April, May, June: Scoping
During the spring and early summer Iriss met with the members of the collective individually, to identify the detail of what they wanted to achieve through the second year of the Relationships Matter project. This activity was pulled together in a document shared with the collective which outlined what each partner planned to do and what support Iriss would provide. By doing this we aimed to connect up the partner’s activities where possible so they could support each other.
We also spent time during this period populating the Relationship Matters website with different kinds of evidence. Designated areas for each practice team to blog about their experiences as they took their ideas into practice were also created.
Two key things emerged from the scoping phase which shaped the project:
- The collective wanted to meet again to share their learning from the pilots. We agreed to bring people together a year on from the JAM in January 2016.
- Discussions identified the importance of talking about continuing relationships. This seemed to be the foundation for starting to change attitudes, highlighting challenges and collaboratively building a culture to support positive, lasting relationships with young people as they leave care. We started to imagine a tool we could develop, building on the evidence of what we know from the project, to help guide these discussions. The collective liked the idea of a tool or game, something accessible and simple – and offered to help us develop the questions and test them.
August: Evidence workshop one
In response to a request from some of the collective, we brought three of the practice partners together for a workshop on evidence. Care Visions, Tremanna Children’s Home team and Hot Chocolate Trust met at Iriss HQ on the 17th of August. The purpose of the session was to share learning, ideas and reflections on evidencing their work, and to offer some peer support. Key questions we explored included: what is evidence? How can we capture evidence about the work we do? How can we use and share it? For more detail, you can read the blog post about the workshop.
September: What are the right questions?
To have good conversations which help change attitudes, open minds and address risks, it is important to ask the right questions. We were invited to the STAF manager’s forum to share information about the project and to try out some test questions for the conversation tool. This session was incredibly useful and we got some valuable feedback on topics and language. We also got to gauge practitioners knee jerk reactions to some questions, for example the ones about social media. During the forum, we also heard a presentation from Phil Coady (researcher / East Lothian Council) on his recent research ‘Relationship Boundaries in Residential Child Care: Connection and safety in group care relationships’ (which STAF helpfully captured on video). Phil’s research included a number of questions on relationships boundaries and it gave us an idea to build our conversation tool on this evidence. We met with Phil shortly after the STAF forum and agreed to collaborate. Our role was to incorporate and adapt relevant questions from his research and try these out with the collective.
October: Evidence workshop two
On the 16th of October a second workshop on evidence was hosted, this time at the Care Visions office in Stirling with some of the team from Tremanna. The focus was on capturing evidence about practitioners relationships with young people. We talked about and looked at various different approaches to acquire evidence, for example writing in diaries and team notebooks, taking and reflecting on photographs, and doing life story work. Through the course of our discussion we realised that Care Visions and Tremanna already create this kind of evidence but hadn’t thought of what they were doing as gathering evidence about relationships. We also talked about using this evidence to create case studies in order to tell the story of a relationship over time. However our discussion was peppered with caution about not wanting the process of acquiring evidence about relationships to detract from the development of that relationship. Therefore we discussed how to make this process as natural as possible and when it may, or may not, be a good time to gather this kind of evidence.
November and December: Tool development and event prep
Over these months we sense-checked each draft question carefully, and identified themes so we could group them. In December we invited Phil, Paul Orr from STAF and Kathleen Quinn to a session at Iriss to get their take on the questions, any gaps and the themes so far. This session was incredibly helpful and we were able to further refine the tool.
During the early stages of this second year of the Relationships Matter project, we had agreed to bring the collective together again so they could share their learning, reflect on and celebrate their achievements. In December we collaborated with the collective to design an event which would meet their objectives.
January 2016
On the 14th of January 2016, we held a workshop to bring together those in the Relationships Matter collective to reflect on and share their learning a year on from the JAM. The workshop was attended by staff and young people from Care Visions Why Not? service, Hot Chocolate Trust, Tremanna, Kathleen Quinn, Phil Coady, Includem, CELCIS, STAF and Who Cares? Scotland. The participants told us what they were hoping to get from the workshop: a combination of inspiration, reassurance, connections, learning, sharing and ideas for next steps.
For more information, we’ve written an overview of the Relationships Matter Story.