West London Zone aims to bring the right support to the right children at the right time. It does this by building trusted relationships, providing activities and interventions and joining up each child’s support system, including families, schools and local organisations, to deliver a personalised two-year support plan for each child.
The initiative uses data and school knowledge to identify the children who can benefit most from WLZ support and to develop a plan which responds to their needs across emotional wellbeing, peer relationships, self confidence and attainment in English and maths.
At the heart of WLZ is the role of the link worker, a skilled, empathetic, motivational individual based in the nursery or school setting. The link worker builds a trusted relationship with the children or young people on the programme and their parents/carers, and develops their personalised plan according to specific needs. Alongside one to ones and sessions led by the link worker, children and young people on the programme benefit from carefully curated and targeted activities brought into their school settings by local arts, sports and community partner organisations. Crucially WLZ also offers programme participants specialist support including speech and language therapy, counselling or academic tuition in their school setting.
During summer 2022, Nesta is undertaking a programme of immersive research including school visits, partner activity experiences, interviews, diary activities and surveys. People we are engaging with as part of this research include WLZ staff (senior management and link workers, managers and practitioners), teachers in school and early years settings, activity partners and children and young people participating in the programme and their parents. Alongside this, we are working with WLZ’s impact team to analyse some of their data so we can map the diversity of journeys through the programme and the relationships between activities, interactions and children’s outcomes.
Using this research, we will create service blueprints – diagrams that visualise the relationships between different components of a service and that show how a service is delivered and how it is experienced by the service user. Alongside this, we will create participant and partner profiles and other visual maps for WLZ’s work in primary schools and early years settings. These elements will help potential partners in other parts of the UK understand the way WLZ works on the ground and any areas which may need to be adapted to meet the needs of their particular locations. We will also draw on our in-house early years education expertise to provide recommendations on the refinement of the WLZ early years programme design which is a more recent addition to the work it does. We will also advise on aspects of the programme which we think add the most value and are therefore most important to scale.
This work will inform the design of the next phase of the scaling initiative, which will involve prototyping elements of the early years and primary programmes in up to three test sites across the UK so we can learn more about adapting the programme for different locations.
https://www.nesta.org.uk/project/scaling-west-london-zone/
