We are keenly anticipating the arrival of the report following our latest independent external evaluation.

Our previous run of independent evaluations (Office of Public Management, 2013; Dr Mary Richardson, UCL 2014 & 2015; ‘Research Ally’ Moira Forrester, 2017) was interrupted by the pandemic. During that pause, we took the opportunity to reflect and refine our approach so we can learn more from the expereince of the children in Family Group.

Rather than asking our evaluators to research intended outcomes and impacts using a case study approach in which the adult narrative tends to dominate, we’ve turned the approach upside down and used The Most Significant Change methodology to launch a bottom-up enquiry that puts children's voices at the heart of the research. 

What do Family Group children, parents/carers and school staff acknowledge as the most significant change that Family Group enables?

While we don’t yet have the results, I’m delighted to introduce the independent evaluators leading the work, who are both highly respected national experts in qualitative evaluation.

We’ve been incredibly fortunate to engage the services of these leading academics, who are working independently of any institution in conducting this research. Dr Amy Smail is currently the lead on Evaluation at the Centre for Teaching and Learning, University of Cambridge, and a Programme Research Fellow at UCL Institute of Education, Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment. Jonathan Schulte is Evaluation Lead at LSE.

Why we chose the Most Significant Change Technique (MSC)

Now in our fifteenth year, we saw a timely opportunity to reflect on how our unique therapeutic model has created meaningful, sustained change for children. We sought an approach that could truly capture the complexity of that change, not just through numbers, but through stories.

Children instinctively know how to tell stories, and storytelling brings the messy, personal, and relational aspects of their experiences to life in ways that other evaluation methods struggle to do.

What makes the Most Significant Change Technique (MSC) different?

MSC is a qualitative methodology, unique because it is participatory, collaborative, and especially effective at capturing the relational. As a social-justice oriented approach, the method begins with hearing directly from the children who have participated or are currently participating in Family Group to understand what change matters most to them and why.

We wanted each child to be the storyteller—the narrator of their own experience—telling us, rather than us telling them, what’s important. Crucially, they don’t just describe the change itself; they help us understand how that change happened. What made the difference? Was it a particular activity, a relationship, or the context created by being part of Family Group? Their insights help reveal the real conditions that enable meaningful, lasting change.

Creating a shared narrative of change

One of the key goals of MSC is to empower those who are benefiting from the programme. In this instance, since the children are the storytellers, their ‘Stories of Change’ were collated, then shared with other stakeholders who learn by reviewing the stories. These stories were also reviewed alongside other data, such as interviews and focus groups with school leaders, to build a clearer, more cohesive narrative of what constitutes the ‘most significant change.’ This approach allowed us to capture not only the children’s perspectives but also the views of everyone involved in the charity’s work.

The MSC methodology has proven to be a powerful way of giving children the agency to express, in their own words, the changes they’ve experienced. Applied to the Family Group context, it helps us uncover the real, personal outcomes of the work we’ve been doing—and crucially, why those changes have happened.

Beyond capturing what’s already been achieved, this process also generates valuable insights to help shape and improve the programme in the future. It strengthens our ability to work with schools, supporting them to understand the lasting value of adopting a whole-school, therapeutic approach.

The full report is coming soon—watch this space!

I recently retired as Headteacher of Richard Atkins Primary School in Lambeth, where I had the privilege of leading a diverse school community through both successes and challenges. The School & Family Works has been a valued partner in our school since 2016/17, and I have seen firsthand the profound impact their work has had on children and families. When budgets were tight, they continued to support us, ensuring that families received the help they needed. Now, I want to give back by supporting them in a new way.

Throughout my career, I have worked closely with families facing significant challenges, including poverty, poor mental health, and complex trauma. I have led a large staff team, managed budgets, worked alongside a governing board, and successfully navigated Ofsted inspections—all of which have given me valuable skills that I hope to bring to my role as a trustee.

I am particularly passionate about breaking cycles of trauma and disadvantage by strengthening family relationships. By supporting parents to build strong, secure attachments with their children, we can help create lasting, transgenerational change. I am excited to contribute to the ongoing success of The School & Family Works and to continue advocating for families in a different way  

“There is deep wisdom within our very flesh, if we can only come to our senses and feel it”.

Elizabeth A Behnke

As an organisation, we’ve been working internally on anti-racist practice for a couple of years now, a journey documented in the anti-racist practice timeline we published on our family facing website last month. Here’s my thinking about the direction of travel, with a note on progress to date[1]

Systemic racism is not immediately obvious to the privileged. Through therapeutic work in diverse communities most of our therapists have supported people who have direct, firsthand experience of racism from other people and within the systems and services available to support them. For them, racism is tangible and whether overt or subtle, limits opportunities. Since the death of George Floyd many more people have woken up to the systemic racism in the US and UK. At the time of this killing a strong feeling was voiced by the therapy team – mainly white and middle class - that we need to proactively address racism. Our therapeutic task directly engages us in our families’ efforts to change: do we fully acknowledge the inequalities they face in seeking to make positive changes for themselves and their families within this society?

