This paper was first published in Care: The Journal of Practice and Development 7(2), 1999. Reproduced with the kind permission of Pepar Publications
Paper entitled "Bridging The Gap"
Neil Thompson
The management consultancy guru, Tom Lambert, claims that most training is a waste of time because most of the learning gets left behind in the training room and does not get applied ‘back at the ranch’ (Lambert, 1996). He argues that there is a need to look more closely at how learning and development can be nurtured, supported and enhanced. With this in mind, I was delighted to have the opportunity of working with a progressive organisation who were prepared to take an innovative approach to staff development in order to avoid the barriers to learning that can be created by a classroom situation unconnected with the com-plexities of actual practice.
Aran Hall School is an independent residential school for young people with learning disabilities, located in North Wales. I was invited by the Directors of the School to advise them on the development of a more integrated approach to professional development. Although the School had invested heavily in training over the years, staff had expressed concerns that the training often did not connect with the specific demands of the type of work they undertook in that particular setting, due partly to the specialised nature of the work. In short, barriers between training and practice had been identified - a problem which, of course, is not uncommon elsewhere. Hence, the ‘Practice Development Project’ was born.
After extensive discussion with the senior staff of the School, I was able to develop a plan acceptable to all parties. As a result of this, it was agreed that the project would be in three stages. The first involved a series of three one-day workshops (one per ‘shift team’). The workshops addressed the development of reflective practice, using theory in practice and continuous professional development (Thompson, 1995). The workshops also had the benefit of enabling me to get to know the staff team and for them to get to know me and begin to feel comfortable with me. This aspect seemed to work quite well. Phase two involved a process of ‘participant observation’, a total of three shifts accompanying the care staff in their duties, taking the opportunity to witness real-life practice and to discuss this with staff at opportune moments.
This helped me to gain a clear picture of the demands on staff, the skills they used and the knowledge base they drew upon. I was able to work alongside staff as they dealt with day-to-day care: mealtimes, personal hygiene, preparing the young people for school, supporting the school staff, taking young people on outings, responding to incidents of challenging behaviour, record-keeping, handover meetings between shift teams and so on - all underpinned by efforts to create as homely an atmosphere as possible and to meet the identified care, development and educational needs of each individual youngster.
The third element was a training needs analysis questionnaire circulated to all staff. This allowed staff to comment on how they saw their own development needs, categorising these into three different levels: basic, intermediate and advanced.
The outcome was a report indicating the many strengths of the staff group, the patterns of professional development needs identified and recommendations for building on those strengths clearly in evidence. This provides a platform from which to develop an integrated approach to professional development. It does not dismiss the benefits of classroom-based training, but it does set it in the broader context of the organisation’s overall approach to learning and professional development.
The project was well received by the staff who co-operated fully and were enthusiastic in grasping opportunities to enhance their ability to learn from practice. This was despite the fact that having someone witness their practice and write a report about it could easily and understandably have led to a defensive response.
By observing the staff in action, I was able to build on my own experience of residential child care work and come up with an analysis of the demands of the job and the knowledge, skills and values involved. This enabled me to make a number of recom-mendations for developing reflective practice, involving the use of supervision, recognising opportunities for learning from each other and various other possibilities. This was supplemented by the findings from the training needs analysis which identified a number of themes that would enable senior staff to plan a pro-gramme of training based on the priorities that emerged. The workshops on continuous professional development had paved the way for trying to make sure that the learning from subsequent training offered would be integrated into practice and not simply fade away because it was not anchored in the realities of day-to-day practice.
I came away from this project with very good feelings about the existing high standards of practice and the impressive level of commitment to continuing to learn and develop in order to offer as high a level of care as possible. Clearly, the more organisations that recognise their staff’s strengths and seek to maximise their potential through innovative projects such as this, the better. I should also add that I gained a great deal myself from this project, and would certainly be keen to use this method again. It enabled me to gain a much greater insight into the staff’s learning needs as well as their strengths and the very real demands they face working with people with learning disabilities in a residential setting.
References
Lambert, T. (1996) Key Management Solutions, Pitman, London
Thompson, N. (1995) Theory and Practice in Health and Social Welfare, Open University Press, Buckingham
© Neil Thompson 2004
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