Transcript

Hedgerows makes a difference for children, young people, and families in lots of different ways. Some are hard to measure, and some are easy to measure. So if we look at footfall or people that are registered with the centre, even though we support 13 estates, on Netherfield, particularly, we know that 100% of our families have registered with us. So we know we've got that contact with them. We can't say that we make a difference to every person in that household, but they are registered with us. They know that we're there if they need us. But our data shows us that we are engaging very well with young people, with people in workless households, and lone parents, so we know from our data that we are engaging with the right people. When it comes to actually measuring our outcomes, we use different tools. So we use family star, which, on an individual basis, will show the growth of an individual, say, when they come in and they may have an issue, we can measure that in a few months time to see if anything has changed and we would actually know. We would have an action plan that would support how that change has come about. In terms of children being school ready, we would use all the planning sessions we have, the earliest foundation stage, and we have measured with local schools, particularly our key local school, that the children that spend more time at Hedgerows score higher at the end of the foundation year. So we use that as evidence to prove that if they come to Hedgerows, if they absorb lots of sessions, as do their parents, they may have some specialist support, they will go on and achieve hopefully better results at school. We have key performance indicators around obesity, so we use different targets to measure how well we're doing for our families in the local area. Also things like has tooth decay gone down, because of all the dentist comes in or all the prevention work we do with families around sugar being quite damaging to children's teeth and sugary drinks. So we can use those and say, actually, we can show part and parcel here that we have made a difference. Signing up children to the two-year-old funding and nursery, we can link the doors that we've knocked as to whether the take-up's improved. So all those things are really important. For us, we like to look at it also on a personal scale. So when a parent comes in and says, actually, you might not have realised, but when I took part in that aerobics session for weeks on end and met lots of women from different cultures and people that I knew that spoke to me in my own language, that got me through postnatal depression, or that made my mental health better. We also have courses. So we will measure how many parents have taken up education for the first time. In this area, we don't have lots of people that have got qualifications from school. So to say they've got level one, level two, we record how many people have gone back to work with our support or with our partners support. I still believe that whoever comes through the door, I like to see people go on to be successful. And I think some people don't start off, you know, exactly what sure start says, with the same chance in life, and for whatever reason, I think our families they come across barriers all the time, they have had difficult childhoods themself. It's about having high expectations. I believe that we can make a real difference. When we're looking in-depth in families now, there's a lot of what I would call emotional poverty. And I think that's the thing that fascinates me at the moment and really keeps me here is that unless we-- it is about well-being. Unless we help people emotionally, it isn't necessarily the practical elements of poverty, even though that's really hard and impacts massively on people, it's their emotional well-being, it's their emotional needs that have never been met that I think that's the specialist work that we do that I think makes a difference. And when I see-- I think of maybe one or two families where I've seen the most amazing journey that they've been on that we couldn't predict in the beginning, and you see happy, safe children and parents that are achieving. We have a duty to these families to make a difference, and believe in them and have high expectations for them, because they have been, you know, not everybody has.