SFW has social justice and inclusivity at its heart. This was always the intention: we have articulated from the beginning our mission to enable change for those facing multiple challenges, tailoring our Family Group model to serve families living in areas of high deprivation. We have also been clear that systemic change is required in order that children and families who currently experience marginalisation and isolation enjoy an equal chance of being successful in schools and accessing the services they require. We have been less explicit as an organisation about acknowledging and naming the power inequalities that many of our families meet. Why so? By not doing so, what are we conveying to those families?

As articulated in our Theory of Change, SFW seeks to enable change by working at two levels: individual and systemic.

“At an individual level, healing involves a re-wiring process in the brain, engineered in reflection and activity through relationship. Brain development is use-dependent, so our approach is experiential. We use the power of the group to recognise, analyse, & evaluate existing patterns so both children and adults are truly heard. Simultaneously, through group activities and targets we stimulate, trial and nurture new patterns, opening new relational possibilities.

At a systemic level enabling healing in the child requires a shift in understanding and practice in school and family around the factors that cause and perpetuate strength as well as disadvantage. Through Family Group, and by supporting staff through training and relationships around their care for children, we enable powerful capacities (human compassion, empathy, respect and recognition of interdependence) that will catalyse systemic change.“

                                                                                                Theory of Change, SFW

Our route to systemic change is identified helpfully: through our human connection we are moved to address the inequities in the wider world. And it is a necessary step in the process of healing that  inequalities are acknowledged and articulated. If not, the child and family will remain burdened by the weight of something silent over which they have no power. For healing to be possible, It is necessary to identify and name the oppression. It was the horror of George Floyd’s murder that shocked us into recognising our complacency. Our families need to be able to talk about what they experience, and so do we. More broadly, as an organisation, we need to clarify how we respond to the inevitable fact that we are operating in and as part of a society influenced by racism.

Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, our therapy team felt compelled to act. Being therapists, we looked at ourselves first: What do my families actually experience from me in this regard? What could I do differently or better in my therapeutic practice to address racism?  What could I do in my organisation? These questions led to a group of therapists meeting under the working title ‘SFW Anti-racist practice group’, and spearheading our journey into what we all knew would be very uncomfortable territory.

An early discussion identified many strengths in our practice. We have a strongly inclusive foundation and good experience in multi-cultural groups where complex situations are co-productively managed. Anti-racist practice is ‘part of our everyday’. However, we all recognised significant room for improvement. Most evidently, our therapists observed inadequacies in their discourse: ‘What is the language to use?’ ‘How am I understood?’ ‘What are we missing?’ We have skilled, experienced therapists, yet our homogenous privileged position, a potential barrier we all consciously seek to diffuse, was acknowledged as significant. Even so, the discomfort around language was unanimous. In our discussions we encountered our clumsiness, our white privilege, our fear.

We’re a couple of years on in our journey now and I’m proud that the ARPG work is embedded in our organisation

Our route in has been through our own bodies. Together, we’ve been able to become curious about what happens inside ourselves when we talk about race; the brain fog that may descend; the righteous internal raging; the dryness in the mouth and the shortness of breath. It’s this looking inward that has been revelatory. Racialised trauma lives in our bodies and impacts us all. Irrespective of skin colour, we carry the charge of centuries of racism within our own bodies.

We’ve always talked about Family Group as a ‘safe space’. In our anti-racist journey so far, one of the many realisations has been that no space is a safe space for everyone. We offer a space: people come and will discover whether it is safe by what they feel in their bodies.

Brilliant training offered by Robert Downes and Foluke Taylor has shaken us to the core. We white bodies in the organisation have had opportunity to recognise white body supremacy within ourselves and we have begun to dismantle the fear on which it is based. Being less afraid, we can be more curious, externally and internally. We hope to see in ourselves the defensive, rigidity of Whiteness and head it off so, embracing our vulnerability, we can be present and transparent in the work in the room. I would hope that, for those who come to our Family Groups, we’ve got better at demonstrating we have minds that can hold difference. We’ve got closer to a shared language with our families which can acknowledge and hold their experience, so relationship can triumph over inhibition and prejudice.

We’ve also recognised the length of the journey ahead. Sometimes, when a parent talks in Family Group, they observe the patterns in their own childhood experience which Family Group is helping them identify and untangle, such that they can make an active choice not to pass on the muddle to their own child. The root of the issue for the child in the classroom may lie in trauma in the family long before the child was born. With racism, the roots go back centuries. And we all, each of us, need to do the work to metabolize the trauma that disconnects us from ourselves and each other.

Our hope is that our anti-racism timeline may help other organisations which are setting out on this journey. You’ll find links to some of the resources we’ve found most useful. We have a long way to go ourselves, and we’ll be updating the timeline as we move forwards. This work is hard. We’ll be going slowly and looking to make friends on the way. If the journey fires you, please be in touch.

Thank you