Engaging young people in a service is not always easy. While there can be many reasons for this, we’ve found one common concern among many young people : they don’t always trust the practitioner(s) working with them.
Although this distrust is frequently overcome through the expertise of the professionals working with the young person, sometimes the type of support offered gets in the way of engaging the child.
It could be that the young person is not able to see any positive change after talking about their difficulties, or that conversations can be perceived as too heavy as they frequently only seem to talk about past problems.
Finding ways to avoid this is crucial in engaging young people in a service or intervention. As one young person on the edge of care told us: “It’s like there is a wall in front of you, and you just grabbed a hammer and smashed it down.”
Through our Face to Face service, we worked with young people in care on a solution-focused approach to improve their confidence and wellbeing. Here are the top five things we’ve learned about how to engage young people with complex emotional difficulties.
See them as partners in the change process
If possible, let young people decide the issue they want to discuss and the number of sessions they attend. As the process of the work was designed to include their feedback at each session we found children and young people were more inclined to come back to future sessions because they had greater ownership of the solution.
Focus on outcomes at session one
Young people value sessions that focus on breaking down their complex problem into a single goal that they can describe and visualise. These sessions gave them the tools to monitor their progress and this helped them feel a greater sense of control in their lives.
Increase awareness of strengths
It is important that any service helps young people to identify and name their strengths, giving them an opportunity to talk about how they have done things differently, or how they coped with situations that were complex. This can increase their confidence in talking to people around them.
Identify and involve a solution team around the child
Where possible a service should involve a young person’s carers, parents or social workers. This helps to create a safe space for some difficult conversations and ensure continuity of the work, while avoiding duplication of intervention.
Make the service easily accessible
Ensure the venues are appropriate, both in terms of location and atmosphere – little things like the availability of food and drink can help reduce nervousness about meeting and talking to someone new.
We’ve found that solution-focused approaches like these, ones led by the needs of the young person, can really help to develop a positive relationship with the practitioner, particularly where complex emotional difficulties are present.
A recent evaluation of an intervention based on these ideas has shown that of the children who were most in need at beginning the service, those with clinical levels of distress (following the outcome rating scale and the child outcome rating scale), 70 per cent showed improvement and ended the service with normal levels of wellbeing.
And although a short term, solution-focused approach might not always be the most appropriate for every young person, there’s promising evidence that it can help involve and engage children and young people, ultimately ensuring that each child gets the best outcome from a service they can.
You can see the final evaluation findings of the NSPCC’s Face to Face service and download our toolkit of resources for practitioners who want a solution-focused approach to improve outcomes for children at nspcc.org.uk/evidencehub.
Content on this page is produced and controlled by the NSPCC, sponsor of the Guardian Social Care Network practice hub
