How Bairns Hoose Works in Practice
Coordination and multi-agency working
The Bairns Hoose coordinator is recognised as pivotal in supporting systemic change for children and their families. This role as highlighted within the National Bairns Hoose Standards as:
"A dedicated manager responsible for overseeing and coordinating the child and family’s journey through the process. This includes coordinating the process with other relevant agencies including education."
The tasks and responsibilities of a Bairns Hoose coordinator should include:
- To lead, manage and direct the activities of the Bairns Hoose to ensure all aspects of justice, protection, health and recovery are coordinated and not delivered in a parallel or overlapping way.
- To support the embedding of Bairns Hoose in formal systems around child protection, justice, health and wellbeing and education.
- To lead professional collaboration to respond to the needs of each child within Bairns Hoose in a rights based, trauma informed way.
- To strengthen multiagency and interagency provision under 'one roof' in a child friendly setting placing the best interests of any individual child at the centre.
- To lead, supervise and coordinate the work of the recovery team and ensure the quality of this work.
- To ensure the voices of children, young people and families are heard in the development and operation of the Bairns Hoose.
- To act as single point of contact for children, young people and their family being accountable to and liaising with the multiagency team around Bairns Hoose.
- To underpin the work of the Bairns Hoose team by providing a broad range of practice and administrative support functions, setting up and maintaining efficient administration and recording systems as required locally and within the wider organisation.
- To take a lead role in enabling the Bairns Hoose to be a place that welcomes children and families with kindness and care, creating a warm, friendly atmosphere.
- To be an advocate and champion for children’s rights.
- To shape and develop recovery and wellbeing services in line with agreed Bairns Hoose objectives, respond to reviews of needs, gaps and trends, ensuring involvement of the individuals who use these services.
- To participate in a range of external networks for the benefit of and with the participation of children, young people and families to highlight the need for service development and system change.
- To build strong partnerships with multi-agency leaders and practitioners to secure funding for service consolidation and development.
- To manage relationships, coordinate priorities for trauma informed system change and support continuous engagement with all key stakeholders within the Bairns Hoose partnership.
One of the roles of the Bairns Hoose coordinator is to ensure the Bairns Hoose is used for multiple purposes. Care and attention is required to carry out this function well. Careful logistical planning is required in the running of a Bairns Hoose. There is a Children First team member at the hoose in North Strathclyde from 9am – 5pm . They open up the house and all rooms, put the kettle on and prepare to welcome visitors whenever they arrive. They also make sure the justice suite, which has a separate entrance, is always ready for use.
Multidisciplinary working
Multidisciplinary working is critical to deliver Bairns Hoose. As highlighted in the Bairns Hoose Evaluation phase two report:
“The North Strathclyde Bairns Hoose and Children First strive to implement a child-rights based approach which informs the approach to multi-disciplinary working. In the context of Bairns Hoose it aims to help ensure the model remains responsive to children’s experiences and needs, helping systems become more accountable to children both individually and collectively."
“For example: [for] somebody who has come through their career mainly in the children and justice world, I think you become, no matter how much you try not to, you become part of that challenge, part of that programme, because you say, actually this is how it’s always been done. And you think about it very much from an adult perspective, at times. But what happens is, Children First always, and rightly, put the child at the centre and challenge why these adult things have to happen the way they do.” (Professional 7)
“At this stage in developing Bairns Hoose the interview team and support workers continue to be able to identify ways in which the justice and recovery experiences of families can be strengthened through better coordination between professionals from health, education, children and family social work services with Bairns Hoose staff and processes.” 66
The Bairns Hoose Standards require multiagency working and collaboration to create a joined up, trauma sensitive journey for children and their families, that strives at all points to minimise the potential for re-traumatisation and by design, offers support to recover.
66 Mitchell, M. et al. (2024) pg.22