Parents Under Pressure (PuP) Programme

A big congratulations to Bob for becoming an accredited PuPP Practitioner in August 2017. Bob is now recruiting fathers in East Lothian to be involved in the ‘PuPP for Dads’ study. Work with fathers involved in this research will start in December.

Students

This year the East Team have supported Bob and Issy’s link worker and practice teaching partnership, offering placement opportunities to social work students in East Lothian. We would like to welcome Megan Cull to the team. Megan is on her final placement from the University of Edinburgh and will be with us until March 2018. We were delighted to received very positive feedback from the University of Stirling when Yvonne Boa successfully completed her second placement in October.

Giving

Following Circle’s Annual Lecture on Health Inequalities, the East Lothian Team has donated food and funds to two local foodbanks run by Trussell Trust and Musselburgh Baptist Church.

Pregnancy Café

In September Yvonne, our University of Stirling social work student, compiled an evaluation of the Pregnancy Café which highlighted the positive impact this group is having for the parents who attend. Kate continues to support this partnership with the new Support from the Start, First 1001 Days worker, Carol-Ann. In the New Year the group will have a re-launch in order to incorporate the new name, ‘Bumps to Buggies East Lothian’, and the new age range which is being extended to allow children up to two years old to attend. We hope this will enable us to reach more mums-to-be and those who already have a child.

Orange Morning

The East Team organised a Circle ‘Orange Morning’ event in Randall House to raise our profile and help local authority staff to better understand our work. Many thanks go to the local businesses who got behind the event and donated prizes for the raffle, and to Circle staff and social work colleagues who baked for our cake sale. We raised £265.41, a massive thanks to everyone! All money will go directly towards Christmas activities for our families in East Lothian.

Focus Group Consultation

East Lothian staff worked closely with Angela, Circle’s Development Manager, to promote service user participation and support our future funding for East Lothian. We ran two group sessions where we met with parents and then with children to ask what had worked well for them and what could have been better. Circle staff were able to support children and families to share their views. We want to say a big thanks to all children and parents who got involved in this – your ideas and feedback will be invaluable to us in improving our service.

Here are some of the key messages that children told us:

  • Children enjoy having a say in activities they undertake with their Family Support Worker
  • Children value the support offered to parents as well as children
  • Children being understood as individuals
  • Explicitly talking about what drugs are, what addiction is and why people take drugs at an age appropriate level was found to be helpful

Circle East Lothian are looking forward to celebrating children and young peoples’ voices at ‘Everyone has a Story’ Parliamentary Reception on December 6th.