“You will absolutely never forget it”: How Virtual Reality is helping foster carers understand children’s experiences
We are learning about innovative uses of technology across different sectors in Northamptonshire all the time.
Rob Fuller from Northamptonshire Children’s Trust shares his story of an award-winning use of Virtual Reality to help foster carers and the children in their care.
In Northamptonshire Children’s Trust’s fostering service, we started using virtual reality with our provider about 3 years ago. We initially saw a demonstration by Leeds City Council and we were eventually able to fund our own project working with VR.
Our technology suppliers have been impressed with how we've used it and embedded it so quickly, especially within assessment.
We've won a National Technology Award with those suppliers. It's been overwhelmingly positive and it's brought a massively different dynamic to our foster care training and how we help support foster carers in their placements.
We use Virtual Reality for two purposes.
Firstly, we use it in fostering assessment. The content we use there, called In Utero, is very much around the child's experience in the womb, experiencing drug use, domestic violence and the general chaos that you experience in utero. That's quite powerful because it's an immersive 360 experience.
And because it's 360 Virtual Reality, when you look around, the sound moves as well so it's an all-encompassing experience. There's shouting, the colours change because of drugs or alcohol, you experience a world that you could never really imagine.
Then we use a clip called 12 Carnaby Street, which is an 18-month-old child experiencing all different types of abuse and neglect - that's emotional abuse, not actual physical abuse, but you witness furniture being kicked, there's a man standing right in your face, there's quite extreme language and mum is clearly under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
It's very harrowing - two and a half minutes that you will never forget. You will absolutely never forget Carnaby Street.
Again, it's 360-degree immersive so you can look around and see your surroundings. There's very little around other than drink cans, mum passed out on the floor and this man coming in shouting at you. Then that changes to mum actually being quite kind in her own way, but that's shocking too. She's trying to meet your needs but she's giving you a bag of crisps in an old takeaway container and then putting some sachets of ketchup on it and as she goes to pass it to you, she falls over. It's really very, very hard to watch.
That all sounds tough but that's what we show to people who want to become foster carers.
Why? Well, what we're trying to do is help people understand what they're bringing into their home.
We talk about children coming into their home. They could be 5 years old or they could be 17 or 18, coming in with trauma-led behaviours from adverse childhood experiences. We talk about the impact of trauma, parental neglect and substance misuse on the development of children.
Virtual Reality does two things - first, it makes people really feel rather than just talking about it. It's triggered a few people but nobody has withdrawn because of it. It makes them really think hard about why certain behaviours or issues may come to the fore in a child's behaviour.
The second reason is that showing everyone the same experience means they're all on the same page. So we ask them to imagine that 12 Carnaby Street is now on your doorstep, or 12 Carnaby Street is now upstairs, refusing to speak to you. Why do you think that might be? The feedback we've had has been absolutely brilliant.
We also introduce it in our skills to foster session, which is our preparation training for foster carers and we do it pretty much right at the end.
We have a big promotional film, which talks about fostering. Again, that is quite hard-hitting because it is graphic, but it's quite emotive as well. It talks about how you can really make a difference to a child and it really captures the essence of why people are wanting to foster because we're talking about children.
What we then do is we use the VR to its full capacity in assessment.
We follow those two scenarios, In Utero and Carnaby Street, and they play out into three different children's lives. The 18-month-old turns into three young people: an 8 or 9-year-old called Rayleigh, who's experiencing trauma triggers in school; a 15 or 16-year-old called Joe who gets drawn into criminal exploitation and Ashley, who is the same age as Joe and is being drawn into sexual exploitation.
They've all got their own unique reasons for that. But they're all related to those trauma triggers that we see at the very start.
One for Rayleigh is in Carnaby Street, and mum is very rough with the child, commenting on her hair and saying "you're disgusting, I'm going to chop all your hair off". It's emotional abuse, and you don't see how it ends but there's a voiceover that says "I will never touch my hair again. I'll never get my hair cut. I'll never let anyone touch my hair.
We then see Rayleigh in school, where a boy touches her hair.
It triggers a whole series of events which ends in a school meeting with Rayleigh. You look around and there are six adults in the room, which is intimidating in itself. You don't know who's who. There's someone with a visitor's badge. You don't notice them at first but you then look around and there are two other people standing behind you talking about what's happened.
And you feel so out of control. People are talking at you. Obviously you haven't got a voice in it.
It puts you into the perspective of a child who's lost control and found themselves in that environment.
There's a man that leans over you and it brings it back to Carnaby Street. It joins all the dots. It's absolutely brilliant.
The power of it is the immersiveness because you could have a video showing all of this which you just watch on the screen. But actually the immersiveness is the power.
We have children or young people whose behaviours are really challenging some foster carers or where foster carers have got a bit stuck in their care and they really don't know what's going on. They can sometimes feel absolutely lost and they need some additional help.
We have used Virtual Reality clips to draw them out and think "okay, what's going on with this child?" It might not answer everything for the child that they're looking after. But it helps them look at things in a different way. So reflect on Rayleigh or Joe or Ashley: how would they be feeling?
It's saved placements and that has been reflected back in child care reviews. In those situations, we'd been worried a few months beforehand because there was a wedge happening between the child and the carer. The carers have been able to take a step back, reflect on their own behaviour and in one scenario, the child broke down their own views and said that in the last three months, this has been completely different - I'm much happier, because my carer was listening to me.
It can be revelatory for carers. Very few people witness these situations and would only ever get that second hand through fiction or reading it on paper.
Virtual Reality brings it right to them and it's helping improve the relationships between children and their foster carers.
Want to know more?
Find out more about fostering in Northamptonshire.