If you are a frontline professional and wish to improve your understanding of MARAC and its processes - these sessions have been designed for you!
The following will be covered:
Gain an understanding of the MARAC process and aims
• MARAC threshold
• Risk Assessment
• How to complete MARAC referral form
• Your role at MARAC, presenting and sharing research
• Understand the importance of information sharing and referring to MARAC
The briefings are intended to be informal sessions where I will be available to provide information, answer any questions and assist with any queries attendees might have.

It is becoming increasingly common for professions to be called to give evidence where an adult with care and support needs dies. This course will explore the purpose of an inquest and provide practical guidance on steps practitioners should take when drafting witness statements or preparing to give oral evidence. The course sets out the responsibilities of the coroner and explains the investigatory process of an inquest. There will be a clear focus on core social care values and a human rights approach.

This course is for Department of Adult Social Care and Public Health (DASCPH), local authority staff who are required to understand the workings of the Coroners Court as part of their role.

Aim of the course
To learn how to apply the law to complete a Mental Capacity Assessment.

Overview of Course
This course is delivered over seven weeks, and delegates must attend all sessions and complete the associated assessment to complete the programme.

The first part of the course is pre-recorded and covers the legal provisions of the act, who the act applies to and when to undertake an assessment.

In week two there is a facilitated virtual session on how to carry out a Mental Capacity Assessment, where delegates are required to actively participated in an assessment within a role play. This is followed up by how to write up a Mental Capacity Assessment in week three which is delivered via another facilitated virtual session.

Assessment
In week four delegates will undertake an assessment where they are required to complete a Mental Capacity Assessment from a specific scenario. In week five each delegate will be required to peer assess another participants submission and consider the strengths and weaknesses of the assessment.

Week 6 is a live facilitated sessioned which will discuss the peer assessment and feedback given from the MCA assessment. It will be an opportunity to ask any questions and/or to reflect on own learning from the peer assessment activity. 

In the final week delegates will be required to test their skills in an online assessment using multiple choice.

The delegate will be given several scenarios covering different challenging situations where they will get the opportunity to apply knowledge gained on the programme. To complete the course delegates must pass this element successfully.

The course will comprise of interactive activities, group discussions and the use of film to illustrate key topics.
The focus will be on the experiences of adolescents as victims of familial abuse; in particular the impact of sexual abuse on children and young people - a survivors account.

What is Motivational Interviewing?

‘You lot don’t care! You haven’t a clue what we’re going through!”
We’re entitled to more than this, and we’re going to get it.
Who’s your manager?
‘What do you know? Do you have kids of your own?’

Are these kinds of ‘heart-sink’ phrases familiar? Do you or your staff frequently find themselves on the defensive as practitioners or as managers? In an environment of diminishing resources and increasing demand on services, we need a fresh and imaginative approach. Motivational Interviewing is a strengths-based approach that helps conversations become more productive, drawing out the motivation or energy within the individual, however little that might be.

The key principles are:

• Engagement with the client, rather than doing something to them – i.e. change cannot be forced or pushed on to someone. It has to be internal for the client to be meaningful and long term.
• Rolling with resistance (NB this is not rolling over or being passive)
• Express empathy
• Avoid conflict
• Developing discrepancy in client’s thinking
• Support self-responsibility
Clients are often stuck or ambivalent about making changes for themselves. Practitioners can easily collude with this ‘stuckness’, or out of frustration try to push people to action, which only increases resistance. Motivational Interviewing helps to make the practitioner aware of these tendencies and give them options to work more powerfully in ways that create more possibility of change for their clients.


Motivational Interviewing is a framework of intervention, brought together in the 1990s by William Miller and Stephen Rollnick. It is an approach that is designed to work with those most resistant to change or stuck in entrenched behaviours. The premise of Motivational Interviewing is that motivation is not a ‘fixed state’ that a person does or does not have. Rather, motivation ebbs and flows depending on many factors such as circumstances, mood and so forth. The skilled practitioner (or manager) will harness whatever very little motivation there might be, and help it move in the right direction. The Motivational Interviewing approach borrows in from other sources such as Carl Rogers’ person-centred counselling; Socratic thinking and Prochaska & DiClemente’s Cycle of Behaviour change. MI is the chosen approach for the Family Safeguarding Model to underpin all interactions with families, individuals, colleagues, for supervision, case conferences and management. It builds on strengths-based work and works with ‘what’s strong, not what’s wrong’.

This highly interactive course will equip you with key tools, skills and experience to make an immediate difference to clients. Using a blend of teaching styles, film and live MI demonstrations and plenty of group work, it will enhance and develop your own strength-based skills. The course has three Practice Development Sessions to further embed the learning with live cases. There is also a unique Motivational Skills App with a wealth of materials to support you in your MI practice.

The aim of this course is for staff to understand how reflective practice can be used to enhance outcomes.

This course is aimed at social workers but may also be suitable for other practitioners. The course utilises the framework of KSS for practice supervisors, as incorporates up to date research and tools on reflective practice. The course offers participants the opportunity to think constructively about how they use reflective practice both in individual and group settings. Core concepts are explored, and practical guidance is provided to enable practitioners to utilise these skills to enhance the outcomes of their work

This course is for Department of Adult Social Care and Public Health (DASCPH), local authority staff only.

'Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid' (HF Fowler and FG Fowler, The King's English, 1906)

Why is this subject important? It's quite difficult to write simply. All too often social care report writing lacks structure and is unclear, unfocused and repetitive. This means the message and impact are weakened or lost. Whether we are writing for children and families, service users, other professionals, the court or others we need to do so in a clear, concise, relevant and meaningful way. And that means taking the reader (whoever they may be) with us every step of the way. We simply need to convince them that we know what we are talking about and are worth listening to.

Reports, assessments, minutes and plans will be read, understood and followed if they are easy to read, easy to understand and easy to follow. We will apply our approach of facts-analysis-judgements. Indeed, research, inspections, serious case reviews and inquiries have all raised concerns that social work recording and reporting often lacks analysis and misses the child or service user's voice (or their voice is 'professionalised').

All too frequently, writing is mainly narrative and descriptive. There is a lot of information and a lot of facts. But we need to make sense of those facts and that information. What do they tell us? Why do they tell us that? What should we do as a consequence of that? We'll show you how to make sense of it all. We'll make analysis easy! Honest.

Aim: To have a basic understanding of safeguarding adults. This course provides a basic overview of safeguarding and the key roles and responsibilities. It provides a basic introduction to the law and types of abuse. It covers what constitutes harm, also identifying restrictive practices. Prevention and positive practice are also covered, and details of how to deal with disclosure.
This course is for Wandsworth and Richmond Local Authority DASCPH staff only. It is aimed at Social Care Assessors. 

To raise awareness, identification and support processes of domestic abuse and the impact upon victims and children to practitioners, enabling them to be able to understand the issues and support processes available to children and families subjected to domestic abuse across all cultures and religions and families.

This course is for Department of Adult Social Care and Public Health (DASCPH), local authority staff only.

This is a one-day course for staff working in the Department of Adults Social Care and Public Health within Wandsworth and Richmond L. The course enables practitioners to consider a range of communication approaches and to balance customer expectations with operational reality. The course provides practical tools to deal with difficult situations sensitively.