A safeguarding programme in Dorset has been extended after a successful pilot found to have benefitted families.

Dorset Council's Safeguarding Families Together (SFT) programme has been extended for another year into 2025.

The programme, which piloted in November 2022, runs in Chesil, Dorchester and the west of the county and will now be extended across the rest of the Dorset Council area.

READ: Dorset Council launch reforms to children's services

It seeks to reduce the number of children in need of child protection or going into care and has been received well by those who took part, with parents suggesting that it should be promoted widely as a different way of working in partnership with parents.

The aim is to improve the health and wellbeing of parents and carers within Dorset by addressing three key factors: mental health, substance misuse and domestic abuse. 

Theresa Leavy, executive director of children’s services, said: “We want Dorset to be the best place to be a child and we make sure we do our very best to help keep families together, even when they are going through tough times.

“The Safeguarding Families Together programme wraps around the whole family and supports them using motivational interviewing, which is a counselling approach designed to help people find the motivation to make a positive behaviour change. 

READ: Increase in adult safeguarding concerns in Dorset

“I am incredibly pleased that it has shown positive impact on our families and that we are able to extend it to cover the whole of the Dorset Council area”.   

The service uses multi-disciplinary teams that have both specialist adult practitioners and children’s services social workers to provide a whole family working approach.

The team provides wraparound support to a family so they can focus on positive changes to behaviour which provide a safer environment for their children with service users reporting better health and overall improved emotional wellbeing.

This approach to whole family working has been implemented in other local authorities and there is compelling evidence to suggest it supports better outcomes for families, improves recruitment and retention of social workers and delivers cost reductions.

READ: Rise in reports of abuse and self-neglect among adults in Dorset

The formative evaluation was planned and undertaken during the period of September 2023 – December 2023 and included researchers from the University of Bedfordshire spending time in Dorset, interviewing families and practitioners. This has enabled the voice of Dorset families to be represented in the evaluation findings. 

One parent reflected on how she sensed that the SFT approach was ‘holistic’ and that there was an acknowledgement of the complexity and the inter-relationships between her experiences of domestic abuse and poor mental health and the impact on her children.

They said: “It seems like they’re looking at the whole, how everything interrelates, so the domestic abuse and then the mental health and then your children are part of that but not everything’s separate?

"So maybe that’s what this new project is doing is it’s enabling almost, yes, that word “holistic” to look at everything and around?”

READ: Pineapple Project will expand to Portland and Dorchester

The final report was shared in March 2024 and evidenced that SFT had been successfully implemented in the pilot areas.

Some key findings included the successful implementation of the programme, shared aims and hopes for longer term preventive impact and the creation of a new shared value-based language across professional groups and with families.

Improved information sharing and understanding of disciplinary perspectives for professionals, a provision of a more holistic, and being an accessible and responsive service for parents was also highlighted in the report.

However, high demand, recruitment challenges, and social work caseloads and statutory deadlines creating logistical barriers were mentioned in the report.

The full report can be found online here: https://bit.ly/3xMaXiu