Our My Brilliant Colleague series invites you to celebrate anyone who has inspired you in your career. It is part of Community Care’s ongoing Choose Social Work campaign, which aims to champion the brilliant work social workers do every day and inspire the next generation of practitioners.

In this entry, Debbie Elsheikh, service manager of Salford council’s workforce learning and development team, celebrates workforce development officer Vicky Wright.

She praises Vicky for ‘revolutionising’ practitioners’ approach to life story work, embedding it earlier in the process of their practice with children.

Vicky is the most creative person I know and highly passionate about children and supporting staff.

I recently involved her in a project to improve our life story work and she went over and above in what she did.

She listened and collaborated with staff, who told us that they needed help with templates and asked that the work started earlier in the journey of the child. Vicky responded to the need.

She did not just create one template for life story work, she created three for under-10s and three for over-10s, to support children at different stages of their journey. The templates are beautifully presented.

Some cover examples of Vicky’s life story books for social workers. Photo by Debbie Elsheikh

Vicky thought long and hard about what the social workers needed, given that they are busy and time-poor, but we want them to start life story work earlier.

She designed the books to be used for direct work and for getting to know the children, as well as for life story work. This meant social workers were not doing additional work, but had tools to use at each stage with children.

When she launched the project, she did a briefing and was so enthusiastic and passionate that practitioners immediately seemed to take on board what she said.

They loved the child-focused templates and we have seen beautiful examples of work since.

Vicky has really revolutionised the way we work in Salford. Her passion and talent have shone through and impressed not just us, but also colleagues in Greater Manchester.

She has gone above and beyond her original ask and given her whole heart to the project, because she wants to better the lives of children.

We are very proud of her!

How to nominate a colleague

You can nominate anyone who has inspired you in your career – whether current or former colleagues, managers, students, lecturers, mentors or prominent past or present sector figures whom you have admired from afar.

Nominate your colleague or social work inspiration by filling in our nominations form with a letter or a few paragraphs (100-250 words) explaining how and why the person has inspired you.

*Despite the need to provide your name and role, you or the nominee can be anonymous in the published entry.*

If you have any questions, email our community journalist, Anastasia Koutsounia, at anastasia.koutsounia@markallengroup.com.

In this thought-provoking and emotive episode of The Social Work Community, recorded at this year’s Community Care Live, you will hear about the importance of a parent’s journey while considering their own child’s life story.

You will hear first-hand the experiences some parents have had and how practitioners can gain a better understanding of the impact positive life stories can have on both parents and children.

Social worker Rachel Thomas and Pause practitioner Julia Williams, both from Wiltshire Council, narrate Laura’s story to a live audience. Laura, who gave up her baby up for adoption, went through a tough time and her story shows how she was supported by professionals every step of the way.

Callum, a father and someone who spent some of his childhood in care, talks about how his key worker, Ceri Evans, through the Dads Matter Too project, helped him overcome his personal challenges and become the dad he wanted to be.

Listen to “The legacy and impact of life story from a parent’s perspective” on Spreaker.

The Social Work Community Podcast explores the issues that matter to social work practitioners in their working lives. You will hear directly from social workers in your community about their successes and their challenges.

So sign up to the Social Work Community to be among the first to catch each episode and to connect with fellow practitioners in a safe space.

Otherwise, check out the Social Work Community Podcast on the following:

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What is life story work?

Life story work is a “biographical narrative approach used within health and social care settings that offers individuals an opportunity to talk and think about their lived experiences” (Kontomichalos-Eyre, Lake & McGillivray, 2003).

Life story work is most commonly associated with adoption. It is a requirement set out in law and statutory guidance for adopted children to have life story books, and, historically, research has focused on its role in adoption. However, life story work can also make a significant positive difference to the lives of children in care.

One reason is that addressing the need for children to feel safe is an essential goal of the work. Research by Staines and Selwyn (2020) indicated that many children expressed confusion about why they were in care, resulting in an uneasy feeling and desire for more information.

When children feel ‘unsettled’

Children may exhibit behaviours because of feeling ‘unsettled’, and often professionals, parents or carers may assume these are a result of ‘something wrong’ with the child.

For example, children may appear irritable, tense, restless or unable to sit still, or they may lack concentration and be easily distracted.

Practitioners should consider behaviours exhibited by children in care in the context of separation, loss, developmental trauma and/or severe adversity rather than focusing on them as symptoms of various diagnoses.

