Camphill Scotland, the membership body for Camphill communities in Scotland, has recently run a Scottish Government funded pilot project into the use of relationship-based care with adults with learning disabilities.\u00a0 This project taught us a lot about the importance of relationships for both staff and the people we support, and we believe that those findings could apply to everyone in a social care setting: relationships are between two people, me and you, and it doesn\u2019t matter whether you are leaving care or I have a learning disability.<\/p>\n
Our research looked at social pedagogy, an approach to working with people which has relationships at its heart.\u00a0 Social pedagogy sees relationships as a way to help people to learn and develop, to have positive experiences, to feel empowered and to be happy.<\/p>\n
Staff who took part in social pedagogy training as part of the pilot described it as \u201ctransformative\u201d and \u201clife enhancing\u201d.\u00a0 It empowered staff, who intuitively wanted to develop relationships with the people they support, to explain to others why this was important.\u00a0 It gave them the tools to understand how powerful relationships can be, to plan how best to use them to help people to develop, and to reflect on where that worked well and not so well.<\/p>\n
Part of social pedagogy theory is that as a person experiences a positive relationship with a member of staff, this helps them to build relationships with others.\u00a0 During our pilot, some staff members also spent a lot of time encouraging and supporting relationships amongst the people they support, helping people not to be dependent on their relationships with staff.<\/p>\n
Last but not least, relationships within the staff team were also improved by taking a social pedagogy approach.<\/p>\n
The University of Edinburgh evaluation of our project showed that a focus on relationships can be incredibly impactful for people.\u00a0 In our project:<\/p>\n
Many of those findings relate to both staff and the adults with learning disabilities that we support.<\/p>\n