How Do We Engagae?

Background

Following EU enlargement in 2004 and 2007 a number of Roma from countries such as Slovakia, Czech Republic, and Romania moved to the UK in search of work and a better life for themselves and their families.

A national mapping of Roma in Scotland, commissioned by Glasgow City Council in 2013, established that there are an estimated 5,000-5,500 Roma in Scotland. Of that, 3,500 live in Glasgow and more specifically in the area of Govanhill. As experienced in their countries of origin, the Roma in Glasgow continue to face severe poverty and social exclusion. Many service providers have reported that the level of poverty experienced by the Roma is akin to poverty levels witnessed in the Glasgow slums in the 1930’s.

Glasgow City Council and other locally based organisations have been investing significant resources in managing the pressure on service provision that this new community has brought. Despite this, there are still high levels of socio-economic exclusion and poverty amongst this community. For example, about one sixth of the Roma population is on the case load of the dedicated Roma Children and Families Social Work team.

Challenges of Engagement

One of the key challenges for Glasgow City Council has been engaging with the local Roma families to gain better insight into their needs and to find ways that they can express these needs themselves.  There is a real desire to improve Roma representation and to activate Roma involvement in local decision making, but this is not proving easy to achieve.    Local charities and NGO’s are doing lots of successful work at local level to help and to empower Roma people to successfully connect and to make best use of the wide range of good quality public services that are available. But the levels of engagement and involvement with the Roma community are still significantly lower than with other migrant communities.

It is clear that one of the key barriers is poverty. The Roma living in Glasgow are suffering higher levels of poverty than those witnessed in recent times and this creates many obstacles. Chaotic lifestyles and day-to-day survival makes it difficult for Roma to find the time or to have the motivation to take part or to make use of the services in areas, other than the immediate and obvious ones that help to alleviate some of their poverty.

The Desired Change? 

During the Roma Net Pilot Delivery Phase we have continually been posing the question of how do we communicate better with Roma to help them connect more with us the public services and with the wider communities ? What is the basis for effective engagement?

In response to this Glasgow has been looking at different ways of communicating with Roma to help them connect  more with services and sustain that engagement.

Through the Social Work Roma Children and Families Team and other NGO’s including Crossroads, a local community mediation NGO, we identified that one of the most effective ways of making a good connection  with Roma is through families and children, and the 0-8 year age group is currently a priority for the City.

How did we use barriers as an opportunity?

Reports from both Social Work Services and Education Services showed that Roma families with children were not claiming the free school meals and clothing grants that they were entitled to This offered an an opportunity to reach out to families and if all went well we could potentially establish a parents group.

In Glasgow, children whose families are in receipts of welfare support are entitled to claim free school meals to the value of £1.40 (€1.80) per day. To claim, families must download a form from the Glasgow City Council website, complete and post, an obvious barrier for Roma families many of whom are not able to read and write in English and who are unlikely to have access to a computer.  Literacy and who don’t have access. Families that are entitled to a free lunch meal, they are also entitled to a free breakfast in school.

Our actions –

Parents Lunch

Through Social Work Services, Roma-NeT provided the necessary funds to offer   a lunch for school pupils attending Annette Street Primary School. Annette Street is one of, if not the most ethnically diverse Primary School in Glasgow. In the Primary 1 class that covers 4-6 year olds, 11 children are Romanian Roma, 12 are Slovakian Roma, 4 are of Pakistani origin and 1 is from an African background.  The purpose of this lunch was to slowly introduce the concept of school meals to families and to build the relationship between the people providing local services  and the parents  of the children in the school.

Parents of the Primary 1 children, aged 5/6, were given the opportunity to sample the food the children can have at school during lunch and breakfast time.  And to receive information about the school meals services available at School called ‘Fuel Zone’.

With support from Roma Net, the Fuel zone information leaflet for parents was translated into Romanian and Slovakian and the school took responsibility for contacting the parents and inviting them to lunch. The school sent a letters in Romania and Slovakian home with the children and a second letter was sent home the day before the lunch.

Parents also received a phone call from the school by a Romanian or Slovakian speaker to make sure they were aware of the time and date of the lunch.  From experience, we know that sending letters home with pupils is not the best method of communication with parents.  Verbal communication in native language is essential.

On the day of the lunch parents were slow to appear,  at first there were only 2 or 3.  But from 2pm onwards more parents joined. Some stayed and had something to eat with their children and others took a sample of the food home.

The Fuel Zone Staff were at the lunch to explain to parents about their service and their flexibility was extremely helpful as the lunch did not quite run to plan.   There were opportunities to talk  one-to-one with parents rather than in large groups and this seemed to be a successful means of communication.