A collective responsibility

An important approach to life story work is to ensure there is sufficient planning. This is not only down to the social work practitioner; you should involve practitioners within the wider network who are supporting the child.

It is a collective responsibility for everyone involved in the young person’s life. Consider how you can best utilise the skills of everyone involved.

Reaching out to birth families is helpful as well, as family networking and conferencing can help to answer questions the child may have, such as, ‘What hospital was I born in?’, or, ‘How did I weigh?’.

Having the answers to these questions will help the child understand their past and will help to form their identity.

It is important to use spaces that are already available to you such as reflective spaces, supervision and team meetings. First-hand information from practice that is shared during group supervision, for example, can be an effective way of receiving peer support and can help with planning and sharing of resources.

Involving carers

Encourage caregivers to record the memories and moments of the child’s time in their care.

This helps ensure that children will not leave their care with limited memories of the parts of their lives while being in care and helps the child understand their experiences.

Positive therapeutic relationship

Life story work is a relational therapeutic intervention that helps children to heal. Studies have shown that absence of life story work can adversely affect a child’s identify formation.

Identity theory in general explains that everyone finds themselves through relationships, experiences and memories; and if this is not possible then people often feel ‘lost’ and uneasy. This is often linked to low self-esteem and anxiety, and what is termed ‘external locus of control’.

If children and young people have access to life story work, then this helps to build a good sense of their identity, which adds to their internal locus of control and a more positive mindset.

Increasing trust and self-esteem

This is because life story work can help ‘fill gaps’ that children and young people may have about past experiences, which can help children to feel more optimistic about the future and increase self-esteem.

It can help to form connections with others as well, increasing the trust children have in others and can improve placement stability by reducing relational conflict within placements.

Practitioners can try to make links and connections between the child’s experiences and the current anxiety, anger or restlessness they may be experiencing. This helps to increase the child’s resilience, by highlighting their capacity to grow and change despite experiencing negative events.

Although information about the child’s past can cause negative emotions, it is better to help the child share and understand their past to make sense of what they experienced and connect parts of their lives.

If you have a Community Care Inform Children licence, log on to access the recorded webinar and learn more about undertaking life story work.

References

Kontomichalos-Eyre, S, Lake, A & McGillivray, J (2023)
‘Life story work for children and youth in out of home care: a systematic review and synthesis if qualitative studies’
Children and Youth Services Review, 144, Elsevier

Staines J & Selwyn J (2020)
‘”I wish someone would explain why I am in care”: The impact of children and young people’s lack of understanding of why they are in out-of-home care on their well-being and felt security’
Child & Family Social Work, 25 (1), Wiley

By Jo Stephenson

Life story work can play a key role in helping care experienced children and young people understand their family background and how they came into care.

“Ultimately it contributes to their sense of identity, which is absolutely critical,” says CoramBAAF adoption consultant Jane Poore.

“It’s a grounding in who they are and where they came from, and if they don’t have that information they will either seek it out themselves – possibly putting themselves at risk – or internalise it and have various problems because of their lack of ownership and sense of who they are.”

High-quality life story work can help improve placement stability and relationships with family members and reduce mental health difficulties, says clinician and practice researcher at Royal Holloway University Laura Hanbury.

Life story work ‘shouldn’t just be a book’

But a lack of research, standards and training, on top of time pressures and high turnover of children’s social workers, means the quality varies widely.

“It shouldn’t just be a book and it’s not a piece of work that is ever completed, in my opinion,” says Hanbury.

Meanwhile practice – which often involves a one-off piece of work to create a paper-based life story book – has failed to keep pace with advances in the use of technology and improved understanding of trauma.

“With all the trauma-informed training that is out there, we haven’t seemed to be able to connect the importance of life story work within that,” adds Hanbury.

“We know that trauma manifests more when there is a lack of comfort, a lack of protection, a lack of context and understanding around certain types of experiences some young people might have. Yet we don’t link that to the importance of life story work and putting meaning and adding context to those experiences – sort of connecting the dots.”

However, researchers and practitioners are devising new ways to deliver life story work and improve outcomes for children and young people.

Creative activities

The All About Me packs. Photo: Blue Cabin

Charity Blue Cabin is exploring how creative activities, from painting to puppetry, can be used as part of life story work, through its All About Me Creative Experience – a six-week programme facilitated by artists trained in trauma recovery and attachment.

Aimed at care experienced children and young people aged five to 17, it sees a “pastoral support worker” – usually a local authority staff member, such as a social worker – working alongside the artist to run weekly sessions exploring themes such as “people in my life” or “places I have lived”.

