We have been working with Siobhan Maclean and Wendy Roberts to develop Reflective Practice to enhance the Effective Child Protection work.
With thanks to the relevant staff for their input into the work and your willingness to share your experiences.
Last year I was fortunate to be able to develop my own reflective skills further with an opportunity to write a reflective article for the Child Abuse Review Journal.
Last year I came across some training being held by Siobhan Maclean and BASW called ‘Reflective Connections’. Due to our interest in reflective practice I immediately wanted to sign up to learn about this new model and see if it was something that we may be able to utilise in Gwynedd.
In the spirit of collaborative practice and reflective practice, we have brought members of each team together alongside the training department, to support us in the project to create our own reflective model for Gwynedd.
I’m sure that we can all safely say that we didn’t see the pandemic having such a profound effect on our work and home lives. With the project, it initially felt that we were losing momentum, and that all the hard work of the past year was not going to be maintained. But we have adapted and found new ways of working, mirroring what is happening in social work across all fields.
Reflective practice has been a cornerstone of the Effective Child Protection project from the outset. The Practice Mentor has used individual mentoring and reflective practice groups to develop the capacity of workers to put some of the principles of Effective Child Protection into practice. This has worked very well for the project and the development of the role of the Practice Mentor.
When thinking ahead to what the future of the project may be, we considered that it would be of benefit to try and develop a learning package to support the sharing of knowledge and information within Gwynedd, across the North Wales region, and beyond.
This is the publication of the second project bulletin which gives a general overview of progress made, some of the learning so far, and our plans for the future.
Here is a short video to set the context for the project by the Cabinet Member for Children and Young People. The video also shares the experiences and perspectives of professionals in the field on what has taken place to work with families to identify the change needed to keep children safe.
This is the publication of the first bulletin of the project.
It outlines why the project was created and the framework in place to answer the question 'How do we know if our child protection work is effective?'