Throughout my career, even before I took on the role of Director of Children's Services across Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, I've always been a fan of future-orientated approaches – looking at what success might look like and what might need rethinking or investment to achieve it. It provides a challenging but helpful lens through which to plan priorities.
Even though lockdown seems a long time ago now, those very strange times forced us to be extra creative in how we were engaging with each other and with those using our services. During this period, the Staff College (set up to support leadership and management local authority across children's services) ran several ‘bite-sized' scenario book clubs, offering an interesting space to think what we might want the future to look like and what we'd need to do now to make it happen.
As part of our forward look, we considered four key points: what life could be like in the year 2035 and the future scenarios we could be dealing with to re-engage staff; conversations about workplace and culture, particularly thinking about new ways of working; visibility in our communities; and digital opportunities.
These sessions proved successful in inspiring conversations with staff and mobilising our shared ambitions. So, as we started to plan for refreshing our Children and Young People's Plan, we decided to run bite-sized 2035 scenario book clubs with our young people to explore what they would like their futures to look like, what challenges they anticipate between now and then, and how we can best prepare them for what lies ahead.
The plan covers all things youth across the two inner London boroughs: the demographics, the achievements of the past few years, the ways we need to improve and the challenges we anticipate for the future.
We ran a series of 13 book club sessions across Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, involving 130 11-to-25-year-olds, including children in care, care leavers and those with special educational needs. Each book club was facilitated according to the needs of the children, using specific communication tools, online chat tools to share thoughts and ideas and running a girls-only group.
Two book club scenarios were adapted from the original Staff College scenarios for groups of young people -– one centred on a world where residents could shape their communities, creating opportunities for children that utilised and valued everyone's talents; the other describing a world where children could be left behind, where services were not responsive, and people felt disempowered and disengaged. Young people were asked how they felt about each scenario, where they thought we were currently heading and how they thought the future could be influenced now.
What was particularly interesting were the common themes for the futures they wanted, with attention afforded to environmental health, mental health and wellbeing, equality and inclusion and opportunities to prepare for adulthood. Most young people want a future that embraces diversity and promotes equality and inclusion – where the environment is properly understood and attended to. We were quite surprised by the level of concern expressed about the current cost of living crisis, the shortage of mental health support services for themselves and their families post-pandemic and the attention afforded to equality. We were really pleased that the young people engaging with us wanted a voice in shaping their future and understood that the things we are prioritising now will have a direct impact.
While this was all wonderful, we had to shape it into a strategy that the young people who had engaged with us recognised, that spoke to other young people across the two boroughs and motivated staff, stakeholders and the wider community to engage with it. It was quite easy to determine seven clear priorities, with a description of what we will do and what success looks like, but we wanted to ensure the voice of young people could be heard throughout… so we simply embedded them! We used QR-codes that signposted readers of the plan to a voice note provided by a local young people talking about their ambitions and goals for the future and discussing how they think they Council can best support them.
The bite-sized book clubs allowed us to engage young people in a different way – where they were sharing their vision of the future, and together we identified what needed to be invested in right now to give us all a chance of achieving exactly what they have told us they want.
Children's Services is a profession that spans the entire country and constantly learns from each other. We are really pleased with our plan, the achievements we have seen recently and the forward plan we have set out. As always, there's more we can be doing, and plenty left to learn, and I appreciate conversations with Children's Services teams about how their experiences differ from ours, or if there are areas of learning they have experienced that we might benefit from.
You can view the Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster Council Children and Young People's Plan on the Kensington and Chelsea Council website.
Sarah Newman is executive director of children's services for the bi-borough – Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (RBKC) and Westminster City Council
