need a level of therapeutic life story work to help them understand the most significant and serious trauma that's had a really great effect on them and even as we want all of our workers to be able to undertake a level of life story work there will always be a need for therapeutic work, particularly for children in our care where we're trying to unpick a level of developmental trauma that will require specialist support. And Richard Rose does some training for us anyway, but we've also had some of our workers train in his diploma to be able to provide that more targeted and planned therapeutic work with children and young people.

[Therapeutic life story work]

Julie: Therapeutic life story work is a specialism and not to be undertaken by just anybody, but I'm interested in the principles gathered from therapeutic life story work that have informed your work?

Lizzie: The principles that underpin our Life Story Approach are very firmly rooted in understanding attachment and understanding trauma, we talk about how life story work is important for all children but particularly when they're trying to make sense of fractured experiences and understand separation and loss. We include training around having a secure base and understanding the impact of shame and blame on children's life stories when we're trying to unpick how they understand what's happened to them as well as the chronology of what's happened in their family life.

Julie: So life story work is obviously really important for a child's identity and understanding what happened to them and also how they feel about it, so how does your approach incorporate that element?

Lizzie: We focus in our training on thinking about how much more able we all are as adults to be psychologically healthy if we understand about our own history. Our identities are a whole range of interconnecting fragments that we bring with us from memory and experience. Not just us but actually people around us, our family and friend's experiences that add up to create a sense of who we are as individuals and also how we differentiate ourselves from other people as well. And a big part of life stories is forming and developing our own identity, and for children and young people that's an ongoing process, it's all an ongoing process for all of us, but for children, they may be considering some of it for the first time. One of the things we want to make sure we support children and young people to do is not just understand their past and know about it or understand the difficult moments in their lives but to integrate that as much as possible to make sense of the present so they can almost look forward to the future with knowledge of good times and bad times. Because we know that if children aren't helped to make sense of the trauma they've experienced then they can carry it around with themselves and if it remains unresolved it can impact on their emotions and their relationships with others as well.

Julie: I wonder if you can give any examples of versions of a life story that you've been able to do that's tangible and that a child or young person can take with them?

Lizzie: We will obviously provide a life storybook for children who are moving into a permanence placement, so whether a child is being adopted, going to live with kinship careers or sometimes children staying in long term foster care. So we have guidance and a couple of examples of what those life storybooks would look like, but we don't just provide a book at those points in time; partly through words and pictures we often provide snapshots so that children understand what's happening right now and that's something they can hold onto. And we've also got similar things not just to say, 'This is to explain what's going on in your life at this point' or, 'This is how to explain a decision that a judge is going to make soon about who in your family you'll live with.' But we also have examples of when children have been living somewhere for a while, perhaps a child or young person is moving foster placement for a reason, we have a level of appreciative inquiry all of the positive things that everybody knows, all of the positive things that somebody can remember with photos, a little bit of a scrapbook. So even though we focus on process not product it's still so important to have something tangible. Our foster carer records are written to children and young people and they provide a really practical, detailed, almost-daily log of what they've done, where they've been, what their preferences are and they include not just things that have been challenging but fun and exciting moments for them to hold onto at some point in the future.

Julie: Great. And you talked there a little bit about the appreciative inquiry, can you just explain that a little bit?

Lizzie: The idea of appreciative inquiry is to take the best of what there is and expand it and share it and that really fits with our whole approach around life stories. None of the work that we have been talking about is new at all, but there are some people that understand it and perhaps want to specialise more in it, there are others that were a bit nervous about where to start or just haven't had any particular training or knowledge about it before and by finding the best of what there is, starting with our young people, and saying, 'What works well, what can we do differently?' And also taking ideas from all of our practitioners we have been able to share so much positive practice that I think it's important to acknowledge the skill and the creativity and the imagination of our workers when we're sharing ideas out, it's not about everybody learning to do things from scratch, it's about learning from each other and that is the big part of the way we're expanding the approach in Norfolk.

Julie: So how have you skilled up the work force, what's been your approach to that?

Lizzie: We started with our focus groups to get ideas and many people have then shared ideas with their colleagues which has created quite a bit of a groundswell. We've produced a training package, which all of our practitioners who work directly with children and families from our early help and family support teams all the way through to our family assessment and safeguarding teams, our children with disabilities teams, children in care teams and life beyond care teams as well as all of our teams that support the child and the practitioner in terms of specialist support. So we began a rolling programme of training everybody in thinking about having a Life Story Approach and again some of those practitioners came for a refresher and some of them came to have a think about this for the first time if they're early in their career. We have two different versions of the training, one directed more towards workers supporting children and young people living with families at home and one directed more at supporting children and young people who are either in care or in kinship placements or not living with their first family in some way and the reason for that was to make sure the examples we used were tailored to peoples experiences so they got more practical ideas.

