NYAS provide high quality visiting Advocacy services to children and young people living in local authority and private children’s homes, residential schools and secure units across England.
Our visiting Advocacy service helps protect young people by providing an independent regular visitor to their home. Through visiting on a regular basis our advocates build relationships with the young people supporting and enabling them to share their views, wishes and feelings, resolve issues and empower them to be involved in decisions that affect their lives. The advocate will also provide written visit reports if required.
All our visiting advocates are accredited independent advocacy trained, DBS checked, experienced in working with young people and possess good interpersonal skills. Our advocates are also skilled at working with those young people who have a disability and are unable to communicate.
- The visiting advocate attends regularly, at a frequency of your choosing, usually monthly. However, this can be tailored to your service to become more or less frequent. Some visiting advocates attend fortnightly or even weekly.
- Visiting advocates work with the young people directly to see if they have any individual issues or collectively as a group relating to their experience of the home. Visiting advocates spend time with young people, listen to their views and aim to empower them to raise any concerns with support if needed.
- Visiting advocates promote the rights of the child and respect the national advocacy standards and the quality standards for children’s homes.
- Visiting advocates are independent of the staff at the home which means we can support them to make a complaint about their experience if needed.
- Young people can access our free confidential helpline in between the advocate visiting.
- Our advocates follow strict guidelines regarding safeguarding concerns.
