Homestart - civic conversation invite March 9, 2010
Posted by wrays2 in : Civic conversation, Uncategorized , add a comment
Those of us who work within agencies supporting parents of pre-school children, would benefit greatly from this ‘conversation’, in order to be better informed about issues and challenges within Mental Health resources.
We hope you’ll take this opportunity to meet various agencies, including Mental Health professionals, at the Early Years Centre, Sanderson’s Wynd, Tranent, on Wednesday 31st March 2010 at 12 – 2.30pm with lunch provided.
RSVP 01875 616066
Doula Seminar - A Civic Conversation event March 8, 2010
Posted by pmclaren in : Civic conversation, Health & Early Years Network, Research & Evaluation, Service Champions , add a commentVolunteer Doula Project Executive SummaryVolunteer Doula Project Executive SummaryPosted on behalf of Shauna Powers
Support from the Start: - Civic Conversation
“A Volunteer Doula Project: Could it work here?”
Liz Cregan the chief nurse for East & Midlothian opened a ‘Civic conversation’, event at The Quay on February 22 to discuss the work of a successful Volunteer Doula project in Hull. The event was to raise awareness of a new initiative developing in England that appears to show promise in tackling early health inequalities. The participant discussed how these benefits could be extended to women in East and Mid Lothian.
A Doula is a trained and experienced partner who accompanies a woman through pregnancy and childbirth and the first few weeks of family life. Traditionally hired privately, training volunteer doulas who then offer their services free of charge to pregnant women is a growing trend. The Goodwin volunteer doula project trains women as doulas who then volunteer their services to women in the community. The project works closely with pregnant women from the asylum seeker community, teenage mothers, and women in sex work.
Heather Barnes, the current project manager in Hull (http://www.goodwindoulas.org/) was the keynote speaker at this event.
Through presentations and panel discussions, the morning session brought together mothers, doulas, midwives, members of the voluntary sector, NHS Lothian health professionals and a member of the Scottish Government. The session brought up many topics from how constant labour support can help improve outcomes for both mum, baby and their family to the importance of peer support and advocacy for women during this important time.
It proved to be a very interesting session which brought together a wide range of experiences and stories. We have attached the PowerPoint presentations for the day. Any comments or questions can also be directed to Shauna.
From this event, a mailing list was created to keep delegates informed about the progress of this idea. To be included on this mailing list, please contact Shauna.Powers@nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk
Volunteer Doula Project Report
Volunteer Doula Project Report
Volunteer Doula Project Executive Summary
Volunteer Doula Programme Canadian Presentation
Goodwin Replica Volunteer Doula Service
First aid training for forest school leaders March 1, 2010
Posted by wrays2 in : Uncategorized, forest school , add a commentWell done to all the staff that passed the paediatric first aid training - and many thanks for being willing to give up a weekend to undergo the training.
The second group had to contend with some pretty extreme weather conditions.
Outdoor Learning in Norway March 1, 2010
Posted by wrays2 in : forest school , 2commentsI came across this you tube video on Juliet Robertson’s blog ‘I’m a teacher get me out of here’. I couldn’t resist posting it here - because this story is a really good way of explaining what nature nurture actually means. (Sadly the link is blocked from my work computer but have tried it from home and it works there)
Anybody that wants to keep up with outdoor learning could do worse than checking Juliet’s blog. For instance the story of Marcus the Lamb had escaped me completely till I recently checked her blog - had to laugh although its not really a funny story especially for the teacher involved.
Also the woodland trust have recently published an outdoor learning pack for primary teachers based on a programme run in West Lothian that looks very useful
woodland-trust-outdoor-learning-pack1
Action Learning February 22, 2010
Posted by pmclaren in : Service Champions , add a commentHere is the output from the 5th session of Service Champions Action Learning sets held on 4th February 2010
Forest school - Nature Nurture February 16, 2010
Posted by wrays2 in : forest school , 1 comment so far
- All our own work
Over the last year I have been training as a forest school leader with the forest school training company. As chair of the East Lothian Forest education Initiative and a keen fan of the forest school concept I felt I ought to experience it for myself. It has been a great experience.
I had helped out a couple of times at the Saltoun primary pilot project which was delivered by Karin Chipulina - you can see the video the school made on her web blog - but I have never really done any work that involved working directly with school children over a sustained period of time. Altough I have taught woodland craft / conservation skills in my spare time for a number of years mostly to adults and older children - I never really have time to get to know the people I have worked with other than on a very superficial basis - so forest school was a completely new experience.
