Kids like Sam usually fall through the cracks. He’s facing multiple challenges - struggling at school, undiagnosed special educational needs or disability (SEND), poor housing, a family reliant on food drops from a local charity due to financial difficulties. The solutions lie in multiple services working together, sharing data, conducting joint interventions, having a single view of the child and the process.

But school leaders will tell you that this rarely happens. They’ll tell you that the school is almost always left to support the child alone, scraping together what help it can from those social, medical and financial services that are too under-funded to fulfil their full role. 

And they’ll tell you things have got worse during the pandemic. 

Even when the child does, by some miracle, get the help they need, it tends to be too narrow and too academically focused. The wider social, community and family challenges rarely get touched.

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But Sam’s situation is different. Sam’s school is part of a pioneering community project called the West London Zone. It is trying to join the dots of support, coordinating help for Sam with his various needs but also addressing the needs of his family. 

It’s a model showing early signs of promise in solving one of the biggest post-pandemic challenges - coordinating multi-agency support - while going further and transforming family support, too.

And it has schools at its heart, establishing them as the hub of the intervention and also letting them get on with what they do best for children like Sam: education.

Multi-agency support for vulnerable pupils

The question is: can it - and schemes like it - scale up and help more children? What’s more, is the short-term promise going to convert into long-term change in how we get young people and their families the help they need?

The West London Zone covers a 25 square kilometre area spanning North Hammersmith, North Kensington, North Westminster and South Brent - with a total population of 350,000 people, 60,000 of whom are school-aged children. Inequality is rife and in some council wards, 50 per cent of children live in poverty.

The project was launched in September 2016, inspired by the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) - a “cradle to career” initiative in a deprived New York borough that proved so successful that it was expanded by former US president Barack Obama to other areas of the country, as part of his Promise Neighbourhoods programme.

The scheme was adapted for the UK by Louisa Mitchell, chief executive of the West London Zone. She pulled together a steering group of 40 people from schools, charities and local government in Hammersmith and Kensington. The aim was to create a model capable of identifying children who were more at risk of poor outcomes in later life as early as possible and then design a two-year package of support targeting the skills the children need to progress socially, emotionally and academically, so that they’re on track to thrive in adulthood. Crucially, that support would include the families of the young people, too. 

Each child needed bespoke learning programmes and interventions. This meant that link workers, based in every participating school, were key to the project’s success. The link workers were tasked with building a relationship with the child and their parents to identify the skills that each child needed, and they were also responsible for bringing in specialist support.

“That might be art therapy, it might be full-blown counselling, it might be catch-up literacy, it might be critical-thinking skills, depending on the age of the child,” says Mitchell.

Before the project was in place, schools were left to create, oversee and coordinate the various agencies to implement a plan. However, what the West London Zone charity does is take responsibility for the management of that child’s support and engage in what Mitchell describes as “joining up the system”.

“The children we work with have a range of profiles,” she says. ‘Some of them are high risk, some may already have other professionals in their lives, but many aren’t yet known to any external services. We see our role as joining up the system and ensuring that families have a seamless experience of different services and children don’t miss out on being connected to the range of services they can benefit from.”

This joined-up approach of delivering a bespoke package of support to meet a child’s individual needs doesn’t come cheap. That’s why the funding package involves a number of different parties, from the local authorities of Hammersmith, Kensington, Westminster, and Brent, which all have outcome-based contracts with West London Zone, through to contributions from private individuals and local businesses and from major social sector foundations.

Spreading the support costs

Mitchell says the support package funded by these different financial contributors is priced on a per-child basis. 

“So it costs around £3,250 per child, on average, per year, but if you think about it, counselling for a child for a year costs around £2,000,” she adds. “So, yes, it costs more money than a single intervention, but it’s actually quite an efficient way for a school or a council to commission resources because they only pay a proportion of it. And so by working together, and paying a proportion of each child’s plan, they’re able to generate much more support for that child in a joined-up way.”

Theoretically, it makes sense, but does that convert to practical benefits for the child? One school that signed up to participate in the project is Old Oak Primary School in East Acton. Katie Beardsworth, Old Oak’s deputy head, says the school decided to take part because it “wanted to provide more opportunities to help our young people get on track socially, emotionally and academically”.

Beardsworth says that children participating in the project have already seen a marked uptick in their academic performance.

“Children have improved academically, particularly if they have been part of the one-to-one Children’s Literacy Charity support programme,” she adds. “The children enjoy being part of a group and working with the same children in clubs. This has supported them socially and impacted on their wellbeing.”

Pupil premium funding is used by schools like Old Oak to help support the programme and they say that what they get in return significantly outweighs what they would get from a package of support that the school alone could afford to finance.

