Children 1st

Day

Tuesday 7 November

Time slot

13:30-14:30

This event took place 6 months ago

Room

Moorfoot suite
Wheelchair accessible

Contact

Louise Hill

Topics

Evaluation & impact Families and communities

Overall aim

• To share our experience of redesigning how we record all aspects of our work with children and families.
• To highlight why language matters
• To tell the story of how a complex practice and technical project is developed collaboratively.
• To explain how children, families and our colleagues were involved in the design.
• To reflect on the opportunities and the challenges

Description

Since 2021, this journey has been about much more than just replacing our aging database which holds thousands of records for children. We set out to transform our culture and practice in recording how we build relationships and work alongside children and families. We record with children and families.

At Children 1st we wanted to develop a new approach which-

• supports our relationship-based work with children and families.
• respects the rights of those whose data we hold and specifically upholds their right to be heard.
• shifts our language of professional jargon to language that is clear, accessible, and respectful.
• will enable us to evidence the quality and impact of our work.
• is easy and straightforward to access and use.

This has been a successful and multi-layered project. As our brilliant colleague who sought the views from children and families along the way said:

Don’t be afraid to put stuff like this to families – they came up with amazing ideas and their footprint will be in our approach for years to come.

In this workshop we will explore why language matters and what changes we made. In working with families, we learned more about how powerful language is. Families told us they found it hard to understand jargon used by professionals. We learnt our recording needed to reflect families’ hopes, challenges and strengths. We will share how we developed our seven Children 1st outcomes and how we creatively, sensitively and authentically use our Pebbles scale to understand change for children and families in our regular ‘Check ins’. We acknowledge that it’s difficult sometimes to balance child and family centred recording with how our diverse range of funders across Scotland require us to report and how we navigate this tension. We have a huge amount of work still to do, yet we would like the opportunity to honestly share what we have learnt so far. As always, we often learn the most by those who we work alongside:

“I would prefer to know about what people say and write about me. I'll know that you have listened and that you get me” (a young person)

Who was the event aimed at?

Frontline service delivery

Who spoke at this event?

Eileen Scouller
Simon McGowan
Dr Louise Hill