A Co-constructed and Co-produced Evaluation of the Anchor Project in Shetland

Section 3: Anchor’s Key Elements

3.1 Services and Supports Offered by Anchor

Anchor provided a range of services and supports which fell into to the following broad categories.

1. Anchor was perceived as a listening, befriending, ‘boundary spanning’ and agency linking service, which has grown organically in response to the needs of its users and community rather than a place. Predominantly, but not exclusively situated in schools, Anchor enabled school staff and project workers to work closely together. Family members could approach Anchor workers directly and for many, the main sources of help sought were associated with gaining access to fuel vouchers, food or children’s clothing which constituted most of the initial support provided to most families who engaged with Anchor. Some of these initial practical assistance contacts, along with growing trust and relationships with Anchor staff evolved into face-to-face contact and support once the ‘door’ to Anchor started to open.

2. Project workers had flexibility and autonomy related to deciding who, when, where and for how long they engaged with those needing support. The perception of parents receiving support was they were “allowed to get things wrong” providing important opportunities for growth and opening the door to accept later support or try alternative ways of coping. This was in an environment where often statutory services, which are under constant governance scrutiny, find it difficult not to be viewed as engaging in punitive decisions or actions. Drawing on expertise and collaborations, being brave and creative in doing things differently and risk taking were all critical to the ongoing development of Anchor. The professional boundaries, predominant in health and social care roles, did not exist. Rather the project workers worked with the child and family in a way akin to a ‘professional friend’ supporting those with lived experience wanted to engage and accept support.

3. Anchor sits outside statutory services and operated like a third sector organisation but with the benefits of organisational infrastructure to support its activities. Given Anchor’s position within Children’s services in Shetland Islands Council, access to Anchor was facilitated through Schools. This was a key factor valued by parents who felt they had somewhere to get help without fear of stigma or judgement. This was linked to epistemic mistrust of statutory services for those experiencing generational cycles of poverty, abuse and bias, and complex family histories, which Anchor was helping those affected to overcome and change.

Anchor had always aligned closely with Schools and more recent developments have seen Anchor workers based in schools. This approach was deemed successful from the perspective of parents, Anchor workers and from headteacher perspectives. There is convincing evidence that teachers being able to refer children and families to someone embedded in the school environment but not perceived to be part of the education system had played a key role in improving relationships between parents and teachers and resulted in positive outcomes for those parents and their children alike. Increasingly Anchor activities involve health, education and promotion in schools alongside targeting children who are showing signs of stress, poverty, or absenteeism.

4. Anchor could be considered as both a service and a ‘way of being’ with the workers being fully embedded in their community – the ‘Anchor approach’. Anchor has a ‘footprint’ and is providing early/right support at the right time to those who need it. Although in its infancy, key stakeholders judge the vision of Anchor will pay off but will take time to demonstrate the scale of positive change observed at the individual level to date. Despite this open approach, the service confirmed that the average family received around 11 hours of support time (direct and indirect).

5. As a person centred and relationship-based service, Anchor focussed on helping people to help themselves without fear of judgement which parent participants associated with statutory services such as social work. The Anchor project challenged assumptions that all solutions lie in statutory services. In contrast to statutory services which tend to have a pre-determined purpose and remit, Anchor as a service which ‘sits alongside’ people, provides a social cushion and helps ‘hold’ people and prevent them slipping into crisis in the immediate term, while supporting alternative strategies; important for those who also need support to consider and utilise alternative strategies in their lives.

Significantly, Anchor was a service which worked to people’s strengths, gave people time, helped them to identify and work with their needs, at a pace set by them and what was possible rather than a deficit model.

Who Delivers Anchor

Anchor is delivered by project workers who bring a wealth of expertise to this role; social/work/care, school nursing, early years education, police work, community development, dental nursing and working in the third/charitable sector. In the past, workers were also seconded from the non-statutory sector but are now all Council employees, making the ethos of the project akin to a non-statutory service.

The researchers were struck by the diversity of the team who, through our joint working, demonstrated a clear and shared vision and understanding about the nature Anchor and its aims as an approach to addressing child poverty and helping families cope with daily living, while aspiring to work collaboratively as workers and with those with lived experience.

Anchor connects a range of sectors and services which includes social/work/care, school nursing, early years education, police work, community development, dental nursing and working in the third/charitable sector. Anchor is a linchpin which draws services together, a role which it seems to have developed due to its organic growth and absence of statutory requirements. The Anchor for Families team, which was created from the findings of the Anchor Project, sits within the Family-Focused Services, within Children and Families Social Work.

How Anchor Operates

The diverse roles of the project workers emerged during the Phase one workshops. Their freedom to determine interactions with families, whilst a strength, meant it was challenging to establish how Anchor works on a day-by-day basis. To help our understanding, four family project workers mapped out a typical working day from the previous week. Participants were clear that no two days were the same, but this mapping revealed a diverse and person-centred service (Appendix v).

Anchor provided practical support such as cooking skills for parents and health promotion work in schools e.g., dental hygiene and care. Anchor project workers also supported individual children experiencing distress at school and transitioning from primary to secondary school. The head teachers reported improved behaviour and attendance at school in children whose families were being supported.

As a ’professional’ friend, project workers helped parents to build relationships with agencies such as schools and feel more confident in coping with the GIRFEC process. Project workers also reported helping to take children to school and sports training where appropriate. This helped to support building confidence and skills development within the family. In this regard, Anchor acted, as a friend will often do for others, by helping with day-to-day activities. In this context, this was to help children engage in education and sport to their perceived advantage.

