Contact
Quality4Children
z.Hd. Mag. Elisabeth Ullmann-Gheri
Wolkensteingasse 2
A-6020 Innsbruck
Email: office@quality4children.org
Child and youth care practitioners need supportive framework conditions and the required competencies to fulfil their complex roles. They must be well-prepared and equipped with the right attitudes, knowledge, and skills to provide quality support to families and care for children.
Child and youth care practitioners in family strengthening and alternative care services play an essential role in achieving positive outcomes for children and young people. They support vulnerable families in complex situations or provide specialized care to children and young people all of whom experienced some degree of adversity and trauma.
They need access to regular one-on-one reflection and other learning and development opportunities. L&D for CYC practitioners involves ensuring that individuals make the most of their daily work experiences, benefit from interactions with peers and other colleagues, and take the initiative to find out things for themselves.
Our L&D for CYC Practitioners approach is underpinned by these five key principles:
- Competency-focused: The L&D approach aims at strengthening the practitioner in their role to provide quality care to children and young people by further developing the required competencies, so that they can unfold their potential and give their best.
- Ongoing: The practitioner never stops learning; they learn all the time, whether they realize it or not.
- Multi-modal: The practitioner learns in many different ways, not just by attending training courses. We learn as we do our daily jobs, interact with people, and discover new things.
- Learner-centric: The practitioner is in control of their own learning and development and cannot expect to be provided with everything they need to learn. They also need to take the initiative themselves to grow and develop.
- Highly reflective: The practitioner needs to take the time to think about what they have been doing, to ensure that they become aware of what they have learned and how they are improving, and what more they need to do to improve further.
Relational Child and Youth Care Practice
There is no other person who is so present in the lives of children and young people as their caregiver – the person who is there when they wake up and go to bed, as well as during all the in-between moments during the day. The caregiver provides care that is immediate, as it is grounded in the present experiencing of everyday moments, as they happen – within the life space.
It is in these everyday moments, which may appear insignificant to others, that caregivers interact in ways to help children and young people experience themselves and others, in different and positive ways. This way of interacting and relating with others requires a special attention to what happens in the in-between moments; it is an intentional awareness of self, others and the space in between them. This is the space that Garfat (2018) calls “the in-between between us”, where the caregiver creates moments in which children and young people feel that they matter.
Relational practice creates experiences that encourage people to think about and live their lives differently, as they are living it. It is not simply a set of skills or techniques, but a unique way of being with children and young people, their families and communities. Working from a relational perspective, the caregiver continually attends to the space between themselves and others as something that is co-created. This attention to the meaning that enfolds within the space between them and others can also be called reflective practice.
In this way of being with others, both parties must experience relational safety and connectedness. From a relational perspective, the relationship is the intervention.
Relational care is not something the caregiver does to or for children and young people. It is who the caregiver is in the present moment and how their presence is felt by others. Relational practice, according to Gerry Fewster (in Garfat et al, 2018) “is not only a different perspective; it is a different pathway, across a very different terrain, in search of a very different destination”.
Our training programmes are built around three competency portfolios – for family strengthening workers, caregivers, and youth development support. All of them are based in the Relational Child and Youth Care Practice’s body of knowledge, which in some geographical context equals to Social Pedagogy.
Relational child and youth care practice emphasizes the role of the caregiver/practitioner as being in-the-moment with children and young people, experiencing their lives and living with them as it unfolds. It is an approach which is inclusive, rights-based, and trauma-informed.
Support Roles
To enable and facilitate continuous learning and development, there are four main roles to support the learner on their continuous learning journey. For all four of them, specific training programmes are available, either online, blended, or face-to-face. Here you find a short description of each of the L&D support roles:
L&D facilitator
The role of local L&D facilitators is to deliver training workshops for CYC practitioners in their organization. They contextualize the training materials and deliver them in the local language. They facilitate according to the learning paradigm of a learner-centric and competency-based approach. This implies very interactive and participatory methodologies. In the Train-the-Facilitator (TTF) Programme, they prepare themselves for their role. The TTF is a blended learning programme, including an online part and a face-to-face workshop.
