Residential child care’s Strictly Come Dancing moments

Residential child care requires relationships, the understanding about who does what next and why and how. For the visual thinkers it can be seen as a dance.

Let’s explore together this idea.

One aspect of relationship building is the mirroring that occurs between two people. A further stage is synchronicity, where one does one thing to enable or enhance what the other is doing. It is more than mirroring.

You both have to be active participants, present in the relationship and each moment. There are routines, one coaches the other sometimes reminding them. Neither partner can be passive, to be fully expressive you both have to be involved to the max.

The partners hold each other, if not physically then ‘in mind,’ being aware of what the other is doing. This series the judges have often remarked about partners being synchronised, doing the same thing at the same time. They have also remarked on how one held the other when they made a mistake, and the dance was recovered and carried on. The steps you practiced before carry you through a tricky time. The choreography, the daily plan is all important.

You signal your synchronicity by the way you dress; each complements the other.

You both have the music in your head, your feel it the same way, you know the moves. It cannot be too fast or too slow. Sometimes you slow the music deliberately to focus especially when learning at first together. It is one thing learning how to dance from a book, another practicing on your own, another when with someone else. In rehearsals, do you decide to intervene to support or correct, or will your partner do this for themselves. Do you stop the dance now or wait for a convenient moment? Sometimes one of you seems to improvise, but always from a secure base that you return to, and you carry on together.  Do you coax, coach or challenge? The decision can only be made once there is a relationship.

Then there is the atmosphere, everyone wants to get to Movie week and then Blackpool to savour the atmosphere. The audience are so supportive, and loud! More than this is the connection, dancers and audience have a sense of belonging. It can be overwhelming though and so each week has to be incrementally building on previous achievements. Doing the dance in the rehearsal studio is different than in the broadcast studio, place matters. We translate what we did in one place to another. We practice a state of readiness.

Now on Strictly they only have to learn one dance a week and then only for 90 seconds. Residential Child Care workers and children ‘dance’ throughout all the day. To sustain yourselves through a day takes emotional and physical strength and this comes through training. RCCWs need the experience of applied knowledge and skills to be resilient in the way the child needs them to be today.

The managers of the home are participant observers, like dancing coaches, assessing, and shaping, role modelling demonstrating what is good and best and achievable here and now.

A dance is more than steps, it is story. Storytelling has been a feature of this year’s Strictly. It has connected strongly when it has been about one of the dancers own life, of struggle, of love, of breakthroughs, of hopes for the future.

This comes from the power of two – two people dancing together.

Jonathan Stanley is manager of National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care (NCERCC). This blog was first published on the NCERCC website.