The concept itself came from Sweden where it developed in response to parent demand following some early pioneering work. Basically the concept seeks to use the nurturing qualities of the outdoor environment to support personal, social and emotional learning through play. Research has consistently shown that quality outdoor environments are stress relieving for all age groups, and for children there are advantages in terms of motor skills development, reduced infections, as well as for confidence and self esteem.
The training is a mixture of taught and practical sessions - including the delivery of a forest school programme of a minimum of six sessions usually delivered over six weeks.
Whitecraig primary kindly let me work with one of their classes for my practical programme, under the supervision of the class teacher.
Here is a link to the session plans I developed with the teacher. whitecraig-session-plans
I have to say that the first time I met the kids in the class i was completely out of my comfort zone - there is something about the scrutiny of five and six year olds that is more unnerving than the professionals and managers I am more familiar with. Leaving comfort zones was also an issue for the class teacher, who admitted to me, that for the first few sessions, the lack of walls in our outdoor classroom caused her some anxiety.
I learnt a lot from the class about the practical application of the forest school concept and a lot from th teacher about the management of a class - how to make sure that they were listening and understanding what was being said. Most of all I had a glimpse of how powerful the outdoors can be as a learning environment for children. It was a privilege to work with the class who were very well behaved - attentive and receptive of new experiences. It was a joy to see their personalities coming out during the course of the eight weeks, and to see them using the experience to grow. The boys who were physically over confident but learnt to understand and respect the boundaries that were placed on them in the outdoors. The quite ones who given the right moment were willing to step into the limelight - the boy with a real talent for expressing himself artistically. The bright girl that always sought the teachers attention in the classroom fading into the background in the outdoors. The girl that struggled with direct adult attention, but was confident amongst her peers with practical tasks. The boy that visibly grew when given direct praise. It was never difficult to engage these kids in what we were doing - they were always up for it - that wasn’t the cleverly designed sessions - it was being outdoors.
From their reactions and feedback I think the children enjoyed the sessions. The parents that came along every week as helpers I think also got something out of it despite the poor weather - it always seemed to be raining on a tuesday morning. The teacher said that the kids always looked forward to the forest school sessions and brought a lot of what they did outdoors into the rest of thier school week - and it was always a quiet and relaxed class in the afternoon after the morning forest school session. I was impressed with one part of the teachers feedback when she observed that she felt the class had developed a group identity and settled as a class more quickly than she thought would have happened without the sessions - it was a P1 / P2 composite class and the session took place in October.
Walking to the forest school site
The Power of Routine February 15, 2010
Posted by wrays2 in : Civic conversation, Health & Early Years Network, Uncategorized , add a comment
The Scottish Public Health Observatory highlighted this longitudinal survey in a recent e-bulletin
“The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study finds that pre-school children in USA with the 3 household routines of regularly eating the evening meal as a family, obtaining adequate night-time sleep, and having limited TV viewing time, had a 40% lower prevalence of obesity”.
Thats a big difference and certainly more to my knowledge than has been achieved in designed interventions to reduce obesity - even than the EPODE programme in France
The following links will give you more information on the study
News article: http://news.scotsman.com/health/A-traditional-family-routine-may.6053741.jp
Online journal publication:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/peds.2009-0417v1?maxtoshow=&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Sarah+Anderson&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT
What I couldnt get from this information was an analysis of why some families value such routines and why some others don’t.
The danger with type of research is that it can be another moralistic ‘health stick’ to beat people with. It puts the onus for change on parents without looking at the context of peoples lives.
In the same way the EPIC longitudinal survey of adult health behaviours in Europe also seems to put the onus of change on individuals. The implication is that if you do certain things and don’t do others your chances of living a longer life with less disease improve significantly - the responsibility is yours. Its very easy too come up with a moralistic answer as to why some people don’t engage in the right behaviours for health?
Dr Harry Burns gave the following summary of the EPIC findings from a study by Ford et al Arch Int Med 2009 at a presentation at First Step in Musselburgh. The figures on the right are the percentages by which people who engage in four healthy behaviors are less likely to suffer the disease category on the left than people who don’t have the four healthy behaviours. The figures in the brackets are the range. Hence if you can stick to the four healthy behaviours you are 78% less likely to have any chronic disease than someone who doesn’t.