These are delivered face-to-face or online to groups of up to six children and young people, supported by a trusted adult, such as a foster carer.

“Unlike traditional life story work, the focus is the creative activity as opposed to, ‘Let’s talk about your life,’” explains Blue Cabin director Jenny Young.

Photo: Blue Cabin

“By exploring a theme, such as who is important in a child’s life, you start to find out about them and their needs, but it’s on their terms and builds on things they want to know about.”

Research findings

A trial at three local authorities in north east England found most staff who tested the approach felt it was more effective than traditional life story work and had improved children’s wellbeing.

Of about 60 staff and foster carers who took part, 78% felt it had improved placement stability to some degree and the vast majority – 93% – believed it had had a positive impact on relationships between children and parents or carers.

However, the evaluation as a whole found no statistically significant difference in wellbeing, placement stability or school stability between children offered and not offered the intervention

Sharing learning

Blue Cabin has also recently launched the Creative Life Story Work online platform, to share good practice and support social workers to deliver creative life story work activities themselves.

“We have bottled up those creative sessions into bite-sized activities social workers can use as part of life story work practice every day,” says Young, who hopes it will go some way to filling gaps in training and guidance.

Darlington Borough Council trialled the All About Me creative experience and has since signed up to the membership scheme.

Therapeutic social worker Charlotte Swainston, who is leading work to embed high-quality life story work across the authority, says creative activities provide a fresh and effective way of reaching children and young people.

“Children and young people have often had many different social workers as part of their journey and what we hear from them is, ‘Here’s another one who is going to get the three houses out and ask the same questions,” she says. ‘Three houses’ is a commonly used direct work tool.

“This is different; it’s not a standardised approach and gives professionals the opportunity to put their own creative spin on things, so children don’t feel it is the same thing over and over again.”

Using objects

CoramBAAF’s Objects and their Stories course helps social workers and foster carers understand how both precious and everyday items can be used to help communicate and build relationships with children and young people generally and as part of life story work.

“Young people often have objects from their birth parents or foster placements and this is about using those objects to bring stories out,” explains course trainer Karey Taylor, independent visitor co-ordinator and an advocate for the Leaving Care with Confidence project.

“’This is the bunny I won at the fair with that foster carer’, or, ‘This is the object your birth mum gave you in hospital’ – and the story just flows from there.”

Using objects as the starting point for conversations is a powerful technique that can help social workers in so many situations, including when they first meet a child and are trying to make a connection.

Crucially, the young person is in control of the narrative, says fellow trainer Lisa Handy, relationships, sex and health education programme manager for personal, health, social and economic education provider Coram Life Education.

“Life story work is done with the child but often comes from the adult. This is very much about [putting] the child at the centre of their memories and is completely led by them,” she says.

Digital solutions

Other are innovating in the digital space. Coram-i, the children’s charity’s improvement consultancy, is working with a software development company to create a life story work app for all care experienced young people and is currently seeking local authorities interested in trialling it later this year.

Most young people have access to a vast depository of “digital memories” accessed via their own smartphones or by scrolling through devices belonging to parents or other family members.

But this is often not the case for care experienced children – especially those who have had  multiple placements.

The idea of the app is to enable children to have a safe and secure, but similarly detailed and constantly updated, digital record of key people, activities and events in their life, explains managing director of Coram-i Kevin Yong.

A more vibrant alternative to case records

Unlike case records, which tend to consist of official reports and minutes of meetings – or a traditional life story book – the app would provide a fuller, more vibrant record of a child’s life so far, through photos, videos and even voice messages.

It wouldn’t end with an adoption or permanent care placement, but could continue to grow and be updated with content uploaded by birth family members, foster carers, adoptive parents, social workers and, eventually, the young person themselves.

The content could be used to create timelines and albums and explore relationships.

Importantly – when a child is old enough – they will be able to carry it around with them and access it at pretty much any time, via a smartphone, tablet or laptop.

‘The content is owned by the person in care’

“First and foremost the content will be owned by the person in care and no one can take it away from them,” says Yong. “It is theirs forever.”

He expects the young person’s social worker would also have access to the app and believes it could help them in their day-to-day practice, as well as life story work in particular.

“It should make the job of putting together a life story book a lot easier and also help social workers keep up to date with what’s going on in a young person’s life, so next time they see them, they can have more informed and meaningful conversations,” says Yong.

“Ultimately, it could help with placement stability, behaviour and other issues that stem from the frustration young people feel in not having access to this information.”