by David Lane

Children Webmag’s Executive Editor David Lane gave a presentation to delegates at the The Fifth Christian Child Care Forum: Celebrating Children in April. Here, we reproduce his talk, which focused on the important issues that underlie training, rather than the details of courses, programmes, awards, curricula or current proposals.

Training is not a Panacea

Although I consider training to be important, it is not the answer to everything. You can lead a horse to water, it is said, but you cannot make it drink. Equally, you can provide a person with training, but you cannot make them think. You cannot ensure that a person’s personality, conduct or attitudes will be changed by training. If a person is unsuitable for work with children and young people, it is most unlikely that training will make them suitable.

Provide a person who wants to learn with training, and they can gain a lot. Offer new ideas to someone with an open mind, and you can see them blossom during a course. Give people the knowledge, insights and skills they require, and they can become self-confident professionals, capable of holding their own with other professionals.

The choice rests largely with the people undertaking the training. Of course, good trainers will be more effective than poor ones, but essentially the approach of the person undertaking the training is the key to what s/he gets out of it. Training is not a sort of sheep dip which guarantees that you will have had your bad practice killed off; its impact should be that of the yeast, working away from the inside and transforming everything in the process.

To acknowledge the responsibility of individual workers for their own training is important because over the last two or three decades an expectation seems to have grown up that it is the duty of employers to provide training, with workers seeing access to such training as their right. It is certainly important that employers should provide training, but in my view any workers committed to providing the best quality of service for children should be wanting to prepare themselves and invest their own time in reading, training and learning more from fellow-professionals.

Training is Life-Long

In the 19th and 20th centuries, a pattern was established for the major professions that people left school, went to university, got their qualifications and then went out to practice for the rest of their careers without undertaking further training, presumably on the assumption that they knew it all, once they were qualified. Over the last few decades that model has been modified, and it is now expected that professionals will undertake refresher courses, learn the latest techniques, get briefed on new legislation and systems, and so on, and in some professions there is a training requirement for continued registration.

Clearly it is generally acknowledged now that there does need to be ongoing learning on the part of professionals, whether through formal training or attendance at conferences or research or reading or observing the practice of others. What I do not think we have yet done is start from a clean sheet and ask whether the current pattern is the best use of training time. We tried this at CCETSW when designing the Certificate in Social Service, but came up against the settled expectations of what qualifying training should look like.

The volume of time put into initial training is vastly greater than all the time put into ongoing training during a worker’s career, and I think we need to question fundamentally whether this makes best use of time and resources, or whether another pattern would be more effective. To give a back of an envelope example, if you do five days’ training per annum throughout a career of forty years, it amounts to about one academic year. I am not arguing against substantial initial training near the start of one’s career, but I am arguing for the need to question, research and rethink what pattern is best.

Training and Education

CCETSW had a very clumsy title, and I would be interested to know the process by which it was decided. I recall, though, that it was felt very important in CCETSW’s early years that a distinction should be made between education and training.

Training was seen as the giving of specific skills, at its most obvious in learning how to mend an electric plug (which was actually in the curriculum of the early childcare qualifying courses as a skill which home-makers needed). Although skills are now defined more flexibly, it is my impression that NVQ training focuses to a large extent on training, rather than education.

Education, by contrast was seen as the general development of the professional – self-awareness, knowledge of professional ethics, absorption of professional values, understanding of fundamental concepts in law, sociology and psychology, and so on. The development of a professional identity was – and I think probably still is - seen as the meat of professional qualifying courses in social work.

There is a blurred boundary where the two meet, and I do not think that there is a need to make a sharp distinction between them. It is important to acknowledge, though, that we do require both education and training throughout our careers.

Sometimes there are new concepts we come across – inclusion or pedagogy, perhaps, - where we need to think about the ideas behind the words and their implications for ourselves. If our attitudes need to be modified as a result, it can be said that we need to be educated in the broad sense.

Equally, when new legislation or regulations come out, on Sure Start or planning systems, for example, we need a teach-in on the facts about the developments, so that we can get our heads round them.

(In this talk I have used the term training mostly in a general sense to cover both education and training.)

Training and Motivation

I understand that at one time it was the policy of Rank Xerox to let any of its staff do any sort of training on the grounds that it would improve their motivation by helping them to think, develop ideas and become imaginative and creative. I am not aware of any other employers following this lead, but I think that the idea deserved to succeed.

In the UK, we are generally happy to provide training which provides specific skills and knowledge, but we seem to be rather uneasy about offering programmes for workers just to enjoy themselves. That is seen as a waste of money. But it is vitally important in working with children that workers should be properly motivated.

Regrettably there are thousands of workers at any one time who are burnt out, or have lost creativity, or who adopt standardised approaches to survive, leading to institutionalising working methods, or who have even come to dislike children and young people. Some years earlier, they were eager, well motivated, obtaining job satisfaction and doing a good job. Now, it is hard to imagine that they are working well, and it is the children, as well as the workers, who lose out.

There are many ways in which such problems should be addressed – better resources and staffing levels, professional supervision, better management, and so on, - but one way is the provision of training opportunities at the right time. Workers need the chance to rethink their careers, to consider whether it is time to move into a different field, to acknowledge ways in which they themselves have changed, to reconsider what gives them real job satisfaction and identify and analyse what they have come to dislike.

