Protecting location

Opening a Bairns Hoose in a quiet residential street and facilitating access to the building by families, as well as professionals, whilst retaining the anonymity of the children accessing the house, has been a learning experience. Children First have found that this requires persistent focus and sharing the reasons we plan visits to the house the way we do, to ensure that new people joining the partnership understand the reason for our ‘rules’ about things like who has access to parking and why.

In North Strathclyde leaders within the partnership have given consistent messages and modelled the importance of being discreet. For example, ensuring that when showing visitors around, we speak quietly, aware of the possibility of neighbours overhearing what is being said whilst outdoors in the garden. We do not take or let others take or share photos of the front and sides of the Bairns Hoose. 

For the space to be truly child and family centred, the small things are the big things that make the difference; whilst lanyards, permits and door entry keypads are used as standard within most workplaces, these features would make a Bairns Hoose stand out as different from other houses in the street. In North Strathclyde these were avoided from the earliest design phase when the front door and entrance were carefully designed.

We found that ensuring everyone understood the reason for this rule and that it was applied equally across the multidisciplinary team, including for senior leaders, lead to the practice being adopted fully with a shared understanding of why this was important for our families.

Bairns Hooses that are not located within residential streets may not have the same concerns around neighbours knowing the reason that children come to the building. However, our learning is that it will be even more important to consider how the building and space can retain the feel of a family friendly space. We would suggest that Bairns Hooses where the interview team and other professionals are to be co-located alongside the Bairns Hoose, will require even greater concerted effort and shared ‘rules’ to prevent the space becoming less child friendly and more of a working environment for the teams based there.