Families First News

Learning & development

HSCP - Training and Resources

Hertfordshire Safeguarding Children Partnership provide a wide variety of learning programmes and workshops across Hertfordshire to develop skills for safeguarding children, young people and adults.

The majority of the training offer is now available via live webinar sessions. Please visit our new webpage to access our monthly L&D Programme, where you can see what courses are on offer and how you can book onto them.

View the Winter 2020/21 Newsletter here

View the Learning & Development Newsletter (February 2021) here

HSCP/HSAB have also produced some helpful resources for difficult conversations that can be viewed here. Please share this with your teams and use it during your team meetings.

Motivational Interviewing - Free training

Following on from the success of the previous release of dates for Motivational Interview training, we are pleased to announce that we have been able to secure some additional FREE training sessions for our Families First partners.

The target audience for these sessions are practitioners from all agencies working with children, young people and their families and the aim is to gain an overview of a motivational skills approach.

The Objectives are:

  • To gain a practical understanding of Motivational Interviewing as a strengths-based approach 
  • To understand the cycle of behaviour change, and how it can help make conversations more productive 
  • To explore situations where there is resistance and ambivalence to change

The half days sessions will be run on the following dates:-

  • Weds 21st April 2021, 1:30pm to 4pm
  • Thurs 20th May 2021, 1:30pm to 4pm
  • Weds 22nd Sept, 9:30am to 12noon
  • Mon 15th Nov, 1:30pm to 4pm

Spaces are limited, so please book early by emailing : hscpcourses@hertfordshire.gov.uk quoting FF Partnership, and cascade to your teams where appropriate.


In addition we also felt you may find the following of interest:-

MOTIVATIONAL INTERVIEWING

You lot don’t care! You’re going to take our kids away and you get a bonus for that’

‘Why aren’t you going to the neighbours down the road, they’re much worse than us!’

‘What do you know? Do you have kids of your own?’

 Are these kinds of ‘heart-sink’ phrases familiar? Do you or your staff frequently find themselves on the defensive as practitioners or as managers? In an environment of diminishing resources and increasing demand on services, we need a fresh and imaginative approach.

Motivational Interviewing is a framework of intervention, brought together in the 1990s by William Miller and Stephen Rollnick. It is an approach that is designed to work with those most resistant to change or stuck in entrenched behaviours. The premise of Motivational Interviewing is that motivation is not a ‘fixed state’ that a person does, or does not have. Rather, motivation ebbs and flows depending on many factors such as circumstances, mood and so forth. The skilled practitioner (or manager) will harness whatever very little motivation there might be, and help it move in the right direction. The Motivational Interviewing approach borrows in from other sources such as Carl Rogers’ person-centred counselling; Socratic thinking and Prochaska & DiClemente’s Cycle of Behaviour change.

The key principles are:

Engagement with the client, rather than doing something to them – i.e. change cannot be forced or pushed on to someone. It has to be internal for the client to be meaningful and long term.

Rolling with resistance (NB this is not rolling over or being passive)

Express empathy

Avoid conflict

Developing discrepancy in client’s thinking

Support self-responsibility

Clients are often stuck or ambivalent about making changes for themselves. Practitioners can easily collude with this ‘stuckness’, or out of frustration try to push people to action, which only increases resistance. Motivational Interviewing helps to make the practitioner aware of these tendencies, and give them options to work more powerfully in ways that create more possibility of change for their clients.

The half-day interactive webinar will give a practical taster session into Motivational Interviewing, and its potential power to engage with people meaningfully, rather than do something to them. There will be opportunities for demonstration, discussion, and questions, conducted in ways that model the principles of a motivational skills approach. We will explore together how we can all nurture even the smallest steps of progress, with the emphasis on encouragement and trying to bring out the best in others as well as ourselves.

See below for diagram: The Cycle of Change  

Herts for Learning - Early Years & Disadvantaged Conferences

Please see the information below about Herts for Learning's Early Years and Disadvantaged Conferences.

The unique child - focusing on what really matters

The Herts for Learning 2021 Early Years Conference is being delivered on Tuesday 2nd February, 9:00am – 1:00pm with keynote speakers Dr Stella Louis, Lydia Cuddy-Gibbs and Rachel Lewis. This year’s conference will explore the impact of relationships and unconscious bias in the EYFS and the need to provide a curriculum that is best matched to meet each child’s unique needs. Lydia and Rachel are practising leaders who bring their knowledge and understanding of the current impact of Covid-19.

