In conversation with: the Doran Project
Communications Officer Innes Burns spoke to Barbara Kennedy and Claire Slocombe about their work helping local authorities with training to gather views of children with complex needs.
Innes Burns: First and foremost, who are you and what is it that you do with Children in Scotland?
Barbara Kennedy: I’m Barbara and I’ve been a teacher for a very long time. I worked for at least 20 years in additional needs schools, supporting children with a range of complex needs, including profound and severe disabilities.
That’s the experience I bring to this role. In a classroom setting you might have three or four members of support staff and perhaps eight or nine children. That’s a lot to manage, and in that environment a child’s voice can easily get lost.
When you’re working with children with severe and complex needs, they communicate in different ways. It’s about really tuning in to them and understanding the importance of relationship. You need to notice how they respond and use that to inform decisions.
Through the Children’s Views Project, we’re trying to find ways to support teachers to gather the child’s voice in that context.
We’ve created a webinar, which is open to anyone, and that introduces our in-person session. The in-person session revolves around the Lundy model of participation. It’s designed as an experiential workshop. The focus is on relationship, atonement, feeling, and using different forms of communication beyond conventional speech.
We’re developing a train-the-trainers package and working with colleagues at Children in Scotland to create a best practice resource online. That resource will mirror the approach we’re taking in the training.
I’m working with Aberdeen, and Claire is working with Midlothian.
IB: Claire, tell us about your background.
Claire Slocombe: I’m a former teacher and now a trainer with Children in Scotland. My background is mainly in supporting children who’ve experienced trauma. For many children with complex needs, that connects, because the world doesn’t always understand them in the way we would want it to.
I’m a Children’s Views Project Officer, and Barbara and I were tasked with working in partnership with Aberdeen and Midlothian local authorities to develop training that supports staff to gather the views of children with complex needs. Too often those views are not sought. These children can be marginalised or assumed not to have a voice or an opinion.
This project is about helping staff gather that voice and then use it to improve the young person’s experience in education.
Working with Aberdeen and Midlothian has been positive. There’s a lot of good practice already. We’re not coming in as if we have all the expertise. What we’re seeing is that practitioners may be aware of the Lundy model, but closing the loop, ensuring audience and influence, and using children’s views to make a tangible difference can be challenging.
Our training is designed to help close that loop.
We know that people remember what they feel, not just what they hear. So we create space for participants to experience communicating in different ways and building relationships without relying on spoken communication.
Alongside the training, we’ve been developing a best practice resource with our colleague Hannah. She suggested the name Listening Beyond Words, which captures what we’re trying to do. Often it’s not that young people aren’t communicating, it’s that we struggle to interpret what they’re telling us. We want to help practitioners make sense of those communications.
IB: Why Aberdeen and Midlothian?
CS: They were keen to be involved and had already been engaged in related work before we joined the project. My understanding is that through other work Children in Scotland had carried out, it was clear that strong practice was happening in those areas. At the same time, practitioners recognised there was still a gap.
It meant we weren’t starting from scratch. There’s research and academic work underpinning this, including work connected to Visible Voices and the National Complex Needs Network. The challenge is translating that into everyday practice and closing the gap between research and implementation.
Colleagues including Karen, Maggie and Jane, the head teacher at the specialist provision in Midlothian where I’ve been working, have highlighted another issue. There is currently no specialist training for teachers during initial teacher education focused on complex needs. There’s no option to undertake a placement in specialist provision as part of core training, and no dedicated modules on working with children with complex needs.
BK: When I trained, there was an elective on additional needs, which I chose because I was interested. But it was only an elective. After qualifying, I spent five years in mainstream education before moving into additional needs schools.
When I did move, I was effectively thrown in at the deep end. I had to learn on the job. If I’d had the opportunity to specialise earlier, I would have taken it. There’s a huge amount to learn when working with children with profound and severe needs.
IB: So there’s discussion about potentially creating a module, perhaps at Masters level, focused on collecting and understanding the views of children with profound and complex needs?
BK: Yes. There’s recognition that there’s a lot to understand in this area, and structured learning could make a significant difference.
