Working together to strengthen practice in residential child care: The power of observation, reflection and feedback
‘Oh don’t mind me, I’m just here to observe’ – what an anxiety provoking statement to hear in your workplace, now add that you happen to work in one of the most complex and fast paced settings in the sector, residential child care. This was the challenge we faced at Aberlour Sycamore when we began to use our practice profile**.
As I discussed in my first blog, we worked hard as an organisation to lay the foundations and get the conditions for change right, and we now felt it was the right time to move to the next stage in our process. The plan was for the programme team, including myself to offer observations of practice in the houses, and to support some of our internal house team members to do the same. We had selected some of our house team members who consistently demonstrated leadership and excellent practice and asked them to become internal observers and to help support others with the changes ahead. They began to spend time on shifts, with the house teams, to observe and offer feedback. Although that seems simple, it didn’t really feel that way for lots of people, including myself.
Building the scaffolds for change
I like to think of myself a pretty robust, pragmatic person. I also consider myself to be an experienced and passionate residential child care professional. However, despite all of this, the idea of going into our children’s houses to observe fellow colleagues left me feeling conflicted. I was excited to support the use of the practice profile because I believed it had the potential to be so beneficial to the adults working in our houses and the children they support, by cementing excellent practice and good decision making. But I was also apprehensive: how would people receive me in this role - was I setting myself up for a fall, or expected to be the fount of all knowledge? I had long-standing relationships with many of the adults in through my main role, but this felt different.
I think it took me about a month to fully settle into my role as an external observer. Offering feedback to people began to change from feeling awkward to more natural and fluid. The house teams seemed to take about the same amount of time to adjust to our new way of working. I remember the house teams being very aware of my presence at first, but the dynamic shifted with each observation and my presence as an observer began to feel natural.
Our young people were the quickest to adapt. We had brought them into conversations about the practice profile from really early on in the programme journey, they knew that they would see additional adults around the house observing, and that we were doing this to try and ultimately improve the staff’s training and practice in order to support them. I took it as a good sign when our young people started asking for us when we weren’t around.
This type of work requires quite a bit of flex, it was important to ensure that the observers were not counted in the staff numbers for shifts to ensure they had time to do all the tasks associated with the programme. But it was also important to try and feel like a more natural addition to the adults around, so taking on jobs around the house in quiet times helped me to find that balance. And the adults on shift soon got used to suggesting what toilets might need a quick clean or washing needed to be done! To help us maximise opportunities to carry out observations the house team had to adjust to keep us in the loop around their daily plans. Some of the most important observations I was able to make happened out of the house, so I soon learned to tag along to appointments and shopping trips, to gather the wealth of data and experiences that would present themselves.
The challenge of the unexpected
It is important to share that the two houses testing the new way of working reacted slightly differently to the practice profile, and we reflected on why that might be. One house team had been in place longer term, had experienced more changes across the organisation, and seemed more cautious about the project, perhaps fearing it could fade away or become a disguised performance management tool. The other house had newer staff who expressed how helpful the tool was to their development. As we spread the practice profile to more houses, we will build on this learning from the different approaches to and experiences of change.
Even with the best laid plans, often life will throw us a curve ball and we have to react. We spent some time recently reflecting together with the house teams about our experiences using the practice profile. One of our house teams spoke about how calm and settled their house had been in the beginning, which was part of the reason their house was selected to trial this new way of working. Two weeks after the observations started, everything changed - we experienced changes of young people living in the house and as a result it wasn’t so calm anymore. To allow the young people time to settle, we choose to extend the planned six months observation period to nine months. The house team noted that rather than feeling like an additional burden at the time of transition, the practice profile project helped them to communicate and “it brought a close team closer together”.
The team at CELCIS supported us to understand that this type of work has ebbs and flows. When I first began observing, I thought it would only take a couple of months before the house teams took ownership of leading on the use of the practice profile in their house. The reality has been that the teams are only now on that journey, after months of observations. This highlighted to me why committing ongoing time and energy is so important, as the teams need guidance and leadership to build confidence around change. I was not only there to observe and feedback, I was also there to show them our ongoing commitment to this work, continually improving to be the best we can possibly be for each other and the young people in our care.
** A practice profile is a tool through which the essential functions or core components of a practice can be identified. It also describes the key activities, and the ‘saying and doing’ associated with that practice. If it is used consistently, and is integrated in training, supervision and continuous practice development, the practice profile enables a practice to be teachable, learnable, doable, and assessable.
Read the first blog post from Marc in this series
Further information about this Aberlour Sycamore’s change programme carried out alongside CELCIS can be found here.
The views expressed in this blog post are those of the author/s and may not represent the views or opinions of CELCIS or our funders.
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