This week, we’ll be featuring an interview series with Vanessa Rogers, an experienced and highly regarded teacher and youth worker, and author of the recent book, Cyberbullying: Activities to…
School is back in full swing this week, and with it come new challenges for students – especially those who have difficulty coping with change, stress…
“Foster carers play an absolutely crucial role in the child care system. The vast majority of looked after children live in foster care. Carers are there at the sharp end, dealing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with all of the consequences of abuse, neglect or whatever family difficulties have led children to be looked after. Yet in spite of this, in my view foster carers are underpaid and often overlooked and under-appreciated.”
“The introduction of market and subsequently business principles into care environments since the 1990s has meant that its associated language and terminology has deeply permeated current management ‘speak’. It has always intrigued me when working with leaders and managers in my role as an educator, mentor and manager, how easily these trip off the tongue or become part of our everyday language and applied to practice often in an uncritical way.”
“Poor supervision can create collusion, indifference or add to the stress in the workforce. Practitioners may leave or burn out and leave…A resilient and healthy workforce is well worth the investment in training supervisors.
“There are a variety of self-help techniques that the individual can use for their own sake…In addition to individual methods, there must be systems in place to secure good follow-up for personnel involved in critical incidents or in work with traumatized children over time.”
Author Liz Beddoe recently stopped by JKP’s London HQ to record a short video highlighting some of the key features of the new book, Best…
Children & Young People Now have featured a great article from JKP author, Dr Gillian Ruch, in which she argues that a focus on improving…
“Then came the opportunity to plan a new style of dementia care home, right in the heart of the catchment area, and the positive effects on relatives’ guilt and strain were palpable. [Relatives] visited more often and felt considerably more involved. But there were tensions too; relatives were often dissatisfied with staff, and staff felt that relatives were more of a problem than the residents. It became clear that the relationship between staff and relatives needed just as much attention as that between staff and residents.”
‘Placing the relationship at the heart of practice means recognising that, as we suggest in the Introduction, ”despite all the continuing upheavals in policy and procedure, social work [will] always begin and end with a human encounter between two or more people” and that this encounter, or relationship as it develops, is the medium through which the social work task can be carried out. Social work is never a neutral activity but can, at its best, offer a vulnerable or distressed person the experience of being valued, supported and understood – perhaps for the first time.’