Learning and development
The Academy will continue its work to ensure that all professionals involved with children within partner organisations fully understand their responsibilities for safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people, a function to be taken from Haringey Safeguarding Children Partnership. Professionals will be equipped to confidently provide effective early support to a family and tackle difficulties head-on before they worsen.
In-house and commissioned training spaces
The Academy provides a range of partnership safeguarding workshops for practitioners, managers and volunteers working with children, young people and their families. It also coordinates dedicated in-house and commissioned specialist training for social workers to enable them to work within the legal framework and meet Social Work England (SWE) professionals standards. Our training reflects learning from serious case reviews and audits findings, good practice, as well as changes in legislation and guidance.
Signs of Safety
Signs of Safety (SoS) is the common practice framework used in Haringey for child in need and child protection work, and adoption of this across all services and partners agencies will strengthen multi-disciplinary work. Signs of Safety is used alongside other practice principles namely relationship based practice, and motivational interviewing to elicit engagement and behaviour change that will benefit the whole family.
Continuous professional development
The Academy endeavours to develop a common continuous professional development curriculum where all professionals can learn together, from each other, and apply best practice and theories to case studies, sharing their professional perspectives and debating on what needs to happen, when, how and the rational for the suggested intervention(s). The CPD offer will comprise of commissioned specialist courses as well as in house training courses and workshops co-delivered by the multi-agency network.
Achieving better outcomes for children
Measuring the impact of our interventions, how they are experienced and outcomes for children will be a focus of the Academy’s work. The Quality Assurance and Learning Framework, informed by SoS, is central to supporting and developing our social workers and managers to achieve better outcomes for children through audit and feedback activities. This will acknowledge and celebrate ”good” social work practice as well as constructively challenge any lack of clarity in relation to the agreed goals for a child and their family. Successful interventions will be used for learning and development using action learning set to deconstruct elements that led to the success of the intervention so everyone is able to learn from this.
Tri-X online platform
Alongside the transformation of our support services and how we intervene with children and families, Children’s Social Care has adopted the Tri-X online platform to provide the workforce, including partner agencies, with access to relevant policies, processes and procedures (local and UK wide) for early help, child in need and child protection interventions; these can easily be accessed to guide and support good practice in an increasing complex legislative framework.
Support and supervision
Critical to the support of our workforce is the commitment to regular, robust and reflective supervision. This ensures management oversight, support and understanding of the situations our social workers encounter every day. The Academy will deliver a development programme for aspiring managers and managers to enhance supervisory practice and ensure high quality reflective supervision is provided monthly to staff.