Domains pilot: Kent County Council HeadStart Project. Case studies in promoting resilience in vulnerable children

This pilot exercise was undertaken as part of the Big Lottery funded HeadStart programme. HeadStart aims to improve the mental well-being of at-risk* 10 to 16 year-olds by investing up to £75m in up to 12 local partnerships to facilitate and support:

1. the implementation of a locally developed, cross-disciplinary, multi-layered and integrated prevention strategy, with the young person and their needs at its core
2. the development of the necessary local conditions to enable that strategy to become sustainable in time
3. the development of a more robust evidence-base around ‘what works’ in the area of mental well-being to be pro-actively shared beyond HeadStart with the aim of contributing to the national and local policy debate.
Previous stages of HeadStart Kent involved knowledge transfer exercises in the form of seminars. KCC staff and the HeadStart programme partners were introduced to the theory of resilience and its application with vulnerable children. A key aim of the seminars was to ensure projects focused on promoting the protective factors associated with resilience when designing and delivering their services.

The HeadStart seminars provided the knowledge transfer to partners delivering commissioned services specific to the programme. This pilot exercise will further contribute to the evidence gathering by working with KCC practitioners at the earlier stage of assessment using a resilience approach.

Increasing the chance of children and young people demonstrating resilience when faced with adversity requires the enhancement of protective factors (those factors which shield the young person from potential blows to their resilience) and the reduction of risk (the removal or re-framing of potentially threatening events or issues). Therefore, it is useful to focus on resilience in terms of the areas or ‘domains’ of a person’s life that can be manipulated or changed. The introduction of a domains approach to resilience at the assessment stage, will better inform intervention and support strategies based on a child or young person’s individual need.