It’s against this backdrop that Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council and the Cheshire and Merseyside ICB approached Capacity in early 2022. They wanted our support to lead a partnership project between Wirral MBC and the ICB, to transform the picture of children and young people’s emotional health and wellbeing support in Wirral.
They wanted our support to:
- Build a digital platform where children, families, young people and professionals can access resources, help and support.
- Shift the culture towards preventative, self-help measures (helping young people build emotional resilience skills for life) – supported by a training offer.
- Explore new commissioning models for children’s emotional health and wellbeing support services which are more collaborative and effective.
We were in good stead to deliver this project, having worked with Wirral MBC for a number of years to transform their approach to Early Help through ‘Community Matters’. The success of this project laid the groundwork. It provided a blueprint for how we could successfully achieve the project’s vision, that ‘children and young people in Wirral have good emotional health and know how and when to get extra support’.
What we heard
Like all good projects, we started by trying to build a picture of the state of children and young people’s wellbeing support in the Wirral through desk research. Due to the lack of coordination between services, local data was patchy (this was part of the problem we were trying to solve). Instead, we reviewed existing data to gather insight into the state of children and young people’s health and wellbeing more generally. Existing data told us that in the last five years, rates of poor emotional health have increased across the country. The impact of COVID-19 and the subsequent government restrictions on freedoms, including the significant disruption to education are now manifesting themselves in the number of mental disorders.
We know that the only way to really get to grips with a problem is to listen closely to the experiences of those affected by it. With this in mind, we spent time engaging with children and young people, families and professionals from across Wirral.
These conversations gave us insight into key themes:
- There are a number of brilliant organisations providing support services for children and young people, but the offer across Wirral is not well coordinated.
- Children, young people and their parents don’t always know where to go for resources and support, and professionals can be unsure of the best service to signpost them to.
- There are long waiting lists to access support and it can be hard to navigate the varying referral pathways.
- Children and young people are often referred to support services without exploring self-help or support from existing networks first.
- Parents and young people aren’t always sure when to access support – some coming too soon, others too late.
What we did
Once we understood what people living and working in Wirral wanted and needed from this work, we were ready to get stuck in. The work was vast and complex, but here are some key headlines:
Designing the contracting method
A key component of this project was to reimagine the way emotional wellbeing services for young people are commissioned in Wirral. Having listened to local people and organisations, we heard loud and clear that this commissioning model needed to be relational, trust-based and collaborative. This model needed to be one that enables flexibility and innovation.
With this in mind, in late 2023 we supported Wirral Council to ask local organisations to tender to be a part of an alliance of local agencies, who would work to bring local services together for an improved, holistic offer. The alliance was launched in 2024 and is made up of Kooth, Open Door Charity, Action for Children, Koala North West and Utopia. These organisations will work together to keep the digital platform running, coordinating and triaging referrals, developing and supporting a wider system of services and raising awareness of the new offer.
Co-designing the brand
Throughout 2024, we worked with local children and young people to co-design a brand for the digital platform.
We shared surveys on social media and hosted a series of sessions with children in Wirral through existing youth groups, spending time hearing their thoughts and testing ideas to get the look, feel and functionality right. Together, we thought about the purpose of the platform and how it needed to be different than what’s already out there.
Overwhelmingly, we heard that the platform needed to be young people-centred, warm and empowering, underpinned by the idea of growth. After brainstorming some names and asking young people what they liked and didn’t like, we landed on Branch. Along with the association between nature and wellbeing, people liked the fact that Branch represented growth, connection and the fact that mental health isn’t linear – it’s a journey that we’re all on.
Once we’d landed on a name, we worked with young people to make Branch more concrete, testing different brand concepts to see what they liked most. Everything about the Branch brand – from the logo to the colour scheme to the photography and illustrations – is informed by the voices of young people from across Wirral.
Building Branch
After settling on a brand, it was time to get busy with the designing and testing of the Branch site and algorithm. We spent time working with Liverpool-based digital communications agency Kaleidoscope to help make our vision a reality.
We continued to work with children and professionals in Wirral to write a spec for the platform, outlining how it would look, what it would need to do and how it would feel. To make sure that the tool could appropriately assess requests for support, we co-designed screening questions by working with CAMHS and drew inspiration from national clinical assessment tools. We worked to unpick some sticky issues, like trying to strike the right balance between getting evaluation right for professionals, while still maintaining the warm, friendly and human feel that young people told us was so important.
In mid-2024, a test version of the site went live. Over a number of months, the alliance led the testing of the site with young people and professionals, making sure that the algorithm gave the right results, fine-tuning the functionality and ironing out any problems. None of this would have been possible without the support of the Kaleidoscope team, who were fully bought into the vision of this project, working tirelessly to embed feedback to get the tool to where it needed to be.
The result of all this work was the launch of Branch on 13th November 2024, to mark World Kindness Day. All this was wrapped up with an accompanying comms and awareness-building campaign targeted at parents, young people and professionals and led by the alliance. Like all the work, this campaign was co-designed with children and young people and is all about the small things we can do to improve wellbeing. From social media, billboards, bus ads, promo items and briefings for professionals, we worked hard with the alliance to spread the word about Branch.
I used Branch for the first time on Monday for a student who has been going around in circles looking for support. By using your new website, it helped him to focus on the most important things that are on his mind at the moment and the support it matched him with was fantastic. He matched himself with one of the services, and was contacted by the agency 2 days later. It also gave him lots of information on other agencies that we didn’t know about. Thank you so much, we were really impressed.
– Bethany, Wirral Teacher
So, what’s next?
It’s still early days for Branch, but we’ve already heard some really positive feedback.
At the end of the year, we handed the day-to-day running of Branch over to the alliance, who will be taking the work forward. We expect that the alliance will be able to identify trends, based on data about what local people want and need, and will increasingly be able to respond to that.
Our involvement doesn’t end there, though. We’ll be working with the alliance in mid-2025 to support their evaluation and review the impact Branch has had since its launch. We’re excited to see what the future of Branch has to hold, and hope it makes a real difference to young people in Wirral!
