Cathy Stancer, Jenny McCabe, Rob McCabe
Birmingham Pathfinder: In practice. (Links to presentation Saturday 11.05)
The Pathfinder is creating a joined-up, systems-wide and strengths-based approach that brings together a network of Social Work, Education and Health resources directly into schools to support families facing serious adversity. This starts with recognising that a young person’s involvement in crime, with Children’s Services, SEND and exclusions is often a consequence of deeper challenges facing the family, such as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), or in a wider sense, deprivation, inequity and institutional disadvantage.
The Pathfinder works through schools, offering sustained support to families. We seek to understand the wider circumstances of a family, enabling effective collaboration and support; empowering them and utilising and building on their strengths. This requires a new kind of intensive, therapeutic, psychologically-informed approach where the quality of relationship between the Pathfinder and each family is the foundation of our practice.
This session will provide an overview of the Pathfinder practice approach, and then ask our audience to bring their own contexts into the room, and to consider the Pathfinder approach in the context of their own experiences and understandings of practice. We will invite our audience to work with us in small groups to consider the following three questions:
Birmingham Pathfinder: In practice. (Links to presentation Saturday 11.05)
The Pathfinder is creating a joined-up, systems-wide and strengths-based approach that brings together a network of Social Work, Education and Health resources directly into schools to support families facing serious adversity. This starts with recognising that a young person’s involvement in crime, with Children’s Services, SEND and exclusions is often a consequence of deeper challenges facing the family, such as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), or in a wider sense, deprivation, inequity and institutional disadvantage.
The Pathfinder works through schools, offering sustained support to families. We seek to understand the wider circumstances of a family, enabling effective collaboration and support; empowering them and utilising and building on their strengths. This requires a new kind of intensive, therapeutic, psychologically-informed approach where the quality of relationship between the Pathfinder and each family is the foundation of our practice.
This session will provide an overview of the Pathfinder practice approach, and then ask our audience to bring their own contexts into the room, and to consider the Pathfinder approach in the context of their own experiences and understandings of practice. We will invite our audience to work with us in small groups to consider the following three questions:
- What are the gifts, that this approach has to offer - to you, your practice, your organisation, as an inspiration, a provocation?
- What are the limitations that you see with this approach - what might be the barriers you foresee, what might be the problems, unintended consequences?
- Where does this approach fit? - for you, your organisation, your thinking, research or practice, or in the world in general?