Welfare Rights Support

It was important to build on the connections and the  momentum gained at the Parents Lunch.  Over the course of the 2 weeks following this session, welfare support sessions were arranged with the Welfare Rights Officer from the Social Work Children and Families Team l and officers from the Welfare Rights Hub in Govanhill Housing Association.

In addition to signing up for free school meals, these sessions also focussed on clothing grants to support parents. As with free school meals, children whose families are in receipt of certain welfare benefits are entitled to a clothing grant of £47 (€60) per child per year to purchase school uniforms.

Over the course of 3 sessions, over 100 people attended. Many families were already in receipt of support however the success was in the new uptakes. The results achieved!

The investment in Roma families from these small but very important events are possible to quantify in terms of financial benefits for families:

• 23 families qualified for free school meals. This equates to 58 children receiving financial support of £280 (€355) per child per school year.
• Free meals include a free breakfast worth £1 (€1.20) equating to £200 (€254) per child per year.
• All of these 58 children also qualified clothing grants as well as a further 9 families. This meant a total of 81 children received a grant of £47 per child.
• In total, some  £31,647 (€40,158) was distributed to support families with children in school.

The Wider Impact

The key purpose of this exercise was not only to make sure that the families were receiving essential financial support, but also to make better connections with Roma families and to create an opening to establish a parents group. As a result, 4 Roma women signed up for the parents group with an additional 5 signing up after the event or at the welfare rights sessions. Soon these women will l be invited to an afternoon tea with the head teacher of the school  when there will be an opportunity to talk about a wide range of issues.  

Critically, there is a much wider impact that benefits the families, children, the schools and the whole communities, Roma and non-Roma.

Glasgow has a pro-active approach to tackling social exclusion which means that areas with the greatest poverty get the greatest resources.  So schools that have a high number of children receiving free school meals  receive additional funding.

The funds allocated to schools are calculated based on a number of indicators. These include levels of local deprivation for example number in receipt of welfare benefits, access to primary services and levels of overcrowding, but also on the number of children receiving free school meals. It means more accurate data about the levels of deprivation in localities which leads to more financial support for the schools in these areas. 

Lessons learned 

Initially, the main purpose of this exercise was to engage better with Roma families and this so far has been successful. 9 parents have signed up to be part of the parents group, which is a small but significant achievement as local officials have struggled to make such connections in the past,

What lessons can we learn from this situation. – what made this different from previous attempts at connecting / engaging with the community ?

• Having a bilingual member of staff to follow up the letters to parents proved valuable: by phoning  parents we established a connection, we make sure the information got to the right people, we created the basis for relationship actions that  helped those people with struggle with the language.  ;
• Joint working was effective and efficient: pooling of services from Social Work Roma Children and Families, Education, the local housing association and a local advocacy services made much better use of already scarce resources. This allowed  more local officials to to connectdirectly with more families during sessions and to follow up on cases;
• Locally based sessions through schools: using the schools as the place to connect meant families could meet  the officials in a familiar local environment. The Welfare Rights Officer highlighted that one of the benefits of this was the issue of paperwork. If families came along without the necessary documents , it was very easy for them to return home to collect 
• It gave something of benefit to the families: there was a clear benefit for families to attend. It was about their children and it they would potentially receive financial support  to help the day to day lives especially for the children

The fact that Glasgow City Council has a dedicated Roma Children and Families team is an important factor that allows for more specialised support that is  flexible, that suits the needs of Roma families and that enables issues to be identified and directly  addressed by the same team.  Its more efficient and means people are not passed around from service to service.

Being part of Roma Net meant that  during the development of the Local Action Plan (LAP), many of these issues came to light. Without full stakeholder consultation and communication, the need for some of these activities may have gone unnoticed or wouldn’t have had the financial or staff support to be tackled.

This initiative has proved that working at a local level with multiple stakeholders and pooled resources creates a bridge between Roma and statutory services, an easily replicable model that is effective and more cost efficient as well as being easily accessible for Roma families.

What Next?

We hope that those who have signed up for the parents group will, through time, increase their capacity and confidence to become involved in other forums or groups, like Roma Net.

Locally, Govanhill is going through a period of change, in that there is a renewed commitment to regenerating the local area. Roma people make up significant numbers of the local population in this area, so it is therefore important that their voice is heard and that they are given the space and opportunity to actively contribute to the transformation of the community.

For more information contact:

Marie McLelland

Glasgow City Council

Marie.mclelland@drs.glasgow.gov.uk