National Centre News: July/August 2015

Dear Readers,

A warm welcome to our newest alliance members David Lane ( Independent Child Care Consultant), Elizabeth King ( Principal Psychologist, South Lanarkshire Council) and PACT ( Parents and Children Together), taking our membership to 75 organisations. 

See attached flyer for our mission, aims, core values statement and current membership list. Please circulate this across your networks to increase knowledge of our work.

The National Centre is the only free alliance committed to creating dialogue and sharing reflective therapeutic practice and research across the residential and fostering sectors.

  1. Our next event:
    ‘Pushing the Limits of Permanence’ residential child care and foster care conference.
    Thursday 24th September 2015, St. James’ Park, Newcastle City Centre. In collaboration with CELCIS, the Care Leavers Association and Care Forum Wales.This conference will provide thoughtful debate and provoke action to highlight the need for whole system change. Our aim is to create an authentic sense of belonging and real continuity and placement stability for children and young people within the care sector.

    See attached flyer and booking link
    : Please join us to support the event, and distribute this across your networks.
  1. The therapeutic care journal. We hope you will make use of this our online journal: https://thetcj.org.uk This provides an accessible on-line forum to submit and publish your thoughts, reflections, working notes, articles and papers to capture the ‘lived experience’ of living and working with children and young people.Our research group is also keen that we use the site to develop a ‘research register’ of research papers and links to research on meeting the needs of looked after children and young people.
  1.  In recent months there have been some excellent books on leadership published by members of the National Centre, these include: Adrian Ward’s ‘Leadership in residential child care’ (Smokehouse Press, 2014) and most recently John Burton’s ‘Leading good care’ (Jessica Kingsley, 2015). Continuing this discussion on appropriate models of leadership and the new Ofsted ‘quality standards’, our member Jonathan Stanley of NCERCC and ICHA offers the following paper: PASSIONATE RESIDENTIAL CHILD CARE lEADERSHIP AND THE QUALITY STANDARDS
  1. Finally, a note from Craig Fees: The majority of talks and presentations from the recent (extremely interesting and useful) Child Care History Network conference are now online: CHILDREN’S HOMES PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE: LEARNING FROM THE PAST TO MAKE THINGS BETTER FOR THE FUTURE
    OR
    go to http://www.cchn.org.uk and click through from the links on the home page.

Wishing you a restful summer, and looking forward to meeting on September 24th at St James’ Park Newcastle.

Kind regards

John Diamond

Permanence Conference Flyer

National Centre poster June 2015