Post Arrival Support Visits

Understand what will take place during your post arrival meetings with Reset

As part of your Sponsor Agreement with the Home Office, you will have consented to participate in follow up calls through your first year of support of a refugee family. These will provide an opportunity to reflect on the support you are offering and to bring up any challenges you may be having. Reset will lead these sessions, on behalf of the Home Office. 

We see this as an opportunity to help you reflect on the support you offer a family, and how this builds into their independence and integration into UK life. It’s not a test or designed to put you on the spot; we want this to be a useful experience for you all, whilst assuring the Home Office that your sponsor obligations are met.

What do Groups need to do?

We will be in contact to ask you to arrange 2 meetings:

• Meeting 1 will be with the Group itself – you can decide who comes to this, but we would certainly need to speak with your Project Lead and others who can provide an update on your support.  This meeting will be attended by and led by Reset, the Home Office Community Sponsorship Team will dial in, and your Lead Sponsor and Local Authority will be invited.
• Meeting 2 will be with the family. We ask you to arrange this as there is no need for us to retain contact details of the family you support.  Reset will lead the session, the Home Office will dial in, an interpreter provided by Reset and of course, the family.

We’ll repeat this 3 times during your year of support to a family.

Who needs to attend the meeting from our Group?

We recommend that you keep the number of people attending this call to a limited number.  Your Lead Sponsor and Project Lead should be present at a minimum, but whoever attends must be able to speak frankly and openly about how your project is progressing. 

We will also meet with the family you support. We will supply the interpreter, but we will ask you to liaise with the family to book in the meeting.

When will the meetings happen?

We’ll organise the meetings so that they take place up to 3 times within your 12 months of integration support.  Each meeting will take no more than 60 minutes with your Group, and around 45 minutes with the family you support.

For your 1st call, this must take place during working hours (Monday-Friday 9am-5.30pm) as representatives from the Home Office will be on this call. For subsequent meetings, these can take place at any time or any day of the week.

Who provides the interpreter?

Reset will organise interpreting services for the time we spend with the family.

How will these meetings happen?

We hold the sessions via zoom, and everyone attending has the opportunity to dial in by phone. Reset will always have their video on, but you do not have to do so. If the family you support or your group are uncomfortable using Zoom, please let us know and alternative arrangements can be made.

Will anything be shared with us after the meeting?

Absolutely. We’ll share notes as well as any specific advice or resources that might be useful with those who attended the meeting. These notes will also be shared with the Home Office and your Local Authority. We will also ask you to provide feedback on your meeting, so that we can improve these in future.

What will happen during the meeting?

Your Group

We’ll ask you how things are going, looking at different areas of the support you offer the family, and help to resolve any issues that are coming up, as well as ensuring your sponsor obligations are being met. Broadly, we will discuss benefits, education, employment and volunteering, English language learning, Healthcare and the support you are offering.

We’ll also help you to reflect on the steps that you are taking to help the family build their independence.

By repeating this exercise regularly, you’ll be able to chart the progress made across the time of your Sponsor Agreement and be ready to exit your sponsor agreement in a way that suits both you and the family you support.

The family you support

We’ll speak to the family you support, asking them about how they feel they’re progressing, and whether there is anything in which they would like more, or less support. We won’t make promises about what your Group will or won’t do, but with the permission of the family, we will share the discussion we have with you.

We’ll assist the family members in reflecting on their progress to date.  A guide to how these work will be made available in the language the family members speak, and an audio file can be made available for those who do not read or write in their own language.

It may be that you wish to make us aware of issues or concerns prior to us speaking to the family members, please do speak to Reset in confidence about this in advance of the meeting.

Who can I talk to about our meeting?

Please contact the Reset Team with any queries you may have.

Resources

There are documents and sound files translated into Arabic and Kurdish Sorani and Kurdish Kurmanji available below that you can download and send to the family to explain the purpose of the meeting and who we are.