Use of Behaviour Education and Support Teams (BESTs) in schools in the North West

Brief description of the project

BESTs are multi-agency teams working with young people aged 5-18 and their families and schools, to promote emotional wellbeing and improve behaviour and school attendance.

They work in targeted primary and secondary schools, supporting individual children at risk of disaffection, as well as developing whole school approaches and working with staff, groups of children and parents. BESTs work alongside a range of other support structures and services – for example school pastoral support arrangements, Connexions and healthy schools partnerships.

Two LEAs have used part of their BIP funding to establish BESTs and their progress and approaches used are listed here.

 The BESTs in Manchester

• Manchester LEA has used some of its BIP funding to establish four BESTs: multi-agency teams who work with young people aged 5-18 and their families and schools, to address emotional and behaviour problems and to promote emotional wellbeing through preventive and early intervention approaches. 

The BESTs in Liverpool

• Liverpool LEA used the BIP money to fast track the development of multi-agency links it was already making with its CAMHS.  As a consequence of this strong relationship, the development of its three BESTs has been co-ordinated jointly by education and the local NHS Trust, and the teams include CAMHS workers, as well as social workers, school nurses, personal and community development officers and police officers from the local Safer Schools Partnership.  This means that the mental health issues that can lie beneath behavioural and attendance issues can be addressed alongside other issues.  In addition to support for individual pupils, the teams have also carried out parenting programmes, transition work, behaviour audits and work with school staff. 

Outcomes of the project

The BESTs in Manchester

• Each BEST works across a cluster of schools consisting of a target secondary school and its main associated primaries. Two of the teams are based in a secondary school; the other two have bases in one of their cluster primaries.  Currently the Manchester BESTs’ workload consists of referrals of individual pupils and their families, issue-led group work, supporting schools in carrying out behaviour audits, holding surgeries for school staff and working with the Adult Education Service on parenting support.

The BESTs in Liverpool

• Ofsted has evaluated Liverpool’s programme and praised the strong multi-agency working being carried out under the BIP’s auspices.  Elspeth Bromiley, Liverpool’s BIP project manager, informed us that ‘BIP enabled us to think more creatively about how we could make the links with other agencies.’  As a result of the success of the BESTs approach, multi-agency training is being made available to schools and other agencies across the city, and four new teams are being set up in EBD schools, to work with individual pupils at the school and on an outreach basis.
• The key achievement of the team is seen as being early intervention with children.  Having the BESTs means they no longer have to delay the process by going outside to agencies and making a case for intervention. They are able to act with children who may not have reached the threshold for intervention by social services but where early involvement means helping the hardest cases before problems escalate.

Challenges

The BESTs in Manchester

Professionals within the teams are drawn from a variety of backgrounds, including Education Welfare, Education Psychology and social services. Like other BIP LEAs, recruitment of key professionals has been a key risk to constructing effective multi-agency arrangements – in Manchester recruitment of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) workers proved particularly difficult.  However, the LEA circumvented this problem by agreeing protocols with CAMHS so they can draw in specialist mental health services when needed for BIP pupils, as well as accessing training and consultancy support for the team.  This strategy has been used in other BIPs facing similar issues to overcome difficulties in recruiting key professionals.

Kim Wade, Manchester’s BIP project manager, has cited the positive links between agencies involved with vulnerable children as one of the early indicators of success of the programme, and their continued involvement in its local management. Among the challenges in achieving success with BESTs, she highlighted the importance of clarifying the role of the team at an early stage to help maintain their focus on wider issues and not just individual cases.

Contact Kim Wade (07985 332006) or Phil Hamerton (0161 234 7266), both Manchester LEA.

The BESTs in Liverpool

A key hurdle identified in setting up the team was establishing a common language and objectives, but overcoming that brought dividends:

 ‘It’s a real strength that we worked out a shared vision right at the start. Once you have that, the partnership becomes really effective… It’s essential to have a good relationship with partner agencies which we achieved by starting with a really strong steering group. This opened the issue of establishing that shared vision and enabled us to get the team right at the outset.’  Elspeth Bromiley

In Liverpool, each relevant agency wrote the job specifications and got agreements in place for BEST team members they had to manage.  Ensuring these procedures were well thought out was deemed a key success factor in recruiting the right professionals and developing effective multi-agency working.

Contact: Ken Roberts, Liverpool BIP Manager (0151 233 2774) or Elspeth Bromily (07739 774685).

Context

The model is firmly grounded in the evidence of what works when delivering multi-agency services to children and families and their accent is on prevention and early intervention. From the original 34 BIP LEAs, 33 have chosen to form BESTs (on average LEAs are spending over a third of their BIP resources on multi-agency support), although the actual model implemented has been determined locally and differs from area to area.  This reflects the different needs for multi-agency professional support at school level, and the ability of agencies to work together in meeting demands of the ‘at risk’ cohort identified by the BIP.