Education & Family Wellbeing Service
Education Family Wellbeing Service provides a community-based education service for children, young people and their families.
About Us
Our systemic approach recognises and works within a strength based, co-production model to support, empower and transform the negative cycles and patterns that many families, children and young people with complex needs experience, as they navigate the traditional education system. We acknowledge and recognise within our model the impact that domestic abuse, poverty, adverse childhood experiences, racism and trauma can have upon the development, growth and happiness of families.
Being exposed to such pressures and experiences can lead to children and young people being hypervigilant to perceived threat and triggered into prolonged physiological dysregulation.
Our Approach
Engagement
Through a student-centred therapeutic model that draws upon coaching and choice, reflective practice, co-production and positive affirmation.
Enablement
An integrated approach to re-engaging young people with learning and their community through authentic dialogue and enhancing knowledge, skills and understanding.
Empowerment
Through exposure to greater choice, enhanced self-regulation, understanding of themselves and their experiences, we promote celebration of achievement, informed choice and an increased control and responsibility for their lives.
What can we help with?
We work in a multi-disciplinary way and are committed to innovative, evidence-based research and practice from the growing field of trauma informed attachment, neuroscience and social justice models. We have specialist safeguarding and contextual safeguarding senior strategic level expertise and experience.
Who do we provide services for?
Our service is set up to support children, young people and families with a range of multi interacting difficulties and disadvantages including:
- Communication and interaction challenges
- Cognitive learning challenges
- Social emotional and mental health challenges
- Neuro diverse young people
- Children and young people involved with the youth justice system
- Children, young people and families being exploited by county lines, modern slavery and child sexual exploitation
- Children and young people engaging in risk taking behaviours
- Traumatised children, young people and families due to displacement, refugee and asylum seeking, inter-generational and other trauma
- Children and young people with attachment challenges
- Vulnerable families with complex interacting challenges
These needs have a variety of presentations, including becoming withdrawn or isolated, as well as displaying challenging, disruptive and disturbing behaviours. These behaviours often reflect underlying mental health issues including anxiety, depression, self-harm, substance misuse, eating disorders or physical symptoms that are medically unexplained. Undiagnosed, unrecognised or unmanaged attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) can also severely complicate and limit the lives of young people and their families.
As a parent and carer, it can be difficult to find ways to effectively support your child and navigate the complex system of SEND and CAMHs. We provide support, advice, advocacy and belonging within an empowering community.
Contact usReferral Assessment & Delivery Model
1. Referral & Assessment
Local Authority SEND commissioning team and EFWS formulate service level agreement. EFWS review paperwork, draw out the strengths and barriers to learning for the student and family in an initial pen portrait. EFWS home visit with family and student contact, informs planning meeting to design the Therapeutic Individual Education Plan (TIEP), staffing, risk assessment and personalised time table. Agreement with family and SEND commissioner.
2. Deliver TIEP with base line assessments and progress tracking
1. Daily monitoring of wellbeing
2. Weekly tracking of progress; academic, social and emotional
3. Half Termly review of provision, engagement and opportunities for joining Group Learning programmes
3. Progress Reports
1. Daily feedback to student
2. Student reviews of TIEP and the group learning
3. Parent /carer review meetings
4. Engagement with co-production activities
5. Half term and termly progress report against base line assessments and agreed expectations
6. Review TIEP set new objectives for next term
7. Regular reporting To SEND Commissioners
4. Family empowerment / student leadership activities
1. Co-production initiatives
2. Student Leadership Programme
3. Careers education, development and independent advice
4. Opportunity for Family Therapy
5. Advocacy support
Who are we?
Michael Wigington
Founding Director
Prior to setting up the Education and Family Wellbeing Service, Michael founded three recruitment businesses that currently have over 300 children's mental health clinicians working nationally. Michael more recently also founded the young wellbeing hub which is a children's mental health clinic that specialises in assessing young people for autism. At 15 growing up in Dagenham, Essex, Michael was forced to leave school before completing his GCSEs due to his own mental health challenges. Michael's personal and also his family experience of navigating the education and mental health services has shaped and strengthened his resolve and determination to make a difference for children and young people. Michael is now passionate about helping young people to have better access to mental health and education support. Michael, through the development of his entrepreneurial leadership skills and business acumen, has built successful organisations both in terms of finance and his relationships with his staff, customers and business partners. Drawing upon his emotional mental health difficulties as a teenager, Michael has the ability to face a wide range of complexities and challenges and perceive them as opportunities and assets. This positive assets-based approach underpins all aspects of his business and is one of the founding principals of the Education Family Wellbeing Service.
Colette Ferns
Service Director
Colette has extensive experience with over twenty year’s working with schools in challenging circumstances and alternative education provision. Holding senior positions within Local Authority Children’s Support Services, School Improvement Service, Head of Education of a special needs school within a secure children’s home and Head of a specialist education service for children and young people with a wide range of special educational and mental health needs. Colette is also a Lecturer at Goldsmiths College on the MSc Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault course, Lecturer on the Youth and Community Development under graduate degree course and runs a short course in Conflict Transformation with a focus upon race equality, social justice and family and community empowerment.
Colette has extensive experience working within a multiagency context with social care emotional mental health services, schools and education departments, the police and the voluntary sector. This experience has enabled her to co-produce an education model that focuses upon systemic change, recognises the impact of racism, domestic abuse, poverty, trauma, discrimination have upon families and communities. Colette is committed to models and relationships that encourage, enable and empower children, young people and families to develop their own agency and self-determination and affirmation of lived experience.
Colette has conducted action research programmes for the Home Office around racial harassment and racial attacks. Ministry of Justice action research upon the nature and extend of youth violence and knife crime. University sector inclusion models and stakeholder views upon EDI policies and strategies. National Youth Work Agency(NYA) course curriculum- scheme of work in Conflict Resolution and Trauma Informed Practice and Race and Racism . She has delivered and developed training materials and resources in the following areas; safeguarding & child protection, domestic violence, modern slavery, child sexual exploitation and trauma informed practice. Most recently working with the Department of Health and Social Care around safeguarding and reflective practice for staff working within the Quarantine Estate and the Afghan humanitarian crisis.
Valerie Dennis
Education Consultant
Valerie is a highly experienced headteacher, senior leader and teacher with a commitment to inclusion and raising standards for all young people. She has developed a strong working knowledge of governance, strategic leadership, sound financial management, leadership and management of change, curriculum development, teaching, professional development and improving education and well-being for all young people.
Initially as a part of the London Challenge initiative, she led Eastbrook secondary school from Special Measures through major academic, social and physical improvements and expansion to include primary provision, and a complete new build and restructure under the Priority School Building Programme 2014 -2018.
As a Founder Member (Secretary of State appointment – Inclusion) of the General Teaching Council (England) she contributed advice to inform national education strategy, supporting the role of the teaching profession in improving education for all children and young people. She chaired the Teaching and Learning Committee and regulated the teaching profession through carrying out capability and disciplinary hearings for teachers and trainee teachers.
As a Deputy Headteacher she led a major review of academic assessment and outcomes, SEND and EAL provision, working in partnership with a range of agencies and the local community; establishing internal and external extended school provision, networks and structures to support young people facing social, emotional and academic challenge and those at risk of exclusion.
Incorporating the establishment of extensive SEND and EAL resourced provisions within mainstream schools into further academic study, enabled an informed theoretical and evidence-based approach to each initiative. A firm believer in developing strong partnerships with Alternative Provisions, she represented schools within the Haringey LSCB. In Barking and Dagenham, she was a part of the multiagency Serious Youth Violence Board and Student Provision and Placement Panel.