Education remains one of the most powerful tools in society. Our city’s schools do a fantastic job of teaching and supporting learners across Bristol. Educational outcomes are rising, and more young people are going on to further and higher education. Bristol is full of brilliant minds. But the national cost-of-living crisis and the difficulty in accessing warm, quiet study spaces at the end of the school day, remains a challenge.

At the University of Bristol, we wanted to come up with a creative solution to this problem and make an active contribution to the city’s Welcoming Spaces network. We wanted to evidence our commitment to creating spaces in which young people could come together as a community, support one another and find solutions to shared problems. For us, that meant funding the development of a homework club.

We knew from our sponsorship of the IntoUniversity Bristol East and South centres that there was a demand for this kind of support, with many families on waiting lists. We knew we had a team of people with the experience and enthusiasm to help. And we soon realised that any provision needed to be based within the heart of communities, without expecting young people to travel to the University’s buildings.

So, we came to the Wellspring Settlement in Barton Hill, one of the city’s 100 Welcoming Spaces. A thriving community centre, the site on Ducie Road was the perfect venue for what’s become a homework and learning club for Year 9 to 13 students. Many of those who come to the club attend nearby schools such as City Academy, Bristol Brunel, and Bristol Metropolitan Academies. Others live in the area and attend schools further afield, including Cotham and St Mary Redcliffe & Temple. All are able to access individual coaching and support from the IntoUniversity team, take part in group work and work on collective challenges.

The University, with the support of philanthropic donations, has provided free laptops, Wi-Fi, learning materials and funded members of IntoUniversity staff. Up to 50 young people a week are attending the sessions which started in February and will run for the rest of the academic year. The young people who attend are able to use their time to complete course work, prepare for exams and meet new friends.

We hope that the sessions will continue to provide the space and support the city’s learners needs. We look forward to exploring the potential to expand this model to other parts of the city, working with the council to ensure social justice, educational equity, and inclusion for all.

In March, Councillor Amirah Cole welcomed Year Four pupils from St Werburgh’s Primary School to City Hall, where they gave impassioned speeches about their priorities for Bristol. You may have seen them making headlines recently, as they held a protest against idling outside their school, brandishing banners such as ‘switch off so we don’t cough’. Clearly, these young people are set out to make the change they want to see.

I was very impressed about what they had to say in City Hall. Not only did they look at the challenges facing our city, but they put forward solutions too — with more maturity than we sometimes hear in the Chamber! I suggested that they share reflections on their visit, so that I could share it with the wider city. Here’s what they said:

“Today we went to City Hall. We loved visiting because it was the first time we had been there. It was very interesting and fun. Councillor Amirah Cole told us about how she helps other people and why she loves doing this. We wrote and performed speeches about what we want to change about Bristol.

“Our speeches were about:

“The Chamber was huge and we felt nervous. We thought the best speakers were loud and had clear pronunciation. We had to project our voices confidently so everyone could hear.

“We thought about solutions. To look after nature we could not drop litter, drive less, and respect animals and nature. We could also plant more trees. We could help people with homelessness by lowering the price of petrol, making electricity in homes cheaper and lowering the price of rent.“

Their speech topics reflect issues that are important for children and young people in our city them; these issues are also priorities for Bristolians and for us as an administration.

Our administration has always prioritised addressing the climate and ecological emergencies, the housing crisis, and the national cost-of-living crisis. Likewise, we heard speeches about tackling racism, improving public health, and keeping our streets tidy – all very important subjects on which we have acted.

It’s reassuring to hear that our future city leaders recognise the importance of addressing these issues and want this work continued. I’ve always believed it’s important it is to make sure young people can have their voices heard, as it puts them on a path to engaging with politics throughout their lives.

We have sought to amplify young people’s voices through the Youth Mayors and the Youth Council – with youth councillors now sitting on both our One City Transport Board and Young Peoples’ Board, directly shaping transport in our city.