As Josie Quested, Sendco at Wendell Park Primary School in Hammersmith, points out: “I think it’s so important to tell other schools that West London Zone provides your school with the opportunity to provide children with support that, without West London Zone, you would never be able to do. We don’t have the funds, we don’t have the staff, we don’t have the resources to offer these opportunities to children, and we know how beneficial they are.”

Although it’s still relatively early days for the initiative, Mitchell believes that experiences like Quested’s and Beardsworth’s are the norm. She is pleased with the results that the programme has achieved to date. In its current cohort, 75 per cent of young people whose mental health was considered at risk have seen improvements, 78 per cent have improved their social skills and 75 per cent have improved their confidence levels.

Each child’s improvement is measured by comparing data collected at the start and end of their time with West London Zone. In addition to receiving academic measurements from schools, the project also measures social and emotional wellbeing through academically validated questionnaires.

Mitchell says that the project has also begun a longitudinal impact and process evaluation with University College London’s Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities, which will run over four years, assessing two cohorts of children through the programme. This will provide a better understanding of the impact of the project and identify areas for improvement. The project is also starting to track population-level indicators, such as exclusion rates and social care referrals, over the long term in conjunction with participating councils.

Could the scheme work in other areas?

Of course, as promising as this project looks, it could be said that delivering this in London, with its vast resources, is one thing but doing it in areas of chronic underfunding and limited opportunity is another. Can this type of approach be adapted to help young people and schools in other areas?

Well, there is some evidence that it could. Another community-focused programme that is having a significant impact on its local area is Cradle to Career in Birkenhead, Merseyside, which was launched last year following a year of research and planning. The project is overseen by the charity Right to Succeed, which champions “a place-based approach” to bringing communities together to transform outcomes for children. 

Cradle to Career was dreamed up by Steve Morgan, founder of national housebuilding company Redrow, who had received a number of requests for support from individual schools across the North West of England.

“Rather than focus on isolated schools, he decided he wanted to do something to help schools work more effectively together, and with other organisations in the community, for a better chance of long-term, whole-system change,” explains Catherine Murray, chief development officer of Right to Succeed. “He approached Right to Succeed as we specialise in using a ‘collective impact’ approach to effect ‘place-based change’.”

Essentially, the charity supports communities in areas of high deprivation to work collectively to give children and young people the best start in life. It does this by bringing together residents, professionals and decision-makers to co-design a development programme that is bespoke to the needs of the local community. 

More than 40 organisations are involved in the Birkenhead project, which has been funded by charitable donations of almost £3 million over three years from the Steve Morgan Foundation, SHINE and the UBS Optimus Foundation. Wirral Council has also committed a 17-person team to the programme.

The scheme is focused on the North Birkenhead area, which has high levels of deprivation. One of the secondary schools participating in Cradle to Career is Birkenhead Park School - the headteacher of which, Helen Johnson, is chair of the programme’s education working group. She says that at her school 71 per cent of students are eligible for pupil premium funding but accessing free school meals is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of local challenges.

“It’s all of those multilayered, complex issues around substance abuse, unemployment and domestic violence that are there in this community,” says Johnson. “So, demographically, there are huge issues and huge challenges, and yet the community are very proud to live where they do and they want to make sure that those opportunities that they don’t feel are there now are there in the future.”

Eight schools currently participate in the programme - six primaries and two secondaries - and Johnson thinks the approach is unique.

“It is truly joined up and collaborative in the sense that it’s really brought all of the stakeholders involved - be that education, health or social care - together, geographically and also in a wider sense, to do absolutely all we can to ensure that children and young people in North Birkenhead thrive from, as the name suggests, Cradle to Career,” says Johnson.

‘Schools can’t do it on our own, social care can’t and healthcare can’t, but if we can bring all those services together, we can access all of the support we need more quickly’

“Schools can’t do it on our own, social care can’t and healthcare can’t, but if we can bring all those services together, we can access all of the support we need more quickly in a much more coherent and joined-up way.”

Johnson says the programme is still in its infancy and the pandemic has presented a number of challenges, but so far pupils in the participating schools have made impressive headway with Year 5 and 6 pupils making - on average - significant progress in reading over the past year. There has also been a 9 per cent reduction in the number of pupils in the lowest two stanines for reading ability, according to GL Assessment’s New Group Reading Test.

As with the West London Zone, packages are bespoke. Thanks to the programme, Johnson’s own school has been able to implement a number of interventions, including one initiative specifically targeted at supporting the reading skills of Year 7 and 8 students. This included “The Big Read” - 30 minutes of reading, four times a week; “Word of the Week” vocabulary introduced in every subject; and the Frayer Model - a tool for building pupil vocabulary - introduced in every subject with all Year 7 and 8 form tutors.

This combination of interventions led to a 72 per cent improvement in the reading scores of Year 7 students and a 64 per cent improvement in Year 8 students. 

