Department of Education: Co-designing Care

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Department of Education: Co-Designing Care

Exploring how technology can support traumatised young people in care to recognise, communicate and cope with strong emotions and manage their behaviour more effectively

Exploring how technology can support traumatised young people in care to recognise, communicate and cope with strong emotions and manage their behaviour more effectively.

Department of Education Innovation Programme

The Innovation Programme aimed to strengthen the assessment of need and increase the quality of services so that children who needed help from the social care system had better life chances. The focus was around supporting local authorities and to create conditions where children’s services in England were better able to innovate in the future to drive sustained improvements in outcomes for vulnerable children and young people. The re-thinking social work strand of the programme aimed to support the implementation of innovative models for children’s social work; particularly around the design and implementation of new approaches to children’s social work.

The project was to explore the current and potential role of technology in social work and define how avatar technology could relate to vulnerable children and young people by providing support and reinforcing their engagement with the social care system. The objectives were to:

  • Establish some robust data about how children in care used technology and how supportive technologies could meet their complex needs.
  • Evaluate the data to establish the potential functionality of an avatar so it best met the needs of young people in care and their carers.
  • Effectively communicate the learning in research and evaluation with the sector.

A film was developed with the Codesigning Care team.