18 January 2021

2021 has brought us another challenging environment in which to support children and young people in west London.

However, the knowledge we have gained from our experience throughout the last year has allowed us to pivot quickly and shift our support as necessary, family by family. Feedback from parents and young people after the first lockdown provided us with crucial insights that will ensure we can respond to families’ needs during this time.

While around half of our Link Workers are still going into schools given the higher numbers of children still attending school during this lockdown, the remainder are providing intensive online support to ensure stable wellbeing and prevent further learning loss.

While we are in lockdown:

• We are continuing to support children’s engagement with their schoolwork alongside providing additional academic catch-up sessions, therapeutic support and other activities;
• We are offering more specialist support than we could in the first lockdown as more of our charity delivery partners have developed a comprehensive online offer, including our academic and therapeutic partners;
• Link Workers that are going into school have a strong sense of purpose and those supporting remotely are confident that they can make a difference using what they learned from the first lockdown;
• We are helping families to access food through school voucher systems, supermarkets and food banks;
• We are working with a number of companies to source reconditioned laptops for WLZ families greatly in need of devices for children to access online learning. The digital divide is still a massive barrier to children’s learning.

In addition to adapting how we deliver support, we have also adjusted how we collect data to ensure we continue to track our delivery and impact on the young people we work with.

We have also stepped up internal communication, added additional management support, and created a calendar of wellbeing activities for the team to combat isolation and promote positive wellbeing.