How Wellbeing Charter is supporting residential child care workforce

Having worked in children’s homes in various capacities in the UK and overseas for most of my career, I have witnessed how the sector has changed and what this has meant for frontline staff.

As a clinical psychologist, part of my role is to often support organisations to develop their service through evaluation and development research, and also to train staff in therapeutic and trauma-informed care. The uptake of the principles of trauma-informed care have been largely welcomed across the sector and there is an important role for trauma-aware care in homes for children and young people who have often experienced multiple traumas, relationship losses and instability. However, I have also seen the impact of this shift upon frontline workers across a number of organisations, who are increasingly required to work as therapeutic practitioners but with none or very few of the protective factors that most therapeutic practitioners would see as basic and fundamental to safe practice.

Therapeutic practitioners often undergo years of closely monitored and supervised practice before we qualify and work independently. Following our training, regular supervision and membership of professional and regulatory bodies remains fundamental. These measures are in place because of the emotional toll of therapeutic work, which requires the authentic connection between people to develop therapeutic relationships, upon which everything else follows.

Therapeutic relationships

Therapeutic relationships are particularly important components of the healing journey for children and young people in care who have experienced so much adversity. Yet, frontline staff in residential children’s homes have no professional body to represent them and drive improvements for working conditions or training. Without statutory requirements around trauma-informed training and supervisory support, the training and workplace support in place varies enormously across the sector. The rates of burnout and workplace stress are high, which ultimately affects outcomes for children and young people as therapeutic outcomes are known to be affected by the emotional availability of practitioners.

Consequently, my colleague Tracey Williams and I sought to undertake a piece of qualitative research to develop a Wellbeing Charter to be used by the frontline workforce and employers to promote wellbeing amongst this essential workforce. Due to the timing of our project, most of our data collection took place during the first Covid-19 lockdown, which exaggerated many of the day-to-day difficulties people were facing and it was clear that some felt as though they were somewhat forgotten as a frontline workforce. One research participant said: “I think people forget about the workers in care roles (particularly with looked-after children) and can’t comprehend the impact of working alongside raw, unprocessed trauma of children at any time, let alone during a virus pandemic. I’d like the public to know that my colleagues are awesome and have consistently shown up and delivered every day.”

As we were developing the charter, it became clear that our participants have particular recommendations for their colleagues but also for their employers, so we developed the charter in two halves to address actions individuals could do, but also to name the systemic responsibilities of employing organisations. We currently have a live survey open to gather feedback on the charter from organisations, and so far all respondents have said workforce wellbeing is a priority for them and that they are “extremely likely” to adopt the charter and its principles (see below).

Protecting against burnout

We are currently completing a mixed methods analysis of a much larger data set, funded by Nuffield Health, collected during 2020 and 2021. Our emerging findings indicate burnout is the biggest threat to wellbeing and staff absences, and that developing healthy coping strategies is the greatest protector against burnout, although an individual’s coping strategies need to be supported by their employing organisation. It is important frontline workers are not expected to be unrealistically resilient.

Over time, we hope the charter will raise the profile of the amazing work being done across the sector by frontline workers so they can work in a safe, supportive and trauma-informed environment, where their professional needs are recognised and met. We have spoken with people across the sector, including the policy team at the Department for Education, to look ahead at where future initiatives and improvements are needed for workforce development and support. We look forward to more conversations and developments, led by the stories of people on the frontline.

• Find the full publication about the charter, open access, here: Reflections from the forgotten frontline: ‘The reality for children and staff in residential care’ during COVID-19 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hsc.13394

• Children’s Residential Wellbeing Charter from: www.mmu.ac.uk/mmud8/media/10758/download?attachment
  
  

Survey of providers

A survey on what providers thought about the Children’s Residential Wellbeing Charter has been circulated through the Independent Children’s Homes Association (ICHA). Peter Sandiford, chief executive of the ICHA, says: “The Wellbeing Charter is very much welcomed by both providers of children’s homes and by staff themselves. The sector provides care and nurture for the traumatised children it looks after, but it is so important that we look after the staff who are doing this vital and demanding work.

“The association is currently working with others, including academics, to improve the recruitment and retention of residential childcare staff and raise the profile of the sector as a career opportunity. Integral to this is the need to ensure the wellbeing of all that work in it.”

• Survey from https://tinyurl.com/5mk55ka