Dear Colleagues,
A warm welcome to our newest members: Gareth Wall of SICs Ltd, Evert Wilbrenninck, and our first Italian member Luca Mingarelli, who is President of the therapeutic community Rosa Deiventi Group, and involved with the Il Nodo Group.
The National Centre is the only free alliance committed to creating dialogue across the residential and fostering sectors. Our recent training events at Essex and Kent Universities demonstrated our ability to bring together residential and foster carers to reflect on and share best practice:
1. Our collaboration with the University of Essex, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies and Childhood First offered our first ‘Social care Active education event’ entitled ‘What do I care, understanding my place in the system of care’.This took place at Essex Business School on April 14/15th.
This was a 2 day event providing ‘accelerated professional development, which used a mixture of keynote presentations from Peter Wilson, Lisa Cherry, John Burton and Liz Huband, alongside workshops run by Dan Neale (Childhood first), Chris Nicholson ( Essex CPS) and Steph Davies (Mulberry Bush). These talks were offered within a framework of experiential reflective groups designed to enable participants to explore the complex personal, professional and organisational issues that are enacted through living with traumatised children and young people. The 19 participants included a mix of residential and foster carers.
2. On April 21st we held our third SE ‘best practice’ event in partnership with University of Kent, Centre for Child Protection, entitled ‘cutting edge work with traumatised young people’. The day conference attracted 120 delegates from across Local Authorities, residential and fostering services. My thanks to all the staff of CCP, who are so supportive of the National Centre, and make the organisation of the event feel seamless.
See attached programme. Keynote speakers included Mark Kerr who gave an overview of policy development s affecting the residential and fostering sectors. Richard Rose spoke on ‘Sharing stories, sharing life: the role of therapeutic life story work’, and Dr David Shemmings and Dr Jane Reeves who gave presentations on ‘Pushing the boundaries- can technology help traumatised young people, the DfE innovation project’ and ‘helping young people stop repeating what they can’t remember.’ The afternoon provided a range of interactive workshops.
3. Our work to develop a Northern Reflective Group Forum has advanced and we are delighted to be running our first ‘introduction to Reflective Practice Group for our Northern and ICHA members on July 13th at UCLAN. My thanks to Ros Denby of Sandcastle Care and Zachari Duncalf of UCLAN who have been so supportive and nurturing of this idea, and have helped make it all possible. (See attached flyer)
4. The next edition of our own ‘the therapeutic care journal https://thetcj.org.uk is published on June 1st. with excellent articles from members, Gabriel Echsteiller of Thempra Social Pedaggy CiC, Keith White, Cyril Ives and Evert Wilbrenninck and others. Please add the NC logo (attached ) and TCJ web address to your promotional information and tell friends, colleagues to sign up for the newsletter, the bigger the support, the bigger our influence.
5. The 2016 Advisory Group will take place at the Mulberry Bush School, Linden House Annexe on July 1st from 10.30 – 1 pm (with lunch). You are also invited to stay on for the Mulberry Bush Organisation AGM at 2pm. You will have received an e-shot about this. If you would like to attend please email me as I have to arrange catering and ensure on-site safeguarding protocols.
6. Finally, Dr Yvon Guest and I look forward to our next Research Group meeting is on July 7th at the above address. If members would like the opportunity to present on any completed or ongoing aspect of research into the needs of looked after children, please contact myself at my email address below.
7. See also attached the IRCT best practice forum on June 24th.
Kind regards,
John