Reach for the stars! Raising aspirations and expectations for our disadvantaged learners

The Herts for Learning 2021 Disadvantaged Conference is being delivered on Wednesday 3rd February, 9:00am - 1:00pm.

With the progression of Covid-19 and disruption to pupils’ education and its impact on their home lives and wellbeing, the disadvantage gap has inevitably widened. Hear from Marc Rowland, Dr Janet Goodall and Rachel Macfarlane who will identify the key strategies for addressing disadvantage and closing the gap in your school.

Please note: Given the current importance of this subject and our overriding purpose as a company, Herts for Learning have taken the decision to offer this cross-phase online conference to all schools / settings at a cost of only £71 per school/setting rather than per delegate

Herts Sport Partnership - Coach Education Week 2021

Whether you're a coach working in elite sport, or engaging people who are new to being active, Herts Sports Partnership (HSP) value your impact in Hertfordshire and want to support you with their wide range of workshops and talks. Now, more than ever, the sport and physical activity workforce needs our support to maintain people's activity levels and eventually, bring normality back to the sector. 

With over 25 virtual and e-learning courses to choose from, there are opportunities to add to all areas of your coaching toolkit, while keeping safe. 

HSP work with a variety of providers including UK Coaching, Performance Hertfordshire, the Football Association, the Activity Alliance and others, which means that many courses come with official accreditation, including CIMSPA (Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity) points.

Please take a look at the Coach Education Week 2021 courses and workshops.

Additionally, please promote and share HSP's Active Local Survey with your communities. HSP are using the information from this survey to understand local areas across Hertfordshire and shape local physical activity offers.

Reducing Parental Conflict training

Free online training for Hertfordshire frontline practitioners

Ongoing and unresolved conflict between parents has been proved to adversely affect the outcomes of children who are caught up within it.

There is some facilitated online training available to help you, as practitioners, to recognise when this may be happening and start conversations with parents about their relationship. For some families, if the relationship between the parents was better, many other aspects within the family unit would be too.

If you are interested in gaining some more skills to help the families you’re working with, please use this link here for more information and how to book.

The dates and spaces currently available are as follows:-

Dates

Spaces

Cohort 3 - 19th Jan & 3rd Feb - 9.30am – 1pm

1

Cohort 4 - 3rd Feb & 12th Feb - 1.30pm – 5pm

12

Cohort 5 - 12th Feb & 2nd March - 9.30am – 1pm

9

Cohort 6 - 2nd March & 4th March - 1.30pm – 5pm

14

My Teen Brain and My Baby Brain Training Dates

My Teen Brain focuses on a key stage of brain development and shows how changes in the adolescent brain, in conjunction with experience and environment, can affect emotions, relationships, behaviours, sleep and attitudes to risk.  

The initiative aims to raise awareness and provide practical information and strategies to professionals. Through training and a range of resources, the initiative will enable them to support young people through this time of change.

Professionals working with either young adolescents (10-14) or their parents are invited to attend a free one-day multi-agency training which will look at changes to the adolescent brain, risks and behaviours and how the learning can help a strength based approach to practice.

THIS FULL DAY TRAINING HAS BEEN ADAPTED TO BE DELIVERD LIVE ONLINE

Dates available are:

Wednesday 10th February, 10am – 3pm

Thursday 11th March, 10am – 3pm

You can book onto the free one-day training here

More Information on the changes that take place in the teen brain is available on the dedicated website.


My Baby’s Brain Online Training Programme—Spring 2021

My Baby’s Brain has been running in Hertfordshire since 2011. In that time, the challenges that families face have evolved, particularly this last year as a result of the current pandemic. To ensure parents continue to be supported at the earliest opportunity, Early Help Commissioning have worked with partners KCA to refresh My Baby’s Brain training to allow for a greater depth of learning for professionals working with young families with additional focus on resilience and managing toxic stress.

Now online, training is a 3 stage learning programme combining webinars, e-learning and small group tutorials.

To register please choose your learning strand A or B  Use the link to book your choice of step 2 tutorial dates

Complete your 2 webinars either live or access the recordings and e-learning before attending your live tutorial

SPACE - Spring Workshops

SPACE is a Hertfordshire based charity supporting parent/carers of children and young people on the Autistic Spectrum, with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or a Neurodiverse Condition.

Please see the links below for information about the online workshops that SPACE are delivering in the Spring term. Please also share this information with your parents and carers.

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