Back in 2017 we made funding available for projects that brought organisations together to test new approaches to making early action central to their work.

This Early Action System Change programme (EASC) awarded £5.9 million to eight cross-sector partnerships to identify areas of early intervention and increased service user involvement within children and young people services, and women in the justice system. 

In this blog, we hear from Laura Haining, from Action for Children, on the learning from their EASC youth homelessness project in partnership with West Dunbartonshire Council (WDC). With an award of £730,207 the project provides interventions for young people before they reach the point of crisis. 

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Our West Dunbartonshire Early Action System Partnership focuses on youth homelessness prevention, and is a partnership between Action For Children (AFC) and West Dunbartonshire Council (WDC).

As we near the end of our National Lottery funding, Scotcen researchers have had a look at the changes made since the start of the project so that we can learn from our work.

One of the tests of change which has been instrumental in driving change and early intervention was the schools-based option. This is where the AFC team would receive referrals from West Dunbartonshire secondary schools for young people who staff at the schools believed to be at risk or threatened by homelessness and these preventions would reduce the likelihood of homelessness occuring.

Our approach to the schools-based test of change was similar to AFC’s Dundee model which worked across all secondary schools in Dundee delivering homelessness awareness sessions and housing information sessions in Personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) classes. This approach was used as Dundee and WDC share similar characteristics with young people, housing and homeless presentations.

What was involved

We identified a pilot school, Clydebank High School (CHS), to begin delivery of the test of change, where we predicted that the school’s staff would be able to identify young people at risk of, or threatened by, homelessness while they were at school. This would then allow for the AFC team to deliver early intervention approaches to prevent these young people from presenting as homeless. 

The original Dundee model was adapted and moulded to fit the needs of Clydebank High School through discussions with the school’s Deputy Head Teacher (DHT). This led to a bespoke model being created for the WDC Secondary Schools. 

AFC began to meet young people referred on a 1-1 basis alongside delivering information sessions to all S4, S5 and S6 pupils at school assemblies. Evidence gathered during the pilot allowed examples of the interventions and the subsequent prevention outcomes to be shared and discussed with other DHT’s across the authority.  This led to sessions being delivered to every S4, S5 and S6 pupil in all but one of the five secondary schools based within WDC.  

The team have supported 20 young people on a 1-1 basis and have delivered sessions to around 900 pupils through their assembly delivery sessions, which were delivered from September 2019 through to March 2022, with a break due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Through the delivery of these sessions and the discussions with schools’ staff, it became apparent that there was an appetite for learning around housing and homelessness.