Social Care and the Thrive Approach
We would like to draw your attention to two recently published papers regarding social care and indicate how the Thrive Approach can help in these areas.
In January 2016, the Government released a new policy paper called 'Children’s Social Care Reform, a vision for change’ outlining the vision for social care for 2020. It highlights the need to:
• Invest in the people and leadership within the profession to give them the right knowledge and skills to carry out the incredibly challenging and rewarding work that they do.
• Develop practices and systems that enable professionals to be able to focus on the needs of children and families without being stifled by the bureaucracy and allow professionals to use innovative approaches.
• Ensure there is evidence of robust assessment that demonstrates the support and intervention has had an impact on families and children.
A new guidance paper titled ‘Knowledge and skills for child and family social work' was published in November 2015 by The Department of Education. The paper outlines the key skills and knowledge that practitioners working in in social care need to have embedded in their practice, which include:
• Building family relationships, resources and resilience
• Understanding child development
• The impact of adult mental ill health, substance abuse and domestic violence on children’s mental health
• Abuse and neglect of children
• Carrying out family and child assessment
• Planning direct work and the reviewing impact
Both of these government papers highlight the importance of excellent training for all staff to enable them to identify and support the most vulnerable children.
How the Thrive Approach can help with Social Care
The new Thrive Licenced Advisor Social Care course has already received a great deal of interest from local authorities in different parts of the county. It provides professionals with a framework of knowledge and skills to support children and families; from those known to ‘Early Help’ to ‘Child in Care’ and post adoption services.
Thrive-Online enables professionals to work with families to carry out an assessment of a child’s social and emotional well-being, and creates an action plan full of creative and innovative ideas for parents or carers to do with their children.
Thrive Approach is listed as a potential provider for Local Authorities accessing the Adoption Support Fund. We are able to provide training directly for adoptive parents and foster carers to support their vulnerable children and reduce the possibility of placement breakdown.