The outcome may be that some workers are remotivated and more insightful, with a lot still to offer, while others may realise it is time to leave the work. The price which has to be paid if these problems are not addressed is even higher. However, if renewing motivation were acknowledged as a regular part of much training, I think that it is possible that we would keep people’s enthusiasm topped up and would have fewer problems. We need people to remain sensitive to children’s needs, imaginative, flexible and creative, throughout their careers, and training can help to keep people rethinking what they are doing and committed to the work. If workers remain committed, keen and enjoying the work, this communicates itself to children and young people.

A Christian or a Competent Plumber?

The question used to be asked, in the Langley House Trust, which has a requirement that most staff have to be Christians, “If your sink is blocked, would you call a competent plumber or a Christian?” The expected answer is obvious, and makes the assumption that Christians do not make competent plumbers and that competent plumbers are not Christian.

Applying this question to work with children and young people, the question is clearly nonsense. Both skills and beliefs are important; it is not either / or. Obviously, people working with children and young people do need some practical skills, but their prime resource in their work is their selves, their personalities, their values, their attitudes, their interpersonal skills, their beliefs. If these are not right, then all the practical skills and knowledge in the world will not make the worker effective. Many of the workers who have abused children have had many skills as competent teachers, care workers or managers, but while their values let them exploit children, the practical skills were valueless.

Workers’ motivation and values play a vital part in what is offered, and I think – perhaps partly in the bath water of wishing to avoid being judgemental or discriminatory – we have lost this baby, and we need to get it back.

A Single Profession

It is my view that one of the main failures of the training system for people working with children and young people in this country is that there is no holistic underpinning concept of a single profession.

Ask another professional what they are, and they will say “Teacher”, and “What do you teach?” – “German” or “Infants” or whatever as their specialism, or “Doctor”, and “In what field?” – “GP” or “Heart Surgeon” or whatever. There is the overarching professional image, and specialisms within it.

Ask a person working with children or young people what they are, and they will say “Nanny” or “Childminder” or “Residential Social Worker” or “Youth Worker”. They do not share a common overall image of themselves as members of a single profession. In this country we are splintered

On the continent of Europe, by contrast, there is the profession of social pedagogy or social education, depending upon the country. Within the single profession, people specialise to work in different settings or different age groups. It is my view that we need the same approach in this country.

After all, much of the training needed by workers in all settings and with all age ranges is the same. They all need to know about family life, sociology of children, psychology, and law, and about all stages of child development. (An early years worker needs to know what stages s/he is preparing little children for, and a worker with teenagers needs to understand the stages they have been through and may revert to.) Many of the skills are the same – communication for example, dealing with difficult behaviour or working with groups. The values underpinning the knowledge and skills should be the same. There are, of course, special elements, but it is amazing how much is shared.

There are now moves in the direction of creating a single profession. Some basic training is already shared between different groups of workers. Ministers are beginning to talk about pedagogy, which was almost a banned word a short while back. The Children’s Workforce Strategy talks in some detail of a single framework of qualifications. Maybe the tide has turned, or the oil tanker has begun to turn round, depending upon the metaphor you choose. It looks like being a real opportunity for change and improving standards in the field of training.

Training for All

My last point is that in my view everyone can benefit from picking up new skills and knowledge, and from refreshing their motivation. This applies to volunteers as well as paid staff and their managers. I suspect it should apply to parents, grandparents and other carers too. We often assume that people can just pick up childcare skills, when in fact they are subtle, complex and need thinking about.

If you analyse the competences needed in working with children and young people, you will find that a very high percentage are picked up in everyday life, learnt from the example of parents or from being a parent, for instance, though because of the shape and size of today’s nuclear families, one of our problems is when people fail to pick up these skills.

Another large group of competences relate to the specific place where people work and the way that things are done there.

The percentage which is professional knowledge not acquired in daily life or the place of work is relatively small. It may be relatively small in volume, but it is crucial in the way that it colours the worker’s approach to his/her work.

And that presents us with the problem that almost everyone from the Prime Minister down see themselves as experts in bringing up children. In one sense they have picked up a lot, but that does not make them the professionals with the in-depth understanding. If you want proof, watch Supernanny.

It is an irony that, if you look at training for people working with children and young people, you will find that those who have least contact have the most training and vice versa. So that, psychiatrists and psychologists who conduct brief interviews and tests have the most training and highest status, while many people working directly with children for long periods have little opportunity to train. What is more, in many settings, work with children and young people is a very flat profession, with few opportunities for advancement in hierarchical terms. Workers may become more skilled, but their status and pay do not change.

Without wanting to see a reduction in the training of psychiatrists and psychologists, I would like to see the other workers have the chance to level up a bit. After all, it is they who have a direct influence in the examples they set, the way they relate, and the values implicit in the way they respect children and young people.

In developing the profession we need also to develop a cadre of leaders – managers, lecturers, researchers, inspectors, writers, thinkers, communicators, - to help develop professional practice and to act as its advocates. There are very few childcare experts in a position to speak for the profession publicly, and it is significant that when a major inquiry is set up, the authors often have to be drawn from outside the profession. It is as if a profession requires a critical mass of leaders before it achieves the status to be taken seriously.

Summary

To summarise :

- training is important for people working with children and young people, to provide skills and knowledge, but they also need broad educational opportunities to help them think and learn;
- training needs to be career-long, offering the chance to keep motivation renewed;
- training needs to be available to everyone, at all levels of the workforce;
- we need a single profession, - whether we call it childcare, pedagogy or social education, - to create a confident, competent and effective workforce, with the right values and attitudes;
- and we need leaders to head up the profession and give it credibility.

The opportunity to get it right is greater now than ever before, and I urge you to respond to the Children’s Workforce Strategy to indicate how important we think the subject is.