We’re committed to helping every child in our care feel heard, understood and supported, and this mission feels especially important during Children’s Mental Health Week.
Through our WAYPOINT service, we work with children, young people and their families to create safe spaces where feelings can be explored and worries can be shared.
Children’s Mental Health week is designed to raise awareness of children’s mental health and empower, equip and give a voice to all children and young people in the UK. Place2Be, the organisation behind the campaign, suggests…
children and young people experience mental health difficulties.
of all mental health issues develop by age 14.
children and young people in England are treated for mental health problems every month.
While these are worrying statistics, the work to raise awareness of the issue is putting children’s mental health support at the forefront of our service design.
As a corporate parent for more than 200 children and young people in South Glos, we take our role in supporting them seriously. Since 2022, we’ve been shaping and growing WAYPOINT, a service that offers a range of trauma and therapeutically informed support.
Paving the way with WAYPOINT
WAYPOINT stands for Working Alongside Young People & Others In Networks Therapeutically. It started as a result of a successful pilot project to support young people to transition from residential care, and South Gloucestershire Council’s commitment to find ways to reduce the number of 11–17 year olds coming into care following family breakdown.
Back in 2022, we brought all our therapeutically informed support teams together to sit under a single service, WAYPOINT, including our Therapeutic Life Story Workers and Foster Carer and Children Support Workers. And WAYPOINT continues to grow from strength to strength, supporting children, families and foster carers.
Therapeutically informed support
The WAYPOINT service provides trauma and therapeutically informed support to children, young people, parents, families, foster carers, kinship carers, residential staff, and any part of the professional network around a child or young person, including education professionals.
While the team works across a few different areas, it’s all underpinned by therapeutic approaches including Dan Hughes’ PACE principles, Signs of Wellbeing, Systemic Practice, Non Violent Resistance (NVR) principles and Therapeutic Life Story Work.
This means we consider the ways in which children and young people communicate their trauma, the impact trauma has upon them and those around them, and how we can support those affected in therapeutic ways.
Specific areas of work where we apply these approaches include Families Together, supporting foster carer placements and transitions of children and young people leaving residential care.
Challenges for children and young people in care
Children and young people in care, or at risk of coming into care, are going to face challenges particularly specific to those circumstances. Many will have experienced trauma directly and will need support to find the tools to express and manage the impact this has had, and continues to have on them.
We have really skilled and supportive foster carers in South Glos and we’re here to support them to provide therapeutically informed care for these young people, ensuring that both our children and our carers have support around them during challenging times.
“Before I had the life story work I felt angry and confused at social services. I had a lot going on inside my mind, and because I was a child it felt like no one would tell me what was actually going on. Life story work helped me understand my life from a different perspective and see things from a different angle, and it made my mind a lot more clearer. I think life story to any young person is a massive help, it helped me a lot. I think any young person who is struggling about their life and their mind is cloudy because no one has explained to them why they’re in care and why certain things took place. I will hope life story does carry on and help other kids in care the same way it helped me.”
– Young person’s experience with therapeutic life story work
Safe spaces and skills development
We help children and young people express themselves by providing a safe space where they can understand their thoughts and feelings. We also help them with skills in building relationships, safety planning, establishing routines, emotional regulation, emotional literacy, social skills, and confidence and self-esteem.
There’s nothing better than seeing the team build relationships with children and young people to allow them to open up about how they’re feeling and what they need. Communication really is the key to ensuring everyone is on the same page and knows how to support one another. And when that gets tough, our therapeutic tools help us find other ways to encourage each person to be able to communicate their needs.
We also have a separate Children of Foster Carers Group that brings foster carers’ children together to ensure they feel supported and listened to as part of a fostering family.
“Charlotte has helped me a lot over the years. Over the time she was supporting me, we’d meet up regularly to chat about what’s happening. She supported me with the transition from school to college, and then moving to university.”
– Megan, Service User
The benefits
We’re working with children and the people closest to them every day and we see the benefits WAYPOINT is making to everyone involved.
Feedback tells us everyone we’ve worked with feels listened to, treated with respect and most also report that we have made a positive difference in their lives.
Data shows that we’re making a positive impact on reducing the number of children coming into care due to family breakdown, and that we’ve reduced fostering family breakdowns for children in care.
This is all really encouraging and really underpins why we do what we do.
Find out more
- Find out more about how we support families, children and young people on the South Glos Council website.
- Find out more about accessing support for mental health and wellbeing for children on South Glos Life.
- Find out more about our WAYPOINT service.
