Meet Nikita, our Head of Family Support Services
.jpg)
"Hello everyone. My name is Nikita, and I head up the Family Support Team here at Little Miracles.
I’ve been with Little Miracles for just over five years as an employee, but I’ve actually been part of Little Miracles for just over a decade.
I have two children, both with additional needs. My son has autism and ADHD, and we started his diagnosis journey here at Little Miracles when he was three years old. Both my son and my daughter attend activities here, and Little Miracles has been a really big part of their upbringing.
Within the Family Support Team, there is myself and Johanna, and we run the team together. We are also supported by a team of volunteers who work across all the different branches around the charity.
I started my Little Miracles journey as the Centre Manager of the Peterborough branch. At the time, Johanna was providing Family Support, and I was supporting the children and families who attended the centre.
Over the last few years, the service has grown tremendously, and we needed to move me across to lead the Family Support Team. We now have two full-time members within the team, but we have seen an extreme increase in the amount of family support we are providing.
Once upon a time, our support was more focused around things like Disability Living Allowance (DLA), a little bit of advocacy and some education support.
Now, we are seeing more and more crisis cases coming through every day.
Families are reaching out because they don’t know where else to turn. We are also receiving referrals from lead professionals who are asking us to complete tasks that they simply don’t have the time to do.
Referrals are coming in from statutory bodies such as the police, the NHS and social services.
We are being used as an extra set of professional eyes to help keep families safe, particularly around safeguarding concerns and situations happening outside of the family home.
We work really closely with professionals and attend a lot of meetings. These can include Child in Need meetings, Child Protection meetings and strategy meetings, where all professionals come together, including nurses, police, social services and other relevant people involved in the family’s case.
This is taking up a lot of our time and is pulling us away from some of the other areas we would normally deliver as part of the Family Support Team, because the level of crisis within the areas we support is so high.
As a Family Support Team, we cover many different areas. Lots of people ask us what we actually do, so I wanted to talk through some of the different things we support families with during the week.
One of the main areas we deliver is parenting workshops.
These can be delivered online, face-to-face or over the telephone.
Some of these are requested by outside agencies and need to be bespoke. For example, we work with families where the parents themselves may have additional needs, meaning we need to adapt the learning and break the course down further so they can understand and use the strategies with their child.
We cover a range of topics including behaviour, sleep, emotional regulation and different parenting strategies. We deliver these in lots of different ways depending on what works best for the family, and we also offer a lot of emotional support.
Some of our families have open access to the team. This means we work with a small caseload of families who can contact myself or Johanna directly when they need support.
It might be that they send us a message and we give them a call to check they are okay and make sure they are not reaching crisis point.
Sometimes we need to bring in other agencies and additional support. This can include situations where parents are experiencing extreme pressure due to caring for a child with additional needs, not receiving enough respite, or feeling completely isolated and alone."
If you would like to chat to Nikita, or any of the Family Support team, please complete a Family Support Request Form and they will be in touch.