What is the best way to promote early child and family support in a city, region or country? Part 2: The work of Interconnections
This essay has two sections:
- The independent work of Interconnections
- Working with UK government
The independent work of Interconnections
Since the mid-1990s, I have been working to promote effective integrated early child and family support under the consultancy name of Interconnections. To a very large extent this relies on my past experiences in the voluntary agency ‘One Hundred Hours’ which had helped pioneer and validate the idea of offering a multiagency keyworker to new families of babies and infants who had significant neurological impairment. Very often these children had cerebral palsy with associated conditions or a named genetic syndrome or a condition with no known cause or label. Several of these children died during their first years.
Interconnections has a dual aim: Firstly, to highlight the fact that parents have unmet needs for information, for emotional support and for full involvement in decisions about support for their child; Secondly, to show the dangers of disorganised fragmented support and to discuss how both multiagency keyworking and the Team Around the Child (TAC) approach can create effective integrated multidisciplinary and multiagency support (and even transdisciplinary teamwork for those interested).
In this work, Interconnections has been spreading information, publishing books and running workshops, seminars, conferences and consultancy projects for people working with the children I have described above. Participants at events have been mostly practitioners and managers from health, education, social care and the voluntary sector. When TAC had become part of the UK government’s Early Support project, there was an increasing number of senior managers at these events. Academic interest has always been encouraged but minimal.
Attendance by parents and other family members is always a problematic issue. My ideal is to have audiences in which 50% are parents and 50% practitioners. This is for three main reasons:
- Parents can talk more effectively about their needs than can others speaking on their behalf. Many practitioners have no idea what family life is like with these children until they have heard parents speak about it. This remains true.
- Parents have a right to be present when children in this group are being talked about. To exclude them is the same as keeping black people out of meetings to discuss racial equality or keeping women out of meetings to discuss gender equality.
- When meetings are making practical plans to enhance local early child and family support, parents and other family members have a very important part to play.
I am often told that parents do not find it easy to attend workshops and conferences because of lack of time, child care or money for travel. Also, parents need to get children to or from school. In fact, all of these problems can be true but are easily solved by providing necessary support with a can-do attitude. There is also a common suggestion that parents might be out of their depth. I do not find this to be true but when a parent is nervous about speaking up, some moral support from practitioners they have come with is always effective. Invitations to parents to events such as these must always include parents whose children have passed through the baby and infant stages and parents whose children have died. They will all have relevant experience and knowledge if they are ready to share it.
Generally speaking, Interconnections has focused its work more on practitioners and their managers than on chief executives for whom these children and families might be only a small part of their concerns. This has been in the expectation that practitioners and managers would change their practice and, at the same time, send valuable information up to chief executives to influence policy.
Interconnections as a low-key project has had some limited success in a number of countries in promoting effective integrated early child and family support, but if I were starting again, I would focus much more on parent and family involvement. I have learned that:
- practitioners can be strong drivers for local change and, in my view, carry a responsibility to take this as part of their role
- parents and family members are also strong drivers for change ̶ sometimes nudging practitioners out of their traditional mind-sets
- parents and practitioners together can be a formidable force. More of this in the 3rd part of this essay.
Working with UK government
The UK Labour government set up an innovative nation-wide ‘Early Support’ project early in the 2000s and involved Interconnections in a minor way in its planning and promotion. TAC became part of the new government guidance for supporting babies and infants who had multifaceted conditions. In very many localities, TAC became commonplace with the appointment within public services of TAC Co-ordinators – a new role to oversee local TAC development.
All good things must come to an end as Early Support did finally in 2015. First of all the 2008 banking crash meant local authorities were now starved of the cash they needed for new initiatives such as Early Support and the project gradually ran out of steam as the Labour government changed to a Conservative government in 2010. My impression as an outsider is that David Cameron, the new prime minster, did nothing to help the Early Support project despite having an infant son with profound disabilities. This is a personal and brief account of the rise and fall of UK’s Early Support project. From my perspective its very welcome focus on babies and infants and their families has since been lost.
While the first part of this 3-part essay described some problems that can arise in a top-down approach, the UK Early Support project shows what can happen when there is over-reliance on government authority and resources. The great advantages can disappear as soon as one government gives way to another in the democratic process. The Early Support project was too short-lived to create lasting cultural change.
Peter Limbrick
May 2021
There is an account of the Early Support project here: https://councilfordisabledchildren.org.uk/our-work/whole-child/practice/early-support-integrated-and-person-centered-approach
For information about One Hundred Hours see: ‘The Keyworker: A practical guide’ by Gudrun Limbrick-Spencer and ‘When the bough breaks’ by Sheila West.
The first part of this essay is here.
I would welcome other people’s accounts of the Early Support project and its aftermath. Please send to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
