Working together to strengthen practice in residential child care: Laying the groundwork for change
Marc Blyth, Lead Learning Co-ordinator at Aberlour Children's Charity Sycamore Residential Service, which provides residential child care across Scotland, discusses how developing consistent, high-quality residential child care practice together as a workforce can be much less daunting than it initially feels.
"The time we invested helped to lay the groundwork for implementing the changes, but also supported our teams to progressively understand the changes in the way we would be working more and more before the practice profile was introduced.
It was key that our teams understood the aim from feedback was to enable them to improve and develop their practice, not to shame or blame people when their practice could have been better.
There was also the additional benefit of understanding and improving the wider team’s practice.
We knew our people were the golden thread that ran through this work, and we needed to spend the time to bring everyone along on our change journey.
We invested our time into preparation, which helped our people to get involved and feel invested in the approach."