The involvement of young people in Bristol’s politics should continue long into the future. If any of the pupils at St Werburgh’s are reading this: I hope this is only the start of your efforts to make the world a better place.

This Young Carers Action Day (15 March), we want to celebrate the incredible work done by young carers every day. These young people juggle caring responsibilities with school, hobbies, and friendships, all while trying to look after their own health and mental wellbeing. This year’s theme, ‘make time for young carers’ is a call to action for us all to prioritise the needs of these unsung heroes.

Young carers in Bristol have been sharing their experiences and thoughts on the importance of making time for them and what this could look like. Here at Carers Support Centre, we recently conducted a survey to better understand how our young carers were feeling and how we can make more time for them.

The survey found that more young people are taking on caring responsibilities than ever before, with 60 per cent reporting an increase in their caring duties in the past year. This increase has also led to higher rates of depression, anxiety, stress, and loneliness. Shockingly, 21 per cent of young carers reported self-harming, highlighting the urgent need for more support. Other health issues that young carers had reported include difficulties with sleep and problems with their relationship with food, with one third of young carers feeling they lead an unhealthy lifestyle. Caring duties also significantly impact young carer’s schooling, with ten per cent missing school and almost half reporting a need for more learning support.

Improved access to mental health resources, better help in schools, financial support, and breaks from caring duties were identified as key areas where more support could make a difference.

At Carers Support Centre, through our Young Carers Service, we are dedicated to making time for young carers. The service has registered 342 young carers. Last year alone, we conducted 93 young carers assessments and provided one-to-one support to 87 young carers. This support takes a blended approach using online, phone, and face-to-face methods to ensure that young carers receive the care they need in a way that works for them. With 382 breaks provided – including fun activities such as music, screen printing, cookery, kayaking, trampolining, and trips to Legoland, Go Ape and the pantomime – the Young Carers Service is committed to giving young carers the chance to relax and have fun.

The impact of our work is clear; 47 per cent of respondents said that our service was instrumental in reducing their sense of loneliness and isolation, a 19 per cent increase from the previous year. However, we understand that more still needs to be done to improve the lives of our carers. We must all make the time to listen to young carers and provide the support they need to balance their caring duties with their own needs.

The Young Carers Action Day, let’s remember the incredible work done by young carers and commit to making time for them.

See all the Young Carers Action Day videos on our YouTube channel.

Carers Support Centre:

Website : Help for young carers | Carers Support Centre

Tel: 0117 958 9980

Email: youngc@carerssupportcentre.co.uk

Twitter: @youngcarers

Facebook: @youngcarersbsg

This week at Cabinet we invested another almost £700,000 in One Front Door, our employment support service. Led by the Employment, Skills and Learning team, we will continue to fill gaps in employment support, enabling us to help many more people and businesses in the city.

From the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, we have been strengthening our citywide partnerships and employer networks to provide this vital service. Helping local people start work for the first time, get back into employment or to begin apprenticeships and other work-based qualifications.

The One Front Door service has given people much needed access to training opportunities, personalised advice, practical help from careers coaches as well as offering guidance to employers to help them network and fill their vacancies.

Since starting, One Front Door has helped over 700 local people with help tailored to their needs. This includes 218 people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, 94 young people aged 18-24, 144 people over 50, 155 people with mental health issues, 11 care leavers, and 40 homeless people. In addition to this, over a hundred laptops have been given out through our digital inclusion scheme to help people train and apply for jobs. With over 28 job fairs taking place and the team attending over 53 other events, support has spread all over Bristol, providing thousands of local people with links to potential employers, resulting in over 1,500 job interviews and 700 jobs.

