In May swallows flew in from distant shores, a harbinger of the arrival in June of the goodenoughcaring Journal. On June 15th, 2013, issue 13 of the goodenoughcaring Journal will nest in the eaves of a computer near you. Incubating in this summer's Journal are articles abundant with recollections and thoughts of the world of childhood and the role of adults in that world. In this issue we have articles by Darren Coyne, Jane Dalgleish, Moira Devlin, Roger Lewis, Jeremy Millar, George Orwell, Joan Pritchard, Charles Sharpe, John Stein, Marie Tree and Werner van der Westhuizen. Further news of these and other articles still in gestation will appear here within a few days.
Wednesday, 29 May 2013
Friday, 10 May 2013
Conference update : From Maria to Munro Safeguarding Children : Procedures, Regulation or Nurturing Relationships? A Child Care History Network Conference
The Child Care History Network invites you to its summer conference on July 25th, 2013 at the Barns Conference Centre of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust at Toddington near Cheltenham. The theme of the conference From Maria to Munro Safeguarding Children : Procedures, Regulation or Nurturing Relationships? is intended to provide a springboard for some fundamental thinking about child protection. For the last forty years child protection and safeguarding have dominated social work with children and their families. The conference will look at how this thinking has developed and ask whether it is time to move on to a different way of viewing ways of meeting children's needs.
How do we best protect children? Is safeguarding still the top priority? Should we place a greater emphasis on nurture? What else should we be doing? As with all CCHN events, delegates shall not only be considering historical developments but also looking at how we can apply what we have learnt from history.
Among the speakers who will be presenting to the conference are : Sir Roger Singleton, Chair of the Independent Safeguarding Authority and Mark Smith, Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Work at the University of Edinburgh and Ray Jones, Professor of Social Work at the Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education, run jointly by Kingston University and St George's, University of London.
As well as the presentations, the day will provide opportunities for delegates to participate and share thinking on the theme.
The fees for the conference including lunch and refreshments are £55 for members and £70 for non-members.
To register for the conference and for further programme details go to CCHN website
Here is the conference programme.
10.30 Arrival, registration and refreshments
11.00 Welcome and introduction to morning session: David Lane
11.15 Plenary: Child protection and safeguarding
12.00 Sir Roger Singleton: Protection systems: where next?
12.45 Discussion
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Introduction to afternoon session: Charles Sharpe
14.15 Mark Smith: Bringing up children: a pedagogical perspective
15.00 Discussion
15.15 Refreshments
15.45 Panel and discussion: Where next?
16.30 Charles Sharpe: In conclusion
16.45 End of conference
This news item first appeared on the home page of the goodenoughcaring.com website on May 10th, 2013
Friday, 3 May 2013
"From Winnicott to the Naughty Step" on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday, May 4th, 2013 .
On Saturday, May 4th, at 8pm the broadcaster and researcher, Anne Karpf, talks about her research on Donald Winnicott's broadcasts on the BBC. Her research was funded by the Winnicott Trust. The programme will include original archival material from the broadcasts and will include interviews with Winnicott scholars and others who have been influenced by him. The programme will be available on BBC iplayer for a short period after the broadcast.
This news item first appeared on the home page of goodenoughcaring at http://www.goodenoughcaring.com on Friday May 3rd, 2013.
Thursday, 11 April 2013
From Maria to Munro Safeguarding Children : Procedures, Regulation or Nurturing Relationships?
On July 25th 2013, the Child Care History Network is holding a conference at the Planned Environment Therapy Trust at Toddington near Cheltenham. The theme of the conference From Maria to Munro Safeguarding Children : Procedures, Regulation or Nurturing Relationships? is intended to provide a springboard for some fundamental thinking about child protection. For the last forty years child protection and safeguarding have dominated social work with children and their families. The conference will look at how this thinking has developed and ask whether it is time to move on to a different way of viewing ways of meeting children's needs.
How do we best protect children? Is safeguarding still the top priority? Should we place a greater emphasis on nurture? What else should we be doing? As with all CCHN events, delegates shall not only be considering historical developments but also looking at how we can apply what we have learnt from history.
Among the speakers who will be presenting to the conference are Sir Roger Singleton, Chair of the Independent Safeguarding Authority and Mark Smith, Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Work at the University of Edinburgh.
As well as the presentations, the day will provide opportunities for delegates to participate and share thinking on the theme.
The date of the conference and further conference details will appear on this page and on the CCHN website in the very near future.
CCHN has provided us with the following rationale for the conference :
Safeguarding Children : achievement or rhetoric ?
Safeguarding children is officially defined as
The process of protecting children from abuse or neglect, preventing impairment of their health and development, and ensuring they are growing up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care that enables children to have optimum life chances and enter adulthood successfully. Ofsted (2005)
The claim made for the concept of "safeguarding children" is that it is comprehensive and goes beyond what its proponents describe as "basic child protection." The new view is that "safeguarding children" deals with a wider spectrum of issues than what we have come to know as child protection. Safeguarding children, it is suggested, provides effective child protection where the latter is only a part of wider work to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. Safeguarding children also demands that all agencies and individuals should aim to be proactive in safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children so that the need to protect children from harm is reduced. (Department of Education, 2013).
In our conference we will trace the narrative of the history of what has come to be known as "safeguarding children" and we will also hope to examine the claim that "safeguarding children" really does represent a paradigm shift from what was termed "child protection" to the extent that it will help all children and make all children safer.
