Expert support to develop the skills and systems your organisation needs
to turn
good intentions
into
good practice
so
more children thrive!
At SFAC, our team of experienced social workers, therapists, lawyers and judges deliver a range of services to help you improve your practice and see even more positive change in children’s lives.
Delivered online or in person, together we’ll pick and choose from the options below to develop a programme of support tailored specifically to the unique needs of your organisation and your context. You can read more about why all of our support is created just for you on our WHAT (We Do) page.
Click an item from the list below or scroll down to find more information about each of these services along with some guidance on the topics we often cover. We cover a LOT of topics, so if what you’re looking for isn’t on the list, please just ask!
Email info@sfac.org.uk to book your free discovery call with our CEO, Dan Hope.
Advocacy & Awareness Raising
SFAC has worked with organisations in 50 countries. This means if you’re looking for someone to help your organisation, or region, expand their ideas of child protection and care beyond the “way it’s always been done,” we can help.
Our advocacy workshops are fun, and interactive and have proven to stimulate conversation and reflection, ultimately, becoming a catalyst for change.
• How can children’s homes help children thrive?
• What does good practice look like in foster care? In kinship care? When children are reunited with their parents?
• Creating safe environments so hurt children can heal
• How to approach developing national systems of care and protection (using SFAC’s Continuum of Services model)
• How might children be represented in court hearings and legal proceedings?
Reviews
Reviewing the current standards of practice is an essential part of any organisation involved in child protection an care. SFAC’s Standards of Practice Reviews help organisations to develop a learning culture and to answer the question:
‘How do we know what we’re doing is good?!’
We conduct reviews in a couple of different ways:
- Members of our team can conduct a review and report on your organisation’s current standards of practice. The report will identify what is being done well and what needs improving and make recommendations for how strengths can be built upon and improvements made. (See the drop-down list below for the types of Standards of Practice Reviews we offer.)
- Alternatively, we can work collaboratively with you and your team to create your own standards of practice tool and review process. This will include training on how to use the tool and implement your review process and recommendations.
• Foster Care Services
• Kinship Care Services
• Adoption and Guardianship Services
• Reunification Services
• Assessments of Children and Families and Case Management Systems. Accordion Sample Description
Training Workshops
Bespoke training programmes can cover any aspect of child protection and care social work, working therapeutically to create safe environments for healing and growth and consideration of legal frameworks and processes. The amount of time, number, choice of topics and delivery format are developed in collaboration with you to meet the unique needs of your organisation and context.
Training workshops are interactive and can be designed to support your organisation in developing a new service or to equip your practitioners with new knowledge and skills to inform (and transform!) their practice.
There are different levels of training workshops provided from introduction level 1 to more advanced levels. Our team will advise you on what is suitable based on your organisation’s context and practitioner needs.
• Good practice and how to make best-interest decisions for children’s placements
• Analytical Child and Family Assessment Training in Child Protection and/or Reunification
• How to complete safe assessments of foster carers/kinship carers/adoptive parents or guardians.
• Care Planning - how to provide best care to children in Children Homes/Foster Care/Adoption/Guardianship;
• Self-Care for Staff
• Introduction to trauma informed care and protective behaviours.
• Introduction to the Continuum of Services - creating a national safeguarding system of family support, child protection and alternative care
• Children’s Representation in Court Proceedings
• Good Practice in Court Hearings consistent with UNCRC
• Role of Judges, Lawyers, Social Workers and other experts in family court hearings
• Making best interest decisions for children in court hearings.
• Other as required
Mentoring & Case Consultation
Professional training workshops can be incredible opportunities for learning and skill building (and we’ve been told that ours are!). Then comes the challenge of trying to implement and integrate the new information and put new skills into action in day-to-day practice. Suddenly a host of questions arise!
That’s where our mentoring sessions come in.
At SFAC we believe mentoring of practitioners and senior staff is vital in converting new knowledge into transformed practice. It’s often during mentoring sessions that big change happens in practitioner and organisational practice. The sessions are designed to support people through the process of putting their new knowledge and skills into action and consolidate and build on the training provided in workshop sessions. Participants are given the opportunity to discuss specific cases or incidents with a relevant and experienced member of our team.
Mentoring services are offered to organisations as a follow-up to training and can be provided to senior staff, individual practitioners, or groups of practitioners. It is often combined with case consultancy.
Consultation & Advice
SFAC provides organisations with advice and consultancy aimed at improving the quality of their child protection and care services.
Consultancy includes:
- Offering advice to national governments and judiciary in developing their services and identifying effective practical systems, processes, forms and training needs.
- Advising organisations on case management systems – forms, paperwork, processes, policies and procedures for their programmes.
- Advising organisations through transitioning from a children’s home to family care.
- Helping organisations think through what services they want to provide in the future using our ‘continuum of services’ model.
- Any other relevant requests.
Accredited Courses
SFAC offers accredited courses in Protective Behaviours.
- Protective Behaviours Introduction Level Course (3 hours)
- Protective Behaviours Foundation Level Course (12 hours).
- We can also arrange for access to further levels of accredited Protective Behaviours courses through the Protective Behaviours Consortium (including a training accreditation for those who wish to be Protective Behaviours Trainers).
UK Visits & Experience Exchanges
SFAC offers international visits and experience exchanges to NGOs, governments and the judiciary.
Visits to the UK
UK visits are an opportunity for NGOs, governments and judiciary from other countries to observe, learn from and question practice in England. Meetings and presentations with those working in the English child protection and care system provide a chance for both hosts and visitors to reflect on current practices and to strategise and problem-solve with international peers. It’s important to note that these visits are not designed for visiting delegations to repeat English models of practice as each country and context requires its own unique systems.
️Delegations usually include a mix of roles. For example: government officials involved in the care and protection of children, members of the judiciary and lawyers involved in family law, and social workers, psychologists and directors from relevant non-government organisations.
Each visit is tailored to the specific needs and interests of the visiting delegation. This blog post shares an example of what one UK experience exchange visit looked like.
SFAC’s relationships with:
- Leeds local authority (local government)’s children’s services (which is rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, the organisation that reviews children’s services in England),
- members of the judiciary and Cafcass (a national organisation representing children in court proceedings),
- and our patron, Baroness Judith Blake of Leeds, who has led local council children’s services through change
mean SFAC is able to provide visitors with exposure to many different aspects of the child protection and care system here in England.
• Visits to foster care and children’s homes provided in the not-for-profit and profit sector in UK may be possible.
• Observations of child protection practice & family support services.
• How the English system provides care for children who cannot live with their parents (kinship & connected persons care, foster care, guardianship, adoption and small, specialist children’s homes and, where possible, reunification)
• How the English family courts operate including pre-care proceedings work, how court hearings are managed, the role of the judge, the roles of the various lawyers involved including how children are represented.
• Meeting with children who have lived experience of care and kinship and foster carers.
• Meeting with other non-government foster care providers.
• Meeting with heads of children’s services departments.
Exchange Visits
SFAC can also visit organisations and conferences to give talks and presentations on the English systems and practice where this is sought, as well as from practitioners based in Australia and Uganda;
Having worked with organisations in 50 countries, our team can also connect your organisations to those working in many other countries who are willing to share practice visits and learnings from their own experience.