ESTER – for youth and families in Iceland Erasmus Project

Project Title

ESTER – for youth and families in Iceland

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Health and wellbeing

Project Summary

Barnaverndarstofa – Government agency for child protection (hereafter referred to as GASP) – is a national agency which provides both tools, knowledge and training to the social workers who work in the field of child protection in Iceland. We operate a wide scale of help for children from 0 – 18 and their families. The Agency also offers wide range of treatment opportunities to children examples of these treatment options are MST, treatment facilities for children with severe conduct problems and foster care. VetEvi AB (Henrik Andershed and Anna-Karin Andershed) in Sweden are the developers of and experts in ESTER – an assessment tool aimed to help social workers in child protection to decide what intervention is needed and whether it is beneficial to the youth and their families. There is published research supporting ESTER as an instrument that can make assessments more evidence based and more effective. The instrument has been implemented in more than 50 municipalities in Sweden, in social services, child healthcare, child and adolescent psychiatry, police, etc. ESTER is the intellectual property of VetEvi AB. The developers are active, and well renowned researchers in the field, Henrik Andershed as professor of psychology and criminology, and Anna-Karin Andershed professor of psychology.
For many years social workers who work in child protection in Iceland had been looking for a tool to help them make an efficient or more evidence based decisions about interventions in child protection cases. Even more important a tool to assist them in evaluating the results of these interventions. Now we have implemented ESTER in every local child protection services in Iceland and also in all social service centers in the capital Reykjavik. The aim of implementing ESTER was to give social workers in child protection working with youths and their parents structured tool to guide them in making assessments and help them to make decisions based on evidenced based methods to minimize individual biases in decision making. This has been a two year pilot project from 2015 to 2017 and the following is a description of what we have done. In February 2015 an implementing group of five people from Iceland visited the social service in Hudiksvall municipality in Sweden (who had been using ESTER for several years) and had a meeting in Stockholm with VetEvi AB to discuss how to plan these two years implementing period of ESTER in Iceland. March to April: Translation of the ESTER assessment book – tree specialists, all with professional and practical experience and knowledge in both Swedish and Icelandic translated each their versions and then united in one final version. April to May: Translation of the ESTER manual and the ESTER screening booklets based on the translation of the Assessment book. We also had meetings with representatives from the municipalities and ministries about the implementation process. May – July: Translating the computerized system. In August 2015 we started the training: ESTER ONE – 17th to 21th August and ESTER ONE continuing – 23th to 27th November, this was a group of 90 social workers working in child protection from all municipalities in Iceland except one. In 2016 we continued with the group from ESTER ONE – 11th to 13th April and also started a new group ESTER TWO – 13th to 15th April. In that group we had still majority of social workers in child protection but also workers from social services in Reykjavik. That started an awakening in Reykjavik city and we started ESTER THREE – 19th and 20th October 2016 with a big group of social workers from Reykjavik child protection and social service centers. In 2017 we used the opportunity having Henrik Andershed in our final congress of the project in January and had a last training in this pilot ESTER FOUR – 26th and 27th January and we also then arranged training activities for all the other groups ESTER ONE, TWO and TREE – 26th January, training in ESTER with real cases. And the last we did, to tell people about the implementation pilot project, and tell them what ESTER is, we had an ESTER congress the 27th of January 2017 with participants from municipalities, Child psychiatry, schools, ministries and NGOs. Altogether, 195 persons in Iceland have had ESTER basic training and some form of guidance or case work in ESTER. They are from all Child protection committees in the country and from all six social service centers in Reykjavik city and also some special teachers, school psychologists and other experts. The overall objective of the project to train professionals in Iceland in ESTER was clearly met.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 133927 Eur

Project Coordinator

Barnaverndarstofa & Country: IS

Project Partners

• VetEvi Aktiebolag