As for whether or not Cradle to Career has had a significant impact on the wider community, Johnson says this won’t be fully felt for years to come: it will need a decade or two for children to work their way through the programme and into jobs. However, the programme’s community support team has enabled families to gain access to the support they need more quickly and, as a result, there have been 85 step-downs from “child in need” status and 37 step-downs from child protection to “child in need” since October 2020. 

The two projects mentioned above are both led from outside of schools, but a third has been led by a charitable foundation attached to a school, giving teachers more of a lead in how the collaboration happens. 

Reach Academy Feltham has around 60 per cent of its students in receipt of pupil premium. The school was set up in 2012 and, according to Ed Vainker, CEO of the Reach Foundation, which oversees the “Cradle to Career” project at the school, working closely with the families of children was part of the school’s DNA from the outset.

“The rationale is that the quality of kids’ education is determined very significantly by things that happen outside school,” says Vainker. “And so in order to strengthen that home learning environment and the wider community, it makes sense to us that schools will play a role. So right from the start, we were investing in one-to-one family support but also in parenting training. We did a lot of home visiting and sent our teachers into homes from the outset and we invested in building this close partnership with families.”

Schools building close partnerships with families

This work ultimately led to the creation of Reach Children’s Hub in 2017, which offers support for young people, families and the wider local community all the way from birth through to the start of young people’s working lives. The hub currently has around 190 families accessing antenatal and perinatal support. Individuals can access courses like an early years foundation degree, and help and support to get training so that they can achieve their career goals.

In addition to the school and the hub, the Cradle to Career initiative also includes a convening partnership of local stakeholders ranging from local authorities through to arts groups and charities that are involved in a series of different working groups to tackle issues in the local community, such as mental ill-health. 

Vainker believes that this approach has a number of upsides.

“I think one of the problems with something like mental health at the moment is there is definitely a lot of need but some of the need could be addressed in quite a low-intensity way, with some peer support or with a group, in the short term,” he says.

“The key is delivering this support early and in a timely way. Whereas what’s happening is a lot of people are ending up on Camhs [child and adolescent mental health service] waiting lists and, although the need may not have been that acute at the beginning, by the time they’ve waited a year or 18 months, it is. So, we think there’s power in having that kind of universal offer and then having increasing levels of intensive support that can be accessed by families and children if they need it.”

Vainker says the initiative is funded either from the school’s general grant-- the school looks to invest between £100 and £150 per pupil to provide this sort of additional support - or philanthropic funding. The school is spending roughly £400,000 a year developing the children’s hub from donations.

It’s still relatively early days for the Cradle to Career project, as the hub has only been operational for four years, but Vainker says that the academy has already achieved some really good academic outcomes, with more young people going on to higher education than is typical locally. 

“We’ve also had some good outcomes on the individual interventions in terms of supporting parents into work, participation in our foundation degree and parental attitudes around the early years,” he adds.

Vainker says that, within the project, it’s particularly challenging to measure causation and establish that “because we did this, this was the outcome”. But there is more certainty around the academic achievements of children attending the school.

“In terms of high-level outcomes, we talk about setting up our children for lives of choice and opportunity, and we talk about there being four enablers of that: achieve well academically is one, but also be healthy, be safe and well supported, and then build strong social relationships and social networks. We’re trying to progress against all of those, but the key metric for us is academic attainment because usually that is a sign that other things are strong,” he adds.

While it’s still early days for these kinds of projects, West London Zone’s Mitchell and Cradle to Career’s Johnson both believe their programmes could be replicated in other communities that face similar challenges. Meanwhile, Vainker reveals that his school is already working with a group of six schools across the country that are seeking to build the same model in their communities.

“We are working with them over three years to help them to do this, and we’re hoping that we might be able to work with a larger group in the future,” he says.

While other stakeholders clearly have a major role to play in providing this sort of help and support to young people, Vainker thinks that schools are uniquely positioned to be anchor institutions in their communities.

“In the places where schools are located, they’re often the biggest institution and they’re often the best-funded institution,” he says.

“If you look at the cuts in local authorities, schools have been insulated from those significantly in the last 10 to 11 years. Schools are a universal institution in communities, which again is very unusual because how many times might a GP expect to see a young person during the period of time someone is in school? It might be 20 times, it might be twice for their jabs, it might be never. And schools are also really trusted. So, when you look at the data around who do people trust, a child’s headteacher and a child’s classroom teacher are two of the people that are really trusted. So I do think that schools can play a really important role.”

Exactly what that role might look like will depend on the local community, the local authority, the local voluntary sector and other local services, plus the capacity of the school, because not every school is going to be in a position to be able to build and offer additional support beyond its existing remit.

However, what is clear is that there are solutions out there to what can often be seen as the impossible problem of getting young people and their families the help they need. The government needs to recognise that a patchwork of context-specific interventions is likely to work better than general, vague promises.

Simon Creasey is a freelance journalist