Training & events programme

FREE FOR MEMBERS
Children, especially those with care experience, need extra support to navigate online life safely. Digital content plays a significant role in their learning, play, and social interactions, offering both benefits and risks, such as addiction to gaming, social media, or excessive screen time. Promoting moderation, rather than restriction, and teaching resilience is key to positive online engagement. This session will explore the impact of content addiction and suggest strategies to help children and young people develop healthy screen habits.

Let's acknowledge and celebrate difference. Understand neurodiversity as a natural variation to ‘the norm’ rather than as something that is disordered, dysfunctional or deficient. This session is an introduction to aspects of neurodiversity including autism, dyslexia and ADHD. It will give an overview to increase participants' knowledge and develop confidence in the subject.

This half day course is aimed at professionals who work with children and families who may benefit from a therapeutic intervention and would like to increase their understanding of different therapeutic approaches. Foster carers, kinship carers and adoptive parents who are considering different options for therapeutic support may also benefit from this training.

The National Leaving Care Benchmarking Forum (NLCBF) is a collaborative network of over 130 local authority leaving care teams, focused on improving services and support for care-experienced young people. Its central goal is to amplify the voices of these young people and ensure their input shapes the forum's decisions and priorities. The forum encourages local authorities to involve as many young people as possible in the Young People’s Benchmarking Forum (YPBMF) to help drive positive change and share best practices.

Cultural competence involves ensuring our attitudes, communication and behaviours recognise and respect cultural differences. As social workers, in whatever our role, it’s essential we are continually working towards cultural competence in our practice. In this open course, you will be supported to explore some of the key concepts within cultural competence and anti-oppressive practice, and then apply this learning to your practice. It will include exploration of how personal and professional identities can impact on the decisions we make in our professional roles.

Child health assessments are a key component in permanence planning for looked after children. Medical Advisers need to be aware of the relevant legislation, statutory guidance and competencies framework. They are required to interpret information and present this in an informative and considered format for social care colleagues, panels and potential carers. This course will consider the Medical Adviser's role in adoption relating to children.

This half day training is aimed at professionals who are supporting children and their families and who would like to explore different ways to collaborate with schools in meeting the child’s emotional needs. We know that for many children who are in kinship or foster care, or who are adopted, education can be a challenging experience.

The secure base model is a strengths-based framework for therapeutic caregiving informed by developments and research into attachment theory and child placement. It focuses on the interactions between a child and their caregiver that can support a child to experience greater security and build resilience.

This course is an opportunity to consider what we know about staying in touch from research, including what works well, the voices of those with lived experience, and aspects that may present challenges or need more support.

This course is an opportunity to consider what we know about staying in touch from research, including what works well, the voices of those with lived experience, and aspects that may present challenges or need more support.