TAC, keyworkers and empowerment. A briefing paper by Peter Limbrick (2013) From the archive

...parents are denied a voice and service managers lose the grounding and dynamism that parents would have brought to the table...

 

Quoting from the Introduction:

“TAC (the Team Around the Child model) has been designed to meet the particular support needs of babies and young children who have an on-going multifaceted condition. Because these children have a range of needs in various developmental areas, e.g. motor, perception, communication, cognition and behaviour, the child and family can find themselves at the centre of confusing networks of service providers. 

“In this article I want to describe TAC as a successful response to the problematic complexity that can arise and as an example of horizontal teamwork. I will also show how TAC both depends on and supports keyworkers and outline the opportunities TAC brings to give more decision-making power to parents. 

“Putting it another way, the article and the TAC model answer some basic questions that parents often ask; 'Why don't the people helping my child talk to each other?', 'Why can't I have just one special person who helps me join it all together?' and 'Whose child is it anyway?'. These are important questions because they are often asked of service providers with a high degree of parental frustration and even anger....”

Note: This essay was first published as a Members' Briefing Paper in March 2013 in the Equity and Childhood Program of the Youth Research Centre at Melbourne University, Australia.

Read the paper here.

Go to the Interconnections archive here.