We partnered with BASW England at their 80/20 Campaign conference to speak about the Talking and Listening project and Kitbag. The event took place on Thursday 4th April 2019 in Birmingham.
In April 2019 the Talking and Listening to Children (TLC) project joined forces with the BASW 80-20 campaign to host an event to highlight the TLC research findings and to introduce social workers to Kitbag. A key and concerning finding from the TLC research was the small percentage of social workers (less than 20%) who used any type of resource to communicate with children. And in those instances where resources were used – pens and paper, lego, beads, puppets etc – the practitioners had almost always purchased them for themselves. A Twitter campaign run a few weeks prior to the BASW TLC event asked the question: Does your local authority provide you with resources to undertake direct work with children? 70% of social workers responding to the question said NO.
Kitbag is a resource designed by International Futures Forum a small Scottish charity, committed to promoting emotional literacy in children and adults. To date Kitbag has mainly been used by the Scottish charity Children 1st in schools with groups of children (see video). With research impact monies awarded to the TLC project, and in collaboration with BASW, we have provided Kitbags to groups of social workers in six local authorities and are running in-house workshops to embed their use with children and families in social work contexts. Over the next ten months these social workers will explore how Kitbag impacts on their direct work and communication with children and how children and families experience working with Kitbag. Plan are in place for BASW 80-20 and TLC Kitbag campaign to co-host a second event in Spring 2020 to report on the progress made and further developments.
The video below give an overview of the conference.
Keynote: Talking and Listening to Children and using Kitbag
This video shows Gillian Ruch’s full keynote presentation.
This video shows scenes from the Kitbag workshop with delegates and members of the BASW and University of Sussex teams talking about their impressions of the resource.