L&D support person
The role of the L&D support person is to accompany the individual practitioner on their L&D journey, in the light of the competencies described in the Competency Portfolio. They will need to have regular one-on-one meetings with the caregiver, usually in person, and develop a trusting relationship over time. In each programme, location or unit, one or two staff members are identified who want to take on the L&D support role. They participate in the L&D Support Staff Training which consists of an online programme as well as a 3-day face-to-face workshop.
CYC mentor
Mentors can play an important role in supporting and encouraging CYC practitioners on their learning journey by providing them with guidance and continuous encouragement regarding their day-to-day child care tasks. Our model of mentoring closely follows the relational CYC model of change, articulated by Thom Garfat (2019), so that mentoring is a mirror of the change principles employed by CYC practitioners in their work with children. Six elements of growth and change are identified and provide the CYC mentor with a structure for the principles of mentoring. Selected practitioners to take on a mentoring role and are offered preparation and support in the CYC Mentor Training Programme.
Line manager
One of the main responsibilities of line managers and supervisors of caregivers and other CYC practitioners is provide them with the conditions they need to thrive. They need to provide a nurturing learning environment, which includes ensuring that practitioners can invest adequate time to learn and have access to the resources they need. It also means that at least one person in the programme is trained as L&D Support and has the time required to meet with each practitioner regularly to provide L&D support. Therefore, line managers need a good understanding of the characteristics of relational child and youth care. There are short and longer orientation programmes available for them.
Training Workshops to implement the L&D Approach for CYC Practitioners
- Train-the-L&D Facilitator: 12 hours online sessions and one week face-to-face workshop within half a year; can also be done fully online if required; available in English.
- Train-the-L&D Facilitator to deliver the L&D Support Staff Training: 9-hour online programme to capacitate L&D facilitators to run the L&D support staff training; available in English and French.
- Train-the-L&D Support Staff: Three-day training workshop; delivered by the local L&D facilitator or by our trainers in English and French, if required.
- Train-the-Child and Youth Care Mentor: One week training workshop to capacitate caregivers and other CYC practitioners for a mentoring role; delivered by the local L&D facilitator or by our trainers in English, if required.
- Initial Training Programme for Caregivers: 25-days training workshop programme for caregivers; delivered by the local L&D facilitator or by our trainers in English, if required.
- Initial Training Programme to Support Youth Development: Two-week training workshop to strengthen staff who care for and/or support young people, such as caregivers or youth development workers; delivered by the local L&D facilitator or by our trainers in English, if required.
- Initial Training Programme for Family Strengthening Workers: Two one-week training workshops, one focusing on family empowerment, one on community empowerment for family empowerment; delivered by the local L&D facilitator or by our trainers in English, if required.
- Leaving Care Training Workshop: One-week workshop as a “train-the-trainer”, including a care leaver as trainer; available face-to-face or online in English.
- Sexual- and Reproductive Health: Two-day training workshop in English; delivered by the local L&D facilitator or by our trainers in English.
- Preventing Self-Harm and Suicide in Children and Young People: Two-day workshop in English; also as a train-the-trainer available.
To read more details about each of the training programmes, please click here: Description of L&D for CYC Practitioner Training Programmes.
The training workshops for the different child and youth care practitioners groups (family strengthening workers, caregivers, and youth workers) support the development of sets of prioritized competencies and introduce the learner to the learner-centric approach. The content can be adjusted to the specific requirements of the organization or group of participants, depending on which competencies they want/need to strengthen.
For all trainings, Facilitator and Participants Guides are available in English; for some of them in other languages such as French, Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish.
Besides the full implementation of the L&D approach for CYC Practitioners, we can deliver any of the trainings as well as similar workshops to strengthen individual competencies directly to practitioners and other stakeholders, as required. Examples are: Parenting styles, Positive Discipline, Child safeguarding, Prevention of Suicide and Self-Harm, Self-Care of the Caregiver, Crisis intervention, and others.
Materials we use
The L&D Approach for CYC Practitioners materials were developed – in a co-creative and participatory process – within a 5-year project financed by SOS Children’s Villages International. The approach was piloted and then rolled out via a Train-the-Facilitator model in around 40 countries worldwide. So far, around 350 facilitators and support staff were trained and over 2500 practitioners have actively participated in the training programmes for caregivers delivered locally.
Through this approach, materials and content are contextualized and delivered in the local language. Internal evaluations as well as a collaboration with the University in Tunis have given first scientific evidence of positive impact on the participating caregivers.