Listen to thisWhat helped to make this home ‘a star’ for us was ...
(a) Staff had a culture of learning
This was a staff
group with a culture characterised by learning from one another and from
others about good practice. In describing what they did with young people
during the course of the days, weeks and years they were resident, staff
demonstrated how they operated at the frontier of young people’s needs. They
knew how to handle transference of anger from a child to a member of staff
after a rejection at home; they knew how to help a young woman out of severe
depression and a serious overdose, even though none of them had
psychological training or formal social work qualifications. Their sense of
effectiveness contributed to their self-esteem: they knew what they were
doing and why they were doing it, and could appreciate the small and large
successes they had with young people. Importantly they were able to
challenge others’ practice – with a social worker who wanted to move a young
person out of the home when she reached 16, they cited a coffee-stained copy
of volume 4 guidelines to The Children Act 1989 (Department of Health,
1991), as a reason for keeping the child until she was ready to move. They
kept her until she had turned 18. They knew the young people so well that
they were able to learn with schools how to continue to educate even the
unruly, and to learn with health services staff how to provide appropriate
health care. All staff made time for talking to others inside and outside
the home.
(b) Management was supportive of the staff group
Staff were supported in their good practice by a line manager, wholly
committed to residential care who spent regular time (a morning once a
month) in the home. The senior manager, also, had experience of residential
care and regarded working towards a plan for all children in need that
included residential provision, as a very important part of the management
task. The director in this authority was accessible, prepared to hear and
respect a plausible argument from any member of staff.
(c) Work to improve network communication was an ongoing and
regular occurrence
Staff also sought to improve communication
with the network. For education, this meant the authority, and the schools.
With health, staff felt that local GPs were possibly easier to educate about
the needs of young people in care, than were other health services, e.g.
psychological services. Mental health services for young people were very
thin on the ground (National Priorities Guidance 1999/00 -2001/02
(Department of Health, 1998b) highlights the need for increased provision).
Relationships with the police, the voluntary housing sector, and neighbours
were all good because the staff in this home regarded making proper
relationships with these local people as being as much a part of their
ongoing task, as having a clear plan for meeting each individual child’s
needs, and working with the group of young people as a whole. In other words
this was a staff group which regarded the network around each young person
and the home as being important. People came into this home regularly, and
staff went out of it, often on their own time, to visit families, to regular
meetings at schools or to talk to aggrieved neighbours, even though they
rarely got mileage allowance for distant visits.
(d) Staff made time to reflect about work
If
residential care is to be effective in meeting the needs of young people,
then carers have to know what these needs are before a placement begins.
This is often dependent on the field social worker who sees residential care
(and a particular home) as being in a position to meet these needs, and who
in most areas is responsible for the care plan. Unfortunately, field social
workers are not always in a position to make a complete assessment of a
child’s needs at the point when a child needs accommodation. Sometimes, in
emergency, there is no plan. It is therefore extremely important that field
social workers and carers should work together as soon after a placement is
made in assessing the full range of a young person’s needs. Ideally they
should work together to identify their goals for the young person and for
his or her family, in line with the Looking After Children guidelines, and
the Quality Protects objectives for children. Goals should be specific
enough to guide the immediate work to be done, and should identify the
longer term goals and the hoped-for outcomes of the placement. Plans should
also identify who does what, and when and how the immediate work will be
reviewed, to check that field social worker and care staff are not working
at cross purposes. Time for reflection should be built into any plan to
allow each set of staff and the child and family to learn from one another
about what has changed. This applies to formal reviews, which serve
different purposes from informal communications, which will be much
strengthened if field social workers and care staff are working together
towards the same ends. In more informal contacts, by phone or in person,
what has gone well as well as what has gone badly should be learned from, if
the professionals most closely involved are really going to meet complex
needs. However, to do this, both field social workers and direct carers need
management support: if there is no workload space to reflect, as part of the
ongoing task, then decisions will be taken `on the hoof’, and staff
concerned may well undermine one another’s work and begin to mirror the
family splits which brought the young person into care. The staff in the
home which was `a star’ for us used the actual research meetings (one
morning each month) to reflect on the progress of the residents, and were
determined to continue with such meetings with their line manager once the
research was completed.
References
Department of Health (1991) The
Children Act Guidance and Regulations, Volume 4: Residential Care,
London: HMSO
Department of Health (1998b) Modernising Health and Social Services: National Priorities Guidance: 1999/00 – 2001/2
Archer, L. (2002) What Works in Residential Care: Making it Work. Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care, Vol 1, pp. 8-9
