Katie Le-Billon | King's College London (original) (raw)
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Papers by Katie Le-Billon
This small-scale qualitative study investigated the attitudes of practitioners’ towards the after... more This small-scale qualitative study investigated the attitudes of practitioners’ towards the aftercare phase of Intensive Fostering for young offenders. Used as an alternative to custody, Intensive Fostering is one of 18 potential requirements given under a Youth Rehabilitation Order to 10-17 year-old children in England and Wales. Children who offend are taken out of their family setting and placed with specially trained foster workers for nine months. A three-month aftercare phase follows. This transitional stage was chosen as the focus of this paper because it has been identified as a barrier to the overall success of the initiative (Youth Justice Board, 2010). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven participants, in person and over the telephone. Participants had a wide range of professional experience relating to Intensive Fostering: one participant worked for a private fostering agency, another was an academic with previous experience as a social worker, and the remaining five all currently work within the field of Intensive Fostering. Areas of good practice identified by participants included the ability for practitioners to provide tailor-made support, unique to the individual needs of young people. However, the findings presented in this report highlight a critical shortfall in multi-agency collaboration; demonstrate the strong association between birth family support and the overall success of Intensive Fostering; and suggest that the current model fails to support all service users adequately throughout the aftercare phase. The researcher calls for an extension to the aftercare phase to better support young people and the birth families (when involved) during the transition and beyond.
This small-scale qualitative study investigated the attitudes of practitioners’ towards the after... more This small-scale qualitative study investigated the attitudes of practitioners’ towards the aftercare phase of Intensive Fostering for young offenders. Used as an alternative to custody, Intensive Fostering is one of 18 potential requirements given under a Youth Rehabilitation Order to 10-17 year-old children in England and Wales. Children who offend are taken out of their family setting and placed with specially trained foster workers for nine months. A three-month aftercare phase follows. This transitional stage was chosen as the focus of this paper because it has been identified as a barrier to the overall success of the initiative (Youth Justice Board, 2010). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven participants, in person and over the telephone. Participants had a wide range of professional experience relating to Intensive Fostering: one participant worked for a private fostering agency, another was an academic with previous experience as a social worker, and the remaining five all currently work within the field of Intensive Fostering. Areas of good practice identified by participants included the ability for practitioners to provide tailor-made support, unique to the individual needs of young people. However, the findings presented in this report highlight a critical shortfall in multi-agency collaboration; demonstrate the strong association between birth family support and the overall success of Intensive Fostering; and suggest that the current model fails to support all service users adequately throughout the aftercare phase. The researcher calls for an extension to the aftercare phase to better support young people and the birth families (when involved) during the transition and beyond.