An example of someone who has worked with the service is Iryna. She arrived here from Ukraine and is one of 82 Ukrainian refugees who have registered with One Front Door. She found out about the support offered at a Ukrainian hub in the city and worked with one of our career progression coaches to find employment. Together they reviewed her CV and went through various courses, apprenticeships and events of interest. Iryna went to local job fairs to talk directly to employers, and also helped other attendees on the day by translating for them. Following the support and guidance she received from the team, Iryna has now started working at Co-Op and is receiving further support from our Future Bright programme (providing in-work support) to develop her career further. Iryna was also referred to Wheels for Work which has helped her with travel costs getting to work.

One Front Door also works in tandem with Ways2Work, where employers and training providers keep us up to date with all the opportunities that are currently available so we can share them with the hundreds of people already linked into our network. If you would like to join them, you can sign up to receive the emails on our website.

The success of the service so far has made a real difference and we are happy that unemployment levels have fallen in the city overall, but we still need to do more. This additional grant funding, secured from the combined authority, will help us focus efforts on our more disadvantaged communities and on people directly and disproportionately impacted by the current cost of living crisis.

One great addition and new for 2023 is Bristol Launchpad, based on the ground floor of the Galleries. This new facility provides a one-stop-shop for anyone in Bristol looking for jobs, training or to become self-employed. Through a partnership of Bristol City Council, City of Bristol College, the Department of Work and Pensions, and the National Careers Service, you can access meeting rooms, hot desks and training facilities to help make your dreams of getting the perfect job, or running your own business, a reality. If you could benefit from a chat with the team, give them a call on 0117 9223440 or fill out an online form at the bottom of the One Front Door website to contact one of our career coaches

When it comes to looking after the vulnerable children in our city, we have a great responsibility. Be it through early intervention to make sure children and families get the right response and the right help at the right time; by exploring options for arranging children to live with wider family and friends’ wherever possible; or the situations when their care becomes our responsibility.

Our ambition and a top priority is making sure that our children in care can stay close to their families, friends, and schools. Approved at yesterday’s Cabinet, our latest sufficiency strategy for children in care and care leavers sets out exactly how we will keep children local and increase placement stability.

Care leaver Martyna reflects on staying at her secondary school, “It was quite important for me to stay in that one place because I already had teachers I could trust, I had friends that knew my background and it just meant that I didn’t have to keep going through the same struggle again, of having to almost experience my trauma again by talking to new support networks about it.” Being able to keep children in Bristol not only reduces trauma but also means children can continue to rely on key support networks.

Our aims

1. Keeping children local:

Deciding a child needs to come into our care is a last resort and we want to do all we can to keep children at home with their families, as long it is safe to do so.

We will achieve this through increased targeted early support for families on the edge of care. Bristol is one of 75 local authorities that will receive funding of £4.8m from the UK Government to support Family Hubs and the Start for Life programme. This funding will help us to support families to have the best start in life and prevent family breakdown.

2. Same day and urgent need:

Short-term provision for children who have an urgent need for safety is necessary. We are also planning to grow our staff team. Having this in place will help us assess children who are in crisis, to stabilise them and prepare them for a more permanent living arrangement that fully meets their needs.

3. Placement stability:

We want children in care to be able to develop secure attachments, however placement instability reduces this opportunity and can also intensify any existing behavioural and emotional difficulties. We will therefore expand our therapeutic support models for carers and for our children and young people to help reduce the need to end placements when the child is having difficulties.

Our current work

Our incredible fostering team are already working hard to increase local sufficiency so that children can stay local and maintain links to their networks and education and access health care. Two notable projects that they are currently working on is increasing foster carers in Bristol through an urgent appeal and ensuring children feel at home as much as possible through the creation new, smaller children’s homes.

Urgent appeal

The demand for foster carers is continuing to rise as we see more children come into care. In January 2023, there were more than 750 children and young people in care in Bristol but only 353 households fostering with Bristol City Council. We need more people to come forward to foster so that we can keep children in the local area.

Where we cannot find local foster homes for these children, there is a possibility we need to place them much further away in other parts of the country. To address this, we launched an urgent appeal at the beginning of the year calling on the people of Bristol to come forward.

