Working together to strengthen practice in residential child care: Laying the groundwork for change
Marc Blyth, Lead Learning Co-ordinator at Aberlour Children's Charity Sycamore Residential Service, which provides residential child care across Scotland, discusses how developing consistent, high-quality residential child care practice together as a workforce can be much less daunting than it initially feels.
This is the first of a series of blog posts which share insights about Aberlour Sycamore’s change programme carried out alongside CELCIS.
At Aberlour Sycamore we were keen to develop our services and people to offer the very best residential child care experience in Scotland. We recognised that if we were to meet our goal of being the best possible practitioners for our children, we needed a way to describe high-quality residential child care practice. CELCIS encouraged us to consider developing a practice profile, by building upon the good practice already happening at Sycamore. A practice profile is, in essence, a tool that describes practice in a way that is teachable, learnable and doable and so that’s what we decided to try and create.
The development of a practice profile for residential child care sounds impressive, doesn’t it? But I confess that when I was asked to be involved in developing a practice profile, I remember that moment very vividly because I said, ‘absolutely not!’. It sounded like a daunting, academic task that felt far removed from the hands on, people orientated work that I enjoy. However, I gave it more thought, found out what might be involved, how it could help our children and young people and soon found myself part of the team leading this work.
Keeping staff involved
Many of us will have experienced new systems or ways of working, brought into the workplace when they are shiny and new, which eventually fade and fail. With an eye to that, we decided to really invest time and effort into bringing the adults working in our houses along on the journey and trying to create the right conditions to help the change stick this time.
We know that the young people in our houses need care and support to thrive in their childhoods and adolescence. We also fully embrace that the way for them to heal, grow and develop is within the context of strong supportive relationships. For our young people, the adults in the houses are often some of the most significant relationships in their lives. We need to get as much as possible right for them, to allow them to become the best versions of themselves that they can be. We felt strongly that in order for the practice profile to be impactful it had to be purposeful and relevant to our teams in their everyday work. We sought out representation across different roles and responsibility levels across the organisation. We also spent lots of time exploring, explaining and reinforcing the work with our adults, to help us all really understand what we do well, and what we need to work on.
Feedback is a gift
Getting feedback on your work can be uncomfortable for some, and giving feedback can be even more so. We explored this with our adults during focused sessions, to gather their own experiences of being observed and receiving feedback.
These focused sessions were informative, offering insight into the varied beliefs and experiences of our adults. They shared past experiences where feedback was seen as judgemental or embarrassing and made them feel overwhelmed, pressured or blamed. We ran these sessions several times in each house, capturing the views of as many adults as often as we could. Our teams were encouraged to ask questions, to challenge our thinking and to help us shape the approach, and we created opportunities to learn about offering and receiving positive and developmental feedback.
Direct observations allowed us to recognise our teams' strengths and think about what support was needed to improve practice. They also helped us provide real time reflections and feedback.
The time we invested helped to lay the groundwork for implementing the changes, but also supported our teams to progressively understand the changes in the way we would be working more and more before the practice profile was introduced. It was key that our teams understood the aim from feedback was to enable them to improve and develop their practice, not to shame or blame people when their practice could have been better. There was also the additional benefit of understanding and improving the wider team’s practice. We knew our people were the golden thread that ran through this work, and we needed to spend the time to bring everyone along on our change journey. We invested our time into preparation, which helped our people to get involved and feel invested in the approach.
Don’t rush the process
I think there is a very natural and normal desire at a certain point in a programme to get going, to roll things out, to get started. However, we were reminded by the programme team we were working with at CELCIS that if we wanted to ensure different results, we would need to take a different approach. We took the time to carefully consider which children’s houses were most ready for us to test our new approach and who from within the house teams would be our first set of internal observers, and then we rolled part of our practice profile out.
Our preparatory work really leaned into creating readiness for accepting feedback – naturally, some of our adults were anxious about it, however, our most recent data collection shows that they identified giving and receiving feedback as one of the main benefits of introducing our practice profile. It is clear to us that all the time and effort we put into our scaffolding of this new approach has been invaluable. It feels like we have approached this change differently and got a more sustainable and impactful outcome because of this. Our teams have told us that their confidence has increased, and this change journey has been a positive one.
I found myself doodling a snail with huge pointy teeth during a planning meeting, and it helped me realise that having the time and space to think creatively and to be reflective is essential as a residential child care practitioner. Those dedicated and protected times have led us to new approaches to our work as well as personal artistic masterpieces.
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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