COURSE

Safeguarding Older Children

Facilitators: Dr Alex Chard and Wendy Tomlinson

Duration: Seven three-hour online workshops (10am-1pm)

Group size: Up to 12 participants

For: Strategists, leaders and practitioners who are already advanced in developing their thinking about safeguarding older children, policymakers, and academics. Participants are welcome from all relevant disciplines

Cost: £700 + VAT (members), £899 + VAT (non-members).

We can also run this course with a full cohort from your organisation. Please contact us at info@careknowledge.com for more information.

In so many ways the early twenty first century is presenting a turbulent world with challenges to being a child and to facing adulthood in ways not seen before. For very many older children the systems that society have wrapped around their childhood have not sufficiently readied them for these changing times and safe successful teenage years or young adulthood. 

When children harm themselves or others, whilst there are legal frameworks that remind us that they are indeed children, media, social commentators and politicians frequently adultify and blame the child, seeking to attribute only responsibility for individual actions, ignoring the underlying causes that urgently require systemic interventions and wider responses. These include addressing poverty, discrimination and limited legitimate opportunity for a sense of mattering, contributing and belonging. 

Our developing understanding of the impact of trauma in all its forms on children and young people and our expectations and hopes for the next generation requires us to re-consider and engage with how we feel about young people and how we individually and collectively respond to their rapidly changing needs.

These workshops are aimed at those wishing to explore, expand and use their influence to create change in how professionals and the systems they inhabit, respond to troubled older children. These will be closed workshops for a small group of practitioners, strategists or leaders who are already advanced in developing their thinking about safeguarding older children. Participants are welcome from academia, policymaking and practice across all relevant disciplines.

We are aiming to work from a place of compassion, understanding and respect and our professional responsibility for our older children. The style of these sessions will be of reflective dialogue and mutual learning. We are also looking to respectfully challenge and as workshop facilitators expecting in turn to be challenged. In essence, we intend that we will collectively be in pursuit of critical thinking to respond to the multiple issues in safeguarding older children in this complex world.

Seven workshops make up this course:

• Introductions and orientations
• The social creation and purpose of childhood
• Challenges for older childhood
• What harms and what safeguards older childhood
• Understanding risks and needs of older children
• Facilitating  advanced individual and agency practice – influence and impact
• Creating safe cultural environments for advanced practice, thinking and learning

How to apply

Need more information? Drop us an email at info@careknowledge.com with your questions about the course format, content, or group rates.

Meet the facilitators

Dr Alex Chard

Director, YCTCS Ltd

Dr Alex Chard is an organisational consultant, independent academic and author. He has a Professional Doctorate in Systemic Practice. His doctorate focussed on creating systemic change in public sector services. He has 34 years' consultancy experience across a range of public services, including significant experience in organisational review and change processes and creating pan-organisational learning. In the early years of his career he established some of the very first community-based projects as direct alternatives to custodial sentences. As a service manager, he managed both social work services and youth justice services. A recent publication Punishing Abuse was a detailed study of 80 children in the West Midlands justice system. In the Foreword, Anne Longfield (Children’s Commissioner for England) described the report as comprehensive and harrowing ... a powerful reinforcement of the need to support all children who have suffered ... Punishing Abuse has been highly influential regionally and nationally in developing understandings of the depth and impact of adversity on children.

His published work also includes:

• Systemic Resilience, HMI Probation Academic Insight, this publication extended the thinking in Punishing Abuse; 

• Troubled Lives Tragic Consequences a review of six children involved in very serious violence;
• Systemic Inquiry, co-editor and author of a book on systemic approaches to research;
• Defending Young People, co-author of three editions of a legal reference book

Alex has detailed knowledge of safeguarding processes and responses for older children. He has studied the professional involvements for 125 troubled children (110 boys and 15 girls) known to the range of public agencies. Through case reviews he developed ALTAR™ (Abuse, Loss, Trauma and Attachment and Resilience) an evidenced based approach to consider the needs and responses for older children.

He has recently been attending the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity (EDI) Professionals. He has provided advice on Organisational Leadership and Culture in developing a Universal EDI Standard. Alex is a member of the Academic Oversight Group for the NHS Violence Reduction Academy for London.

Wendy Tomlinson

Social Worker, Service Manager and Coach

Wendy is a social worker who had 25 years of working in and managing children’s services, including a Youth Offending Team and services for Looked After Children and Care Leavers and their foster carers, adopters, and other providers. She led the Youth Custody Service’s safeguarding agenda.