What We're Up To
“I’m currently training to be a Childline counsellor, and your method of training was so engaging. It’s made the utmost difference to my understanding of children, and the way in which their brains and bodies differ.
I feel ready to continue positively and so much more knowledgeable with this role.”
Childline Course Trainee
Events Coming Up...
FREE online workshop: Supporting Children With Parental Separation & Divorce
The decision to separate or divorce is never made lightly when children and adolescents are involved.
You may still be working out how to tell your kids…
You may already be trying to help them adjust to this new reality.
Regardless, this is new territory (for everyone!), and knowing what to do or what to say – without making things worse – can be terrifying.
What should (and shouldn’t) you actually share with them?
How do you talk to them in ways that help them accept and process what’s happening?
And how do you ensure you help, when you know this change will hurt them?
‘Kids are resilient’ is well-meaning advice but, in a situation that’s genuinely life changing, it doesn’t help you make the right choices for your kids.
What if you had enough insight into your children’s emotional needs to feel able to do just that?
This FREE 60 minute workshop deals with the most common fears and worries that separating parents face.
By the end, you will:
- Know how to meaningfully talk to your child about your separation; what – and what not – to say
- Understand the most common emotional needs of children at different ages, and how to respond to them
- Be ready to handle the hard questions with confidence, instead of panicking or shutting down, or being plagued by self-doubt
Sign up here to ensure you get the email to register!
Measuring the Magic - How to Evaluate The 'Hard to measure' Workshop
This 2 hour online CPD session is designed for organisations and practitioners who:
1) Know their work is deeply impactful, but because their activity is person-centred, process-led and/or supports people who can’t always share their experience in very reliable ways etc., find it challenging to articulate exactly what there outcomes are
2) Lack a clear, consistent structure or evaluation process, meaning that the impacts of their work are not being evidenced, and therefore shared, as effectively or powerfully as they could be.
We’ll uncover five of the easiest evaluation mistakes to make, but demonstrate how – with the right thinking, knowledge and processes in place – they’re also easy to avoid.
The session does not aim to do is replace the valuable expertise that external evaluators can bring.
However, the reality of the current economic climate means that, while many organisations are reliant on funding to survive, the competition for that funding is increasing.
In other words, funding allocated for evaluation is decreasing, at a time when it’s never been more important to present a compelling argument for funding.
This sessions aims to break that chicken-and-egg cycle, helping you to generate the strongest evidence-base possible in the most efficient way, e.g.
- For those which can’t sustain external evaluation – or who evaluate internally already – it’s designed to strengthen capacity, knowledge and understanding, helping you to develop a streamlined approach to evaluation
- For organisations which do have the resources for outside evaluator input, the session will support you to do the groundwork, making that process more efficient on time and budgets.
Introductory offer, £35. Places limited. Booking link coming soon.
What We're Up To...
We work with all kinds of organisations – schools, development agencies, support services, local authorities, and charities – to support the development of children from infancy through to vulnerable adulthood.
You can find out more about some of these throughout our website, but here are a a few examples of our current partnerships.
Creative Education
From May 25-Dec 26, we’re working, alongside TMC, as research and evaluation partners for Creative Connections, hosted by Departments for Education in both Ireland and Northern Ireland as part of the ‘Shared Island’ initiative.
Our research focus is evidencing how creative approaches across primary, secondary and SEN schools supports teaching & learning, impacts young people’s personal, social and emotional competencies, and strengthens the cross-border relationship.
Creative Mentoring
Since 2020, we’ve been delivering part of the induction training programme ‘Creative Mentors’; practitioners who offer 1:1 support for care-experienced children and children in need (those who have a social worker) with partner agency TMC.
Our CPD enables mentors to more deeply understand the impacts of trauma and chronic distress on their brain development and what they can bring to their relationships with these children to help them thrive as a result.
We also explore the risks to practitioners when working with children in very vulnerable circumstances, and how to protect their own emotional states in their practice.
Read more about the programme here.
Emotional Health in Care Settings
Based in the East of England, ‘MiniDonks’ improves the wellbeing of individuals in vulnerable circumstances through visits by their six miniature donkeys.
They support services such as older people and dementia settings, prisons, special schools, mental health wards, hospices, brain injury units, day care for learning disabled adults and more, and ‘wellbeing’ means something different for each setting.
Because many of their service-users can’t share feedback in reliable or consistent ways, we’ve created a framework which which, firstly, doesn’t necessitate verbal input from them, and also adapts to individuals’ diverse wellbeing needs.
At the end of this shared four year journey with MiniDonks, our aim is that the human team will have the skills and expertise to evaluate the impact of their work in a 100% independent and sustainable way.
Foster Care Partnerships
We have a continual relationship with local authority fostering service and Tree House Care, providing regular in-person and online training to foster carers and social workers and adapting our training material to align to the very specific experiences of both care-experienced children and those who look after them.
Find out more about our CPD sessions here.
SEND Education Evaluation
We’ve been working with Attenborough Arts Centre since 2020, initially creating and now developing the evaluation framework for their ‘SENsory Atelier’ programme.
Designed around the diversity and complexity of participants’ learning and communication needs, this ensures the programme’s impacts on children to be recorded consistently, regardless of how those experiences are expressed.
Download the framework here.
“The immediate response regarding your address was extremely positive.
You made something that’s incredibly complex accessible and understandable.
People engaged really well – not only with your material and the liveliness of your speech (learning better through doing rather than listening) – but also with you.”
Children’s Bereavement Centre