From the Maria Colwell Report of 1974 through to the Munro Review of Child Protection in 2011 there is a sense in which "child protection" has grown into a huge empire in the social work school of professional thought. Certainly it has engendered a continuous production line of different policies, and procedures. This process is still alive and working among us without, it seems, ever creating a situation with which we can rest more easily. More importantly there are still many children who live in poverty, who suffer neglect, who fail to flourish, who do not enjoy good health and there are still children who are the victims of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
It has been suggested that the problem with child protection is that in a way it has become an institution with some of the flaws characteristic of big institutions. It was born out of professional failure and the tragic death of a child and it sustains itself in the aftermath of further tragedies by producing literature and teaching that speaks of "imperatives" which in turn cultivates a blame culture when things go wrong. It is a system which says, after the event. "Why didn't we do a risk assessment?" rather than saying a priori, "Now have we made sure our children have what they need to see them happily through today?"
There are those who would argue that the formal safeguarding risk assessment procedures we have in place to safeguard children are too impersonal and inorganic. Too often they disregard the views of children and parents alike. They would suggest that it might be better to approach "child protection" in a fundamentally different way by providing unhappy children with the kind of natural nurturing relationships they need with adults: relationships uncluttered by the requirements of regulation and procedure. This of course might necessitate not only the provision of means to train people to develop their already naturally held nurturing capabilities in order to extend these to the care of other people's children. For this scenario to flourish there may be a need to cultivate a more nurturing social climate within our wider community if children are to be safeguarded.
On the surface safeguarding children appears to be straightforward: something that should just happen yet it evokes contentious and complex issues as well as many ideas about how these would be best approached. Our hope is the conference will stimulate you to pursue, discuss and debate these ideas as well as the many others that will arise during the day.
Saturday, 23 March 2013
Digital life story work
We have been informed of a new BAAF Publications book by Simon Hammond and Neil J Cooper, Digital life story work : Using technology to help young people make sense of their experiences which is a practical guide aiming to bring the benefit of life story work - most often undertaken with younger children - to young people and adolescents. With the use of free software, smartphones and camcorders the authors demonstrate how digital technology can support and become an integral instrument of life story work. It is the authors' intention to show how new digital technology can be used to further the therapeutic process of helping young persons build a relationship with a caring adult while reflecting on their lives.
About the authors
Dr Simon P Hammond has contributed a number of articles to the goodenoughcaring Journal and he is a lecturer in Psychology at the University of East Anglia. Simon developed the idea of integrating the use of digital technology with life story work while he was a residential child care worker in Sheffield.
Dr Neil J Cooper is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of East Anglia.
For more information about Digital life story work view the BAAF catalogue at BAAF
Archive of the Year Award for the Planned Environment Therapy Trust
On Saturday, February 23rd at the "Who Do You Think You Are? Live" exhibition in London ('the biggest family history event in the world'), the BBC broadcaster, historian, and Editor-in-Chief of 'Your Family History' magazine Dr. Nick Barratt presented the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre with the prestigious Your Family History national "Archive of the Year" award. Past winners have included the Surrey County Council History Centre, and Kent County Council's Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre.
In presenting the award, Dr. Barratt quoted from one of the nominations: "Not only do they collect and curate a range of small yet important archival material and collections, including oral histories, but they also provide a space for people to share memories and experiences relating to environment therapy - so continue to undertake therapeutic work today. All this is done on a small budget, showing that you don¹t need millions of pounds to make a difference to people's lives."
Receiving the award for the Archive and Study Centre were archivist Craig Fees and team members Gemma Geldart and Chris Long, who were core team members of the award winning "Other Peoples' Children" project. PETT was so impressed with the work of the team and with the very real difference it made to people's lives that when the funding for the project came to an end, the Trust asked them to stay on, and to continue to develop their work with former children, staff and families from residential therapeutic communities, many of which are now closed.
The team at Trust see this award as an endorsement of the work it has been able to do, especially with the help of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant during its"Therapeutic Living With Other Peoples' Children: An oral history of residential therapeutic child care" project in 2010-2011. As well as students and young people, the team at PETT has been able to work closely with a number of people who were children in care, their families, and friends; and to discover and demonstrate how remarkably 'therapeutic' archives can be in practice.
More information about this event, Archive and Study Centre and other aspects of the work of the Planned Environment Trust can be found at PETT Archive of the Year Award WinnersThis news item first appeared on the home page of the goodenoughcaring website on February 26th, 2013
Residential child care in practice.
The Policy Press has written to us announcing the publication of Residential child care in practice Making a difference by Mark Smith, Leon Fulcher and Peter Doran. The book is about residential child care practice beginning from the standpoint that residential child care involves both children and adults sharing a common life space in which the quality of the relationships between the people involved is key. It is a very practical book which aims at being of interest and value to a worldwide range of practitioners and managers as well as to students at different academic levels. It draws on the ideas and traditions of a variety of theoretical and practical fields of thought including child and youth care and social pedagogy.
The authors of the book, all experienced practitioners and academics, are : Mark Smith, a regular contributor to the goodenoughcaring Journal, who worked for 20 years in residential homes and schools before becoming a university teacher and is now Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Edinburgh ; Dr Leon Fulcher, another contributor to the goodenoughcaring Journal, has for over 40 years practiced in, and taught, residential child care across the world and is now the Chair of the the International Child Care and Youth Care Network; Peter Doran, who recently retired as the Chief Executive Officer of a residential school in Scotland, having spent his career in residential child care and who, since his retirement, has undertaken work for The Scottish Government on the education of children with complex needs.
The book will be reviewed in the next issue of the goodenoughcaring Journal. For more information about Residential child care in practice Making a difference go to The Policy Press
This news item first appeared on the homepage of the goodenoughcaring website on January 25th, 2013.
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