We have seen a positive response so far, but we still need more people to come forward. Are you over 21 with a spare room? Become a foster carer and provide a child with a home in their city. Find out more at www.bristol.gov.uk.

Children’s homes

In Bristol, we are also working hard to increase the number of children’s homes we have locally so that children do not have to move away from the city and can stay close to their families, friends, and schools.

We also want these homes to feel like a place they can call home. This is why last year we set out a vision for our children’s home across Bristol, for opening smaller homes across the city. This allows us to provide children with an environment that feels more like a home and gives them a better quality of care with more one on one support from our dedicated team.

We have already opened four new, smaller homes across Bristol, with one opening in the spring and at least another three smaller homes due to open in the next couple of years, and we are already seeing results. In November 2022, we had an incredibly positive Ofsted inspection, with one of our children’s homes being judged by Ofsted as good with outstanding leadership and management. These smaller homes have been able to support younger children to stabilise, experience good care and then transition to foster care whilst also supporting young people with very complex needs.

Our corporate parent commitment

Bristol is committed to being an effective, caring, and ambitious corporate parent and we will show this through our love, our language, and our actions. We want them to be and feel heard, as demonstrated in our Belonging Strategy, where we asked Bristol’s children and young people if they see themselves, their histories, cultures and identities reflected in their city. 

We will do everything we can to make sure that our care-experienced children are set up for life, and this sufficiency strategy is a positive step forward to achieve this.

For many parents and carers, finding ways to entertain children and make sure they are eating healthy meals can be something of a challenge.

In Bristol, the Your Holiday Hub (YHH) programme provides free holiday activities and meals to thousands of children and young people (CYP) during the Easter, summer, and winter school holidays. Last year over 32,800 spaces were available on the programme for children and young people from Reception to Year 11. Places on the programme are for families who receive benefit-related Free School Meals, or for those children who may require additional support over the school holidays.

Yesterday Bristol’s Cabinet accepted a grant for £1,848,730 from the UK government’s Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) programme, to cover the school holidays in 2023. This means we can continue running the fantastic YHH programme in Bristol until March 2025.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic combined with huge increases in food and energy prices, has widened the economic divide and amplified the inequalities in our city, which we know disproportionally affects our children.

As part of Bristol’s Belonging Strategy, we want our children and young people to have the best possible start in life, gaining the support and skills they need to prosper in adulthood. The importance of offering these opportunities where children and young people are able to socialise and play together, post-pandemic, cannot be underestimated. We know these basic but vital skills were badly impacted by the long periods of isolation.

Getting children to eat healthily can be tricky. Through Your Holiday Hub, children can learn about the importance of leading a healthy and active lifestyle through exciting and engaging activities, trips and interactive workshops delivered by a network of over 70 activity providers in Bristol. Activities vary from football camps with the Bristol Robins Foundation, to den-building with Branches Our Forest School, to cooking and garden crafts at Redcatch Community Garden to name but a few.

The programme is also a fantastic example of how city partners can come together and tackle city-wide issues with us in a One City approach. Working with us to deliver this large-scale logistical exercise for each of the main school holidays are Feeding Bristol, Fareshare South West, Bristol Association for Neighbourhood Daycare (BAND), and Playful Bristol.

As part of our plans to get more eligible children and young people to access YHH, we have begun to build up a network of trusted school staff or HAF Champions to help encourage eligible families to sign up for to the programme. We currently have 40 wonderful HAF Champions in schools across Bristol. Over the coming months, we hope more school staff will step forward to be the bridge we need between YHH and the children who will benefit from it the most.

I am so grateful for all the hard work and dedication that is put into running Your Holiday Hub which helps so many families in Bristol. Huge thanks to the 72 organisations across Bristol who put together such inspiring holiday activities and food workshops for our children and young people during the school holidays.

Your Holiday Hub activities for the Easter holidays will be available on the Your Holiday Hub website from mid-March. More information about the Department for Education’s HAF programme can also be found on the government website.