Assessing the impact on excluded families
Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:31:00 BST
Samantha McMahon, Course Leader for the Early Years course at the University, is working on a longitudinal study entitled ‘Assessing the impact of Oldham’s Children Centre Services on Excluded families’ for Oldham Council.
As Sam explains, ‘We are working with the Nationwide Children’s Research Centre (NCRC), Consult and a colleague in the School of Human and Health Sciences at the University. The project involves working with 60 families in three areas of Oldham to explore the use of Children’s Services.
Oldham Council has a duty to assess the impact of their services and also to evaluate them, but they really want to try to understand the barriers for families who do not use their services. They hope that the results of the work will help them to target their resources specifically to reach excluded families. And it helps that we have some of their staff studying our early years courses at our Oldham campus, and also studying for Early Years Professional Status at the Huddersfield campus.
With Julie Percival and Gail Frampton, I am gathering additional data through child observations in relation to the Early Years Foundation Stage. This type of work helps us to keep our knowledge and understanding of the workforce current and skills fresh, which in turn helps us relate to our students in their practice. We are also able to use the observations in our teaching.
And it is proving useful for our partner organisations as well. The recent Ofsted inspection of Hollinwood Children’s Centre included a comment that the inspectors were impressed by their involvement in the research project as it demonstrates their interest in understanding their clients better.
The project should be completed in August 2011 with the final report submitted by the end of September 2011.
