All EHCAP Projects have a robust golden thread of safeguarding. Our particular expertise is in building skills that enable more effective working together in settings where staff from different services gather with children, young people and families, e.g. Education Health Care Plan multi-agency meetings, Child Protection Meetings, Child Protection Medicals, Team around the Child or Common Assessment Framework Meetings.

Taking a trauma-informed approach can stretch soft and non technical skills. It is particularly relevant to highly stressful situations such as those where there are safeguarding concerns. The question posed by way of evaluation is whether the trauma informed approach Mindful Emotion Coaching and Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) awareness (MACE) can enable professionals to work together more effectivly accross services and communities.

 

The intermediate outcomes of increased staff wellness through mindful exercises, coaching responsive relationships (Dan Siegel’s Hand Model and John Gottman’s Emotion Coaching are practical psycho-education tools that build and strengthen these skills) and increasing understanding of the effects of toxic stress on development and social interaction can be assessed with regular fast feedback loops through online feedback from learners at workshops and open learning forums.

The Ultimate Outcomes of decreased stress, increased self compassion and improved communication between professionals across services can be demonstrated by multi agency innovation with a child, parent, family, community focus.

Moderators will be different in different settings and include, for example, recruitment processes for facilitators. 

Examples of Moderators with learning from EHCAP projects:

recruitment of facilitators by the host organisation needs an awareness of the emotional resilience of the facilitators themselves and a normalised offer of emotion coaching to support their development
proper governance -facilitators need time allocated for them to read and assimilate learning through EHCAP's Wellness Coaches Learning Programme
evidence base needs to be robust and clear from the beginning
networking effectively accross services enables group interaction/discussion  which is an important learning lesson in itself