Overview

The perfect guide for new workers entering residential childcare. Adopting a case study approach, this book contains a collection of stories of good practice told from the point of view of the residential care worker that help to demonstrate how they deal with dilemmas and make effective decisions in the moment. Workers in residential childcare have to quickly understand the complexity of how young people's early neglect, abuse and relational trauma impact their lives. There are also conflicts and relationship challenges in abundance. This collection of stories illustrates good practice told from the point of view of the residential care worker and demonstrates their thinking in action around ethical dilemmas, different courses of action taken and why they made these decisions. This book also talks about how effective communication with other adults in the team can de-escalate risk and how to carry out dynamic risk assessments. The users can apply their knowledge obtained from this book through the use of reflective questions which offers relevant neutral material where workers can take a step back from the emotive situations they are currently working in and reflect on the hypothetical. It is also intended that the scenarios in this book can be used as a springboard for further learning or as scenarios in an interview.

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9781915080806

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Reviews

Supervisors and practice teachers have long struggled to support workers and students to bring appropriate theory to residential child care, and often revert to what they know from casework oriented approaches. This small book confirms what I have always believed to be at the root of this difficulty, and that it that there is just too much going on in the life-spaces where adults and children come together in the course of everyday living to be able to package it in the nice clean ways that students, workers and managers would like to think we should be able to. This book does not offer easy (or any) answers, Instead, each chapter offers a fictional but utterly believable, case study from different residential child care settings. In each of them, what shines through is complexity and uncertainty and a worker talking us through their thinking processes to elucidate what might be going on and how best to respond to their not-knowing. The scenarios themselves do not shy away from knotty issues in contemporary residential child care, such as accusations made against staff, questions of sexuality and of the challenges posed by ready internet access, concluding with a discussion about love, a topic that has only recently begun to be discussed in the context of caring for other people's children... The book should be a boon to practice educators and supervisors supporting students and workers as they embark on what Abbi Jackson recognises as the 'unique privilege' of life-space work. -- Mark Smith * Professor of Social Work, University of Dundee *

Author Information

Abbi Jackson has worked in children’s services for around 25 years. She has been a foster carer and has worked in secure care and children’s residential care. She spent time as a social worker in a statutory childcare team, an independent Form F assessor and a supervising social worker. She has led large scale practice audits in children’s services and more recently in adult protection. Currently she is a senior planning officer for adult social work and integrated services in a local authority area and is an independent panel member for a private fostering company. Abbi is also an active practice educator and lectures in critical social work practice. She has an interest in early intervention with young people who experience emerging mental health concerns. Never a dull moment, she is currently undertaking a piece of action research with young people receiving alternative therapies. She is a beekeeper in her spare time.

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