One of the research team accompanied a project worker who took a child to School before they returned to speak to the parent. Without this intervention, the child would have missed out on important activities linked to their development. The freedom to support children and families in this way is a key feature of the autonomy and flexibility of project workers to agree with parents what helps.

Anchor has an open-door policy, is never considered the ‘wrong door’, people were taken at face value, and no one was turned away. Interventions were ‘organic’, developed according to need with onward referral, signposting, and interface with other services as appropriate. Meeting calls for practical help and assistance such as fuel vouchers, clothing, and food parcels was part of the work most days. For some people, help beyond this was not required, but workers cited examples where receiving practical help opened the door or functioned as a hook or means by which people enter a conversation with Anchor staff. Other referrals were through the schools where staff noticed a child who seemed withdrawn or with behaviour issues, hungry or inadequately dressed. Schools play a central role as one mechanism by which Anchor works. One school Head talked about how working in collaboration with Anchor, had allowed some families with generational challenges with education relationships, to positively change the way they perceived and interacted with educational bodies and teachers and thus radically alter the life chances of their children and educational achievement. A call from Anchor was perceived to have a different tone for families to one received from the Head or other school staff.

Anchor is not an emergency/crisis service and sits ‘under the radar’ in terms of Statutory Services and policy such as GIRFEC. The researchers recognised Anchor as the ‘liquid between the stones’ providing advocacy, brokering, support and a professional friendship. The Anchor team helped to ensure services engaged with families and individuals at a time that was best for them. Through helping people to recognise risky behaviours and try out different behaviours compared to what they might have previously enacted, Anchor helped to build resilient families.

A key feature of the way Anchor worked was the role of parents/families in setting the pace and agenda including where they met their project worker. This was often in a local coffee shop or the community centre. The researchers emulated this practice and of the six parents we spoke to, four conversations took place in public cafés and two were at their home.

Underpinning Characteristics of Anchor

The ‘open door’ and ‘never the wrong door’, where no-one was turned away, exemplifies Anchor characteristics. Interventions were ‘organic’, developed according to need and agreement of the parent with onward referral, signposting, and interface with other services as appropriate. One single parent with children with additional support needs, was empowered by the support of the worker to challenge the conduct and focus of a GIRFEC meeting. The GIRFEC process was causing the parent distress. The parent was clear the confidence to speak out would not have happened without Anchor support. The same parent registered with an academic institution to undertake a degree which was also attributed to the support available through Anchor and the confidence it instilled.

Another parent who had longstanding and negative memories of school was experiencing problems with non-attendance at school of the youngest of four children and the only one still of school age. The support from the worker was helping the parent to speak to the child and encourage school attendance. In this case it was about supporting strategies for the parent to communicate and encourage school attendance and the situation was improving.

Our interactions with parents and project workers suggest Anchor operates on characteristics including fairness, compassion, humanity and kindness with flexible boundaries to meet the needs of parents/families (see below and Appendix v ‘A day in the life of…..’)

Apparent Anchor Characteristics that underpin the modus operandi of the Anchor workers and their managers

• Bravery
• Flexibility in terms of the where, when and for how long, of client engagement
• Compassion
• Non-judgemental
• Gave permission to fail and still receive help and support
• Worked in collaboration with families and other community support systems
• Walked beside and worked with parents as they wished and at the point they need help - no more, not less

Cross-organisational Operating Principles

• Collaboration
• Good boundary spanning relationships
• Trust
• Shared vision
• Shared aims
• Being willing to share resources and take risks
• Being comfortable to experiment to find out what works.

Being willing to give up power on the basis of evidence of what works

Critical Success Factors

Key to the success of Anchor is its problem-solving and practical approach; for example, if a child needs shoes or a warm coat, Anchor workers prioritise this and without the need to know why in the first instance. This speaks to the non-judgemental, openness, compassion, humanity, and kindness the researchers identified as part of the Anchor approach, building trust, and encouraging long-term independence and sustainability.

Anchor aimed to be and has been successful in offering a people facing service, valued by those who experience and deliver it. Evidencing the impact in the short term is difficult so there is a need to move towards longer term and impact. Early intervention/prevention is less costly than crisis intervention but hard to quantify and ‘light touch’ means of doing that should be agreed, going forward.

Anchor is perceived to contribute to a fairer society but cannot fix everything and is part of a wider picture of support in the Islands. It is important to consider how the principles and values of Anchor; person centred, early intervention, prevention, compassion, humanity, offering professional friendship and kindness, can be incorporated into the ‘whole system’.

Time, resources, and patience have contributed to success thus far. Recognition that conversations about pathways, values clarification, and examining case studies take time (in relation to Anchor this was around two years) is key. Anchor has required thinking ‘outside the box’ to achieve a sufficient level of agreement about ways of working between the various public services. A shared journey of partners has resulted in an agreed appreciation of the need for early intervention and vision for a support service such as Anchor. This seems to be working, as leaders are on board and have been brave in developing Anchor. They have realised a desire to work differently and switch resources to early intervention, if there was some slack in the system. This evidences the need for authentic conversations around social inclusion, connectedness, and social interaction. Anchor demonstrates the importance of authentic conversations as part of its success.

Anchor has helped to draw services together through links with e.g. social work, Shetland Family Centre and the ‘No door is the wrong door’ policy. Services need to link together and agree multiagency ownership for ensuring people have a better and fairer society in Shetland.

Statutory services are increasingly working with high level cases, so Anchor is needed in Shetland for those who need support but sit out with or at the margins of statutory services. Overall, the vision of services needs to shift to early intervention.

Key to the success of Anchor is the sense of place and belonging for leaders, workers, and communities. Passion for improvement was visible to the researchers and permeates Anchor. Shetland is their community and they wanted it to be an inclusive and fair place to live and work.