First for Mums, YMCA North Staffordshire
YMCA North Staffordshire’s ‘First for Mums’ project was established in 2015 to work with young women under the age of 24 who have had at least one child removed and placed in care who are likely to face further removals.
Working collaboratively with the Local Authority, YMCA is confident that we are seeing transformational change in the ways services are offered to young women who find themselves entrenched in this cycle.
Pilot funding from Stoke-on-Trent City Council (£30,000 per annum) has enabled the service to successfully engage 15 young females to date.
- By focusing support around the mother and partner (where appropriate), we wanted to test whether:
- Qualified social workers operating outside of the statutory sector are better positioned to build effective relationships with mothers/partners
- More intensive coaching by Social Workers to address the wider issues within the family unit would break the cycle of pregnancy/removal.
We anticipated this approach would:
- Result in more resilient mothers able to better judge their own situations and their ability to parent
- Result in fewer mothers becoming pregnant, or if they did, fewer children being removed
- Lead to significant savings to the taxpayer.
Our Impact to Date:
The project is already proving to be very effective in transforming outcomes for the young mothers engaged, and significantly reducing the cost to taxpayers as a result of the outcomes which are being achieved. The local authority estimates that it costs circa £75,000 to undergo court proceedings with the average annual cost of looking after one child in care set at circa £38,000.
Outcomes to date have exceeded everyone’s expectations. Our evidence demonstrates that 10 of the 15 females engaged are now on Long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARC), four of six are no longer abusing substances and over 50% (8/15) are now engaged in education, employment or volunteering.