Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council (BCP Council) recently invested in Creative Life Story Work membership, giving its team access to training, tools and resources, all focused on creative approaches to life story work.
Leanne Morgan, principal social worker at BCP Council, explains how she hopes the Council’s new method of delivering life story work will mean every child experiences an offer that’s as unique as they are.
Our membership of Creative Life Story Work is part of our new approach to direct work and life story work, called My Journey. This approach looks at joining the threads of a child’s experience and story together, from the point they become known to us in a continuum as they travel through our service.
My Journey will support children and young people to know their story and make sense of it. It is a multi-faceted approach, that includes direct work, All About me, More About Me and Therapeutic Life Story Work and a consistent platform for recording this; so it is increasingly visible to those young people who may come back to view their records and is more supportive of practitioners that are looking to support a child or young person with therapeutic life story work.
We want to increase the number of children and young people that have access to All About me and More About Me, as well as improving the current Therapeutic Life Story Work offer from referral, through triage to delivering this intervention.
We have often faced challenges with gaps in information about children and young people in our care within their records. This then impacts on our understanding of their context and the time it takes to track down this information before life story work can begin.
We have also had challenges in terms of improving connectedness between the work we do in assessment or child protection spaces, and the offer of life story work that we have had in place for our children in care.
Having a life story work offer that only sat within our Children in Care services meant that we have not been able to support children and young people who work with us in other areas of our service – who are also experiencing trauma, change, insecurity and whom also maybe struggling to understand what is happening and where they fit in to that.
We already used All About me and More About Me to support children in care but wanted to strengthen our use of this and make it more consistent, upskill a wider range of practitioner colleagues so that we could bring this to more children and young people.
Creative Life Story Work as a platform offered us the opportunity to support skills development, bolster skills that our practitioners already had, and the online classrooms presented practitioners with the opportunity to tailor their learning, so it is purposeful and targeted.
The resources also fitted in well with our My Journey approach, meaning that imagination, creativity and alternative ‘tools’ could come into the direct work space as well.
We want membership to be pivotal in building practitioner and colleague confidence to support earlier interventions with our children and young people that help them understand their story, so that gaps are reduced and information gathered informs plans and interventions.
We want to de-mystify life story work, so that practitioners understand they can contribute to a child’s story, and that life story work is not a tick box task.
Underneath this, we feel that membership will help us shape the culture around direct work and life story work, supporting our restorative and Trauma Informed Practice Framework.
For children and young people, we hope that membership of the platform will mean that they will never have to endure repeat ‘direct work’ tools, and that they experience an offer that is as unique as they are.
We hope that they will be able to see and feel that they are heard and that we offer back our understanding of their experiences to them throughout their work with us, not just at specific points of transition or crisis.
We also want them to be able to easily see within their record how we have worked to support them as well as present a repository of photos, certificates and other memories that help them make sense of their journey.
Thank you Leanne for sharing how you and your colleagues support children in care.
BCP Council is a Creative Life Story Work member, which means its team has access to life story work training, tools and resources. Other organisational members past and present include Darlington Borough Council, and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
