On Monday 17th August, a small group gathered in the training room at Brunswick House (IRISS HQ) to talk about evidence. Three of the partners from the Relationships Matter project including Care Visions, Tremanna children’s home in Falkirk, Hot Chocolate Trust and a care experienced young person working for Who Cares? Scotland joined me to take some time out to think about their evidence needs and to share their experiences with each other. Each partner is at a different stage of thinking about and using evidence. The purpose of the session was to share learning, ideas and reflections to offer some peer support and also, to identify ways Iriss could help as part of the Relationships Matter project.
What is evidence?
At Iriss, we think about evidence in three ways – research evidence (eg content of journals and other publications), practice wisdom and the lived experience of people accessing social services. Increasingly, people working in the social services sector are expected to evidence personal outcomes for those accessing services which is no easy task. So, as one of the Evidence-informed Practice team, I find it fascinating to bring groups together to discuss what evidence means in their contexts, to get insights into the real world of practice and to help us be realistic when we talk about evidence-informed practice.
Common ground and culture
The morning started with coffee, pastries (courtesy of Social Bite) and some information sharing. The group talked a bit about their organisations and the origins of their approaches to continuing relationships. Although from different parts of the social services sector, there were overlaps, common ground and shared values across the group. The nuts and bolts of processes and paperwork differed but what was shared was the belief that continuing relationships with young people is the right thing to do. The group described examples of ongoing relationships with young people and the fears some staff struggle with around this. They talked about the importance of getting continuing relationships out in the open, to reassure staff and young people that it’s ok and not something that needs to be hidden. The group agreed that creating a culture around this was paramount and more important than getting frameworks or processes written down (which reminded me of the Peter Drucker quote: ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’).
Back to basics
In the workshop, we started with the basics: What do partners want to evidence? For what purpose? And importantly, who is it for? The team at Hot Chocolate Trust (HTC) have been thinking about evidence for some time and have developed an Outcomes Database flyer which Dave Close, Director of HCT, shared some reflections about. He was really clear that, for them, evidence must first and foremost be to serve young people; secondly, it needed to support workers to be effective and reflective; thirdly, it needed to support HCT as a learning organisation; and fourthly to be used to report robustly to external partners. I loved this clear hierarchy which put young people and their outcomes front and centre. No evidence gathering for the sake of it, or ticking boxes for external stakeholders. For other partners, the motivation for gathering evidence was similar. Care Visions want to gather evidence to support Why Not? workers to inform their support of continuing relationships. Tremanna want evidence to support their cultural commitment to continuing relationships. The group agreed that evidence can help legitimise their approaches and demonstrate their effectiveness as well as addressing concerns about resource and capacity for ongoing relationships.
A change of person
During the discussion, an example from Hot Chocolate really sparked some interest. Dave described the notes that youth workers gathered about conversations with young people, debriefing as a team and mapping common topics to the eight core outcomes of HCT. Dave noted that a game changer was when workers agreed to write their notes in the second person (‘you’) rather than the third (‘he / she’). This small change had a big impact on the content: notes were longer and more personal. The young person in our group agreed that she had engaged much better with the more personal tone of case notes that sounded like they were written to her rather than about her. The staff at Tremanna were really interested in trying this in their context and sharing their learning with the rest of the Relationships Matter Collective.
Using different media
After lunch we watched a couple of inspiring examples of evidence captured by Hot Chocolate including an animation called ‘Mark’s journey’, and ‘Unrelenting’ (part of this blog post). Similarly, Care Visions noted they are experimenting with video diaries of young people about their experiences of continuing relationships after leaving care. This led us into a conversation about using different media to capture evidence of the contribution support can have on a person’s life. Again, this was really relevant given Iriss’s Knowledge Media team who promote the use of web-based communication to disseminate and embed knowledge and evidence in practice, for example by digital story-telling, creative storyboards and internet radio.
What’s next?
The workshop finished with a promise from me to set up another date to bring the partners back together to explore using different media and case studies to capture evidence. The learning from these sessions will be shared here so watch this space!
For me, it was a really interesting session, hearing about the realities of capturing and using evidence. What struck me was the motivation the group had for evidencing what they do is completely aligned to their values about ongoing relationships. It’s about being able to share what they know about the importance of ongoing relationships and supporting a culture where ‘this is just the way we do things’.