Listen to thisSupervision has long been recognized as an essential component of effective Child and Youth Care practice. In fact, it is probably fair to say that supervision is or at least ought to be a central component of all disciplines engaged with young people and their families. In Child and Youth Care practice in particular the importance of supervision, and also the approach to supervision, is based on the construction of effective Child and Youth Care practice as a reflective activity; guidance in reflection strengthens that process immeasurably. Given that much of the workforce in child and youth-serving agencies and organizations is often young, relatively new to the concept of reflective practice and eager to receive guidance and feedback, the provision of supervision becomes, in my view, not just a matter of effective practice, but also an ethical obligation. Meeting this ethical obligation is made easier by virtue of the excellent material available on supervision in Child and Youth Care; the work of Frank Delano for example has consistently been great and always relatively easy to translate into practice. Others, notably Garfat, Mann-Feder and Krueger (and many others) have also provided excellent reflections/conceptual approaches and stories in this respect.
Logistically, on the other hand, meeting the ethical obligation of providing supervision has been much more tenuous. In far too many service settings, practitioners go for months without any offer of supervision beyond the more administrative type of meetings that might settle issues related to vacation time, performance concerns or other relatively trivial matters. Equally concerning is that many supervisors whose job it is to provide supervision to practitioners have themselves very limited training in how to do this. In so many cases, supervision is an ad hoc process often performed more as a way of checking in with one another than an approach to guided reflection. Moreover, if the supervisor is under pressure to attend meetings or deal with unrelated issues elsewhere, supervision meeting invariably become the last priority and are cancelled or rescheduled.
In fact, in spite of the recognition of its importance, there has been a long standing culture in many areas of our field to become complacent about its non-existence. This is why I think it is important that we consider an entirely different approach to supervision, either instead of what we have been doing or to complement what we are doing. I suggest that we take a serious look at developing supervision models that rely on external supervisors rather than supervisors who form part of the agency management structures. This is not, of course, a novel idea at all, and there are many places where external supervisors are already in use. In North America, however, external supervision has not taken hold in many settings, in part because of anxieties about what might go wrong.
External supervision models in North America have typically focused on executive type positions, where an executive leader within an agency hires an external supervisor either through her or his own funds or with the blessings and financial backing of the Board of Directors. What I want to argue in favour here, however, is a little different. I want to suggest that this external supervision model would be particularly useful in the context of residential care and treatment. In fact, external supervision is the common set up in residential group care facilities in Germany. Teams of practitioners are provided with the necessary resources to pay for a supervisor who can provide group or individual supervision depending on the need at any given time. The team can select a short list of possible candidates, choose its preference from amongst those short listed and then seek agency approval; the agency, in turn, typically maintain a veto right on that choice, but not the right to install an individual based on management preferences.
In the larger residential group care programs in Germany it is taken as a given that agency management could not possibly provide effective and meaningful supervision to front line staff; the contradictions between having the authority to fire workers and guiding them through some of their more challenging moments is too great. At the same time, there is a strong commitment to ensuring that practitioners have access to someone to guide them in their reflections, personal/professional development and also in their processing of traumatic or near-traumatic experiences on the job.
The benefits of external supervisors are many, and I think it is time for North Americans to get passed their professional arrogance and agency loyalties and consider doing what is necessary to provide practitioners with what everyone seems to agree is needed: skilled supervisors who are reliably present and attentive to the experiences of practitioners. A commitment to using external supervisors would allow for the development of a highly skilled group of external supervisors that is unencumbered by the everyday politics of agencies or employee-management relations. Moreover, it would then be possible to ensure that supervision unfolds consistent with the principles of Child and Youth Care practice, at least where it impacts primarily Child and Youth Care practitioners. It also guarantees that supervision actually happens, and practitioners can rely on having access to someone at regular intervals. Finally, an external supervision model allows for confidential reflections on themes and topics that otherwise might e suppressed or simply deemed too risky to bring up.
An external supervision model does not require the abandonment of internal supervisors altogether. These positions are still necessary and require access to ongoing professional development opportunities as well. With the external supervision model in place, however, internal supervisors can focus on some of the logistical aspects of managing a staff team more effectively. Most importantly, this would allow the internal supervisors to really focus on issues of team development and team dynamics, which often are not captured effectively in any supervision model.
It is unfortunate that the North American context of service provision is often structured along extremely competitive and territorial lines; agencies rarely cooperate within their own service sectors (they do often cooperate across service sectors), and prefer instead to create redundancies and inefficiencies in order to protect their turf. From a Child and Youth Care perspective, a related area of major concern is the ever-expanding workforce of casual workers, sometimes referred to as ‘relief workers’ or ‘contract staff’.
These are practitioners who are hired by agencies to be available for shifts on an on call basis, or whenever needed. In many agencies, these workers are hired with fewer pre-service qualifications and are provided with no supervision whatsoever. They also often are not invited to professional development or training events or even to team meetings. One would think given that most agencies have such casual workers it would make some sense to hire an external supervisor for several agencies in geographic proximity so that supervision could be provided to these practitioners as well. Sadly, this is not happening and children and youth in group care facilities across Canada and the US continue to be served (or dis-serviced) by practitioners who we hope know what they are doing. I often wonder whether ‘hoping they now what they are doing’ is good enough.
