Martin Wright is manager of St Christopher's project in Greenwich.
St Christopher's Fellowship is a national children's charity and the Greenwich project provides up to two years floating support to around 60 young people aged 16 to 25.
The service is only five years old and was conceived and built with an explicit outcomes focus.
Around 320 young people of been through the service since it started. Here Martin describes the process of choosing and implementing the Outcomes Star and the affect this had on the project:
I was already focused on Outcomes when we started, and work with young people lends itself to an outcomes focused strategy, so we started on that basis. We began by developing a tool ourselves, and then rejecting it.
People at Head Office were looking for some form of outcome measurement and literally picked the Star off-the-shelf.
Not everyone was agreement.
Some people wanted to design their own model.
But tools that had been used previously were not as good and the Star has a high standard of presentation and was ready to go so we decided to go with it. .
Our first move was to get the Support Officers enthused
Introducing “another piece of paper” is a sure way to turn people off. There was a lot of discussion initially; people were sceptical. I presented the Star as potentially time-saving, and having the benefits of being visual and not using many words or long questions. It was agreed that we would let the Support Officers try it out themselves, to evolve a method that suited them. We also agreed to secure a ‘retrospective reading’ as well as the current position, so as to show immediately how service users had progressed since arriving at the project and give the tool and data some meaning.
One month later, at a Team Meeting, feed-back from Support Officers was very positive. They reported that Service Users really liked it, and became significantly motivated when they had completed it. It was clear also that the Support Officers themselves were very keen, and saw its value. There has been no pressure from me to secure readings. But whereas before there were misgivings now Support Officers are automatically feeding the data in to me without me asking.
We realised the need for flexibility when using the Star
Our clients are not always the easiest to engage with, but we found that if you get your timing right, the Star works very well.
Workers need to be experienced and also flexible about when to do the Star and how to engage with the client. For example, to postpone if someone was going through a bad experience that was not representative of their overall progress. We also learned that it is helpful to start the Star at a point where you know progress has been good, thus seeking for the good points to outweigh the not-so-good.
The Star fits nicely with our Solution-Focused Approach
I.e. let’s not keep looking just at the problems, but at what is going well for the Service User, and what can be learned and so used in other areas. The process of positive change can be a bit like hair growing - you can't see it happening to yourself, but it is often noticed by others. The Star helps the client see and measure the progress.
The Star is a fixed item in Supervision sessions
And it is often on the agenda at Team Meetings. We use the completed Stars in Reviews, to see where we can close the door on things in a support plan and/or when to give things a higher priority.
When we do that based on the completed Star, we have found it takes very little time to re-model the Support Plan to fit with what the client and the worker need to concentrate on. When people get close to 10’s, we use the Star to negotiate with the client the prospect of sign off from the Service.
In all areas of the Star the Greenwich project is showing progress
We can also see that some areas are very closely linked, like offending and drugs.
We send the data to head office but do not calculate averages across the whole project.
Service Users refer to the Star as “
well cool”.
One Service User, who prior to sign off completed her fourth reading which comprised all 10’s from what had been 3’s, 1’s, 4’s &2’s said : “I
f some had told me two years ago that this is where I would be today, I wouldn’t have believed them.”
The next step for us is to look at rolling it out across all of St Christopher's as an organisation.