22
ratings
Children raised by their birth families will have their lives recorded in the memories of those around them, by their family, by those who love them. A consistent caregiver not only provides a stable foundation for children to spread their roots and grow, they also provide a stable external narrative. Children and young people in care will also have their lives recorded by those around them but the difference is that for many children in care, especially those on long term care orders, those around them are constantly changing and so that external narrative comes from a huge list of authors, all carrying different opinions and motives. This external narrative can paint an unfair and unbalanced picture of a child. The lives of children and young people in care are narrated on paper and on electronic systems such as CHARMS. Although foster carers will record a child’s journey in their memory, when a child moves on from them, those memories stay in the minds of the foster carer, whilst their paper narrative sticks with them. This course will explore how children are portrayed on paper with a focus on the power of blankets statements and labels, encouraging caregivers and professionals to narrate a child’s life positively rather than focussing on what a child has said or done wrong. Scott will also pull on his own life experiences, presenting some of his own files, reflecting on the way he was written about as a child.
Unlimited Duration
12 March 2021
Course Curriculum
- Introduction and Overview 00:00:00
- Safeguarding: The Systems Focus On The Negative 00:00:00
- Opinions, Facts and Labels – Part 1 00:00:00
- Opinions, Facts and Labels – Part 2 00:00:00
- The Child’s Narrative 00:00:00
- Capturing A Child’s Voice 00:00:00
- Accessing Care Files: A Care Leavers Perspective 00:00:00
- Summary 00:00:00
- Evaluation – Capturing The Journey Unlimited
Excellent
A true tool to further halo a child now and in their future
Capturing the Journey
This course encourages you to expand on what is required in recordings about a child in your care to highlight the true nature of the child, to demonstrate an understanding of them as individuals and to embrace their differences and experiences. It will make you question and improve best practices in an attempt to reflect the child in a open minded and honest approach without being judgemental, prejudicial or making assumptions about them. This is another thought provoking course from someone who truly understands from the child’s perspective and should be completed by everyone who works with children.
Great Course
Its good to see things from a child prospective
they are factual and to the point
this talks about issues from both sides of the fence, with a common sense approach highlighting methods and peoples attempts to justifying the methods but then advocating to look for more modern methods
A revelation!
I have completed two courses this week, Growing up in care. Lived experience and Capturing the Journey. I am a teacher and a panel member and I honestly feel that these courses and my reflections following them will shape my practice going forward more than any other course I have ever done. I am Looking forward to my next course, as I feel I have learnt so much and been made to think about things in a whole new way. Thank you so much
Section 31 training
Fantastic, real life experiences to listen and reflect on.
capturing the journey
Interesting course – thought provoking for good practice in recording
Capturing The Journey is a wonderful course.
This course has been so informative and has really helped me to think about how children are spoken about on all paperwork, meetings etc.
capturing the journey
i found this thought provoking and quite moving .Even though I realise that I’m certainly on the right path with my notes-Scott has helped me to think further into the implications of our documented fragments of young peoples lives.
Capturing the Journey
Excellent course containing practical advice to enhance my practice
Great insight to a childs thinking
Really informative and direct to the point, really does teach us what it’s like from a child prospective
capturing the journey
easy to listen to and learned a lot from this
Capturing the journey
Excellent content , presented in a direct and thought provoking manner.
How to keep their memories
This was such an insight into how we write our logs! I’m now putting little references in there for the child to read when they do!
Capturing the Journey
An excellent reminder to hold the whole child in mind (an make sure the others do too) not just a catalogue of experiences and behaviours.
Capturing the Journey
A very informative course – particularly relating to the perspective and narrative of the child/young person. Very clearly communicated.
I felt there were issues with this advice.
Whilst I agree that positivity about the child is important and that this needs to be recorded, there’s an issue with trying to avoid the negative.
“I am finding Boris challenging” allows SWs to undermine the carer and assume that they are the one who is struggling. It excuses the SW from putting support in place for the child and potentially can be used to break a placement down, which is more damaging to the child.
Presenting the child’s negative behaviour in an incident report protects the Carer. In a Residential restraining is often more forgivable, because in truth, SS don’t have anywhere else to put the kid. But as a Foster Carer, even when the kid is throwing punches and injuring other children, the SWs will look to blame the Foster Carer for using restraint. As a Foster Carer, you have to evidence why you felt it was necessary to restrain at that time and that requires evidencing the negative behaviour.
By evidencing negative behaviour, the children receive support quicker. If a child is behaving, then SS overlook them. So you have to draw attention to every negative that you can in order to get the children the support they need. This may lead to them having negative reports to look back on, but it may well be what gets them the therapy they need before they hit 18.
Hello Mark, Thankyou for your review. Whilst creating this course I was always mindful of why, as you say, documenting negative behaviours is important in regards to safeguarding yourself, those around you and indeed the child and also how there is a need to label to some degree because unfortunately thresholds for support such as CAHMS are high and these labels can often be a ticket into such support and services. This is why, throughout the course I reiterated the point that those things still need to be documented and that it is a requirement to do so. This is not about ignoring the negative or hiding it to protect a child as that would create it’s own set of negative consequences. It is more about finding the positives too and making sure that they are also heard so that a balanced picture can be painted and to enable a child to be better matched to placement. I agree with many of your points and I totally understand how frustrating it can be trying to get the right support for the children in your care, safeguarding yourself and how often foster carers can feel that negatives and problems are the only things that are ever heard. Afterall, you would not call the CSW or your SSW every time a child does something really good but you are required to when something really bad happens. I would never advise that anybody ignores or overlooks negative behaviours and that was never stated. The overall message is about being balanced and fair wherever possible and trying to capture who that child really is. It is not about writing positives INSTEAD of negatives but writing positives AS WELL as negatives to make it balanced. I feel that you have missed the underlining messages within this course. However all feedback is good feedback and so I will edit the summary section of this course to make those messages even clearer. As you say, in these systems we work in it is often a label or a diagnosis that is needed to access additional support and services but those labels alone do not define who a child is and so it is important to try and capture the rest of that child’s identity rather than just stamping labels to get a service provided.
A detailed explanation
This was a detailed course, with a lot of thoughtful consideration. I do think in practice that whilst it makes sense to include the positives, getting support put in place for the children often requires us to stress the negatives. This then ends up being recorded. This may look bad on the child’s file, but without doing this, they don’t get access to things like therapy, or EHCPs etc. It’s a shame the course didn’t touch on this.
Capturing the Journey
This was an Excellent Course. Explains Everything About A Child/Children in Care.
Capturing the Journey
Thank you Scott for your insight into how the narrative around a child can be altered so we stay child focused and think of the meanings behind the behaviours.
Capturing the journey course captures attention
Scott has created another thought provoking course which examines what is written about children who have experiences of foster care and challenges us to respect the power of the pens that we hold to influence the narrative of children’s lives. The course asks us to consider how much focus is given to the positives and how they are celebrated in those narratives as much as the essential notes about concerns and health. Are we conveying the essence of the child and their identity and would they recognise themselves when they read their files in adulthood? He reworks a personal example of an incident from his own file and then rewrites a perspective that may have been in his heart and mind at the time to show how differently the recording may have been. This is a great course for long term carers who may need to review their skills as well as new carers who are just learning about their role and responsibilities for ‘capturing the journey’ of their child on a permanent and powerful recording of their life.
Capturing The Journey
A good reminder of how a child’s records and the way they are written can have a long lasting impact on decisions made for a child. This course should encourage all carers to understand the importance of written records and ensure that they complete them in a way which genuinely reflects the child who they are caring for.