[Embedding the approach]

Julie: So how have you gone about embedding the approach and what have been the challenges and facilitators of this?

Lizzie: Having the comprehensive training has been really useful because it's given practitioners the opportunity to take a day out and really think about life stories and connect so much of their knowledge and experience around understanding trauma and managing feelings and sharing stories with families and coming up with a shared narrative. With the long view, understanding how individual interventions that we might do with children over a short period can sometimes have an afterlife going forward, that we want to make sure a child understands. A lot of those conversations have led to really deep thinking and one of the things that we know is we can share lots of learning and training and we can have fantastic examples coming back of how practitioners are putting into practice, but it can sometimes be difficult to see how that has an impact across the board. Already even though we've only started to roll this out this year we've had some positive feedback. We had a focused visit from Ofsted in October and as part of that Ofsted commented, 'Helping children to understand their experiences and why they're in care is a priority in Norfolk. The commitment to working with children to understand their life stories is evident in children's records.' And that is really encouraging because we know already somebody coming in can see that footprint of a Life Story Approach across children's records.

Julie: That's great to hear that that's been recognised by Ofsted, so really, really important for you. So that has obviously been recognised but have there been any challenges along the way in embedding the approach?

Lizzie: Everybody is busy and particularly for social workers working during conditions that are still very challenging with limitations on pandemic, and we're always worried about whether schools will be closed and what impact that will have on vulnerable children and their families. It's one more thing for people to hold in mind and that's always going to be challenging. We've tried to mitigate that by providing as many tools as possible and embedded the whole way of working in the rest of our planning. So it is a way of thinking that should change the conversations that workers have in the direct work they're already having with families and it should be as little additional burden as possible when we know everybody is working so hard to support children, young people.

Julie: So obviously going forward, you know, the approach is going to be rolled out much more across the organisation, are there any other future areas that are perhaps in the pipeline or that you're considering?

Lizzie: We have all sorts of hopes to embed far more clearly the Life Story Approach in our recording which has always sometimes lagged behind. We obviously have memory boxes for children in care where foster carers will keep special things for them. We're working towards having a virtual or a digital memory box where we can put anything for children in care, that they continue to access far beyond when they've actually been in care. Whether it's their class teacher emailing into it their star of the week certificate, or their foster career keeping in there, their video of them learning to ride their first bike. And that would be owned by our young people in care and they would be able to carry that with them. One of the things that we're obviously going to do is talk to young people again and say, 'Have you noticed a difference? What has worked and what could we keep doing to keep improving to make sure we're holding your stories in mind and making sure that while we're carrying out all our statutory duties, and while we're supporting you to live your best lives? How are we making sure that your story is in the centre of that and that at every point you and your family understand what is being done to help you? And you're telling us how we can keep your story at the centre of everything we're doing.'

Julie: So, it's very much a virtual cycle and a learning journey for yourself.

Lizzie: Very much.

Julie: Yes, that's great and finally I'd just like to ask you what advice that you might give to others who are thinking of their Life Story Approach and perhaps wondering what they might do to make some changes in this area?

Lizzie: Every organisation's different, but one thing I would always say is to look at what's going well now, look at what your workers are doing well now and talk to your young people, see what their experience is of how you understand children's life stories. Not just how the products look, but how much do they understand and how much can they make sense of any difficult times and any good times they've had in their lives as well, how do we hold onto them for them and walk with them in the stories. Find the gems where you have practitioners who are doing amazingly creative work and see where you can go with it and how far you can spread it out. We've had our best experiences where we've been able to create space to share good practice and reiterate the importance and keep peoples motivation in busy times to think about the child's experience not just do they know what's happening but can they make sense of it, would they be able to explain it to somebody else in the future. And make sure that children's life stories and how they understand them is at the centre of our direct work with them.

Julie: And I think that's a really, really nice note to end on, it's that importance for children and young people, of helping them to make sense of what has happened to them. So I'd just like to thank you very much Lizzie for this podcast and there's lots of really exciting, interesting information there, so thank you very much.

Lizzie: Thank you for having me.