A discussion of the North Yorkshire project
Nicki Watkinson
My name is Nicki Watkinson and I am the manager of the Youth Voice & Creative Engagement Team in North Yorkshire. I became involved in the Information Use Project in my previous role, which was Opportunity Manager in North Yorkshire’s Leaving Care team, so I was already passionate about working to improve the lives of care leavers. This passion, combined with the youth voice work I undertake in my current role makes the project a perfect fit.
Working for a local authority, I often find that hard data forms the bulk of our reports and feedback, but for me, this only tells a partial story, and it is the voice of the participants that really brings the information to life. So how can we combine both data and voice to improve outcomes for care leavers?
As with all local authorities, in North Yorkshire we capture a lot of standard data from our care leavers, which is used in our DFE returns, but this does not tell the full story. The story about how aspirational we are for our care leavers, whether that is in terms of their education, employment, accommodation or overall wellbeing. In fact, the data gathered for DFE returns can often tell a contradictory picture as it is so one-dimensional. For example, our returns often show that over 90% of our young people are in “suitable” accommodation, but when questioned as part of the Bright Spots “Your Life Beyond Care” survey almost 40% of our care leavers said they did not feel safe in their accommodation, despite it ticking the box as being “suitable”. Our Care Champions group and now working to unpick this to find out what would make care leavers feel safe in their property and are considering simple solutions such as having video doorbells installed so they can monitor who is coming to their property. This example demonstrates how voice is equally important, as we can get a much fuller picture when we capture the voices of our care leavers, and this, combined with the hard data, should be used to improve outcomes.
I am keen on raising aspirations of care leavers, and not settling for them just being in employment; is it the right employment, is it a stepping stone to what they really want to do, where are the gaps in their skills to help them get to where they want to be? We can only answer these questions by ensuring that we, as workers, ask the right questions and listen to what we are being told. We then need to translate those answers into actions, and for me, this is where the Information Use project comes in to its own, by getting workers from lots of different departments to look in more detail about what information we hold individually, and how by sharing this across teams we can work together better to achieve improved outcomes.
This might all sound a bit abstract (it did to me for a while) but here is an example I use to help me understand what the project is all about: As Opportunity Manager I would record (on a stand-alone spreadsheet) the career aspirations for all young people we were working with. I would then look to match with any opportunities North Yorkshire could offer, as corporate parents. This long-winded and manual task was not often shared with other departments / areas of the council. If, as a result of this project, we got smarter about what information we captured, and how we captured it (something that was more accessible) and we could run reports based on that information, we would be able to match more young people to work experience opportunities based on their career aspirations to help them succeed in their chosen careers and lead more happy and fulfilled lives.
I hope my rather basic examples have demonstrated how this project can have a real impact on the lives of care leavers and why the research is worthwhile. If you have any questions please get in touch at: nicki.watkinson@northyorks.gov.uk Thanks for reading!
