Contact
Quality4Children
z.Hd. Mag. Elisabeth Ullmann-Gheri
Wolkensteingasse 2
A-6020 Innsbruck
Email: office@quality4children.org
Children need loving, nurturing, and stable relationships to develop in a holistic way and unfold their full potential. Ideally, they receive this loving and nurturing care through their family, embedded in a supportive community environment.
When families face challenges and their relationships become strained, the child protection system plays a crucial role in supporting parents. The primary goal is to assist them in improving the care they provide to their children and prevent a breakdown of these essential relationships.
The competence of social service workers who engage with these families – their attitudes, understanding, knowledge, and skills – is key to this process. They need to establish trusting relationships with family members and prioritize strengthening family relationships in their interventions.
When preventing separation is not possible and alternative care for a child becomes necessary, the approach to care must focus on relational child and youth care. Here, the relationship between the child and the caregiver is the heart of the intervention.
Caregivers in kinship, foster and family-like care settings, along with the practitioners and professionals who support them, are crucial for achieving positive outcomes for children and young people. Effective screening and recruitment, accessible support structures, and ongoing learning and development (L&D) opportunities are essential components of this process.
Millions of children and youth worldwide depend on care systems that currently do not prioritize their critical need for close relationships.
At Quality4Children, we believe that effective child and youth care begins with building strong connections. Any meaningful reform in child protection and out-of-home care must prioritize human relationships. Therefore, the awareness and competence of social care workers are key drivers of change and play a crucial role in achieving better outcomes for children and young people.
Strengthening practitioners and organizations in relational child and youth care practice is highly relevant for the following main reasons:
Improving the quality of care: Competent and empowered child and youth care (CYC) practitioners are essential to provide quality support to families and quality care to children and young people. Competency-based, continuous learning & development (L&D) helps organizations enhance the competence of their care and support workers.
Professionalizing child and youth care practice: Quality4Children offers organizations a framework and tools to strengthen their CYC practitioners through L&D opportunities. The approach has the potential to lead to national accreditation of the training programmes and external recognition of the CYC profession.
Supporting care reform: Improving child and youth care work with families and in alternative care services is a strategic goal for many countries and organizations. Training and retraining of the social care workforce is a key element in promoting care reform, resulting in positive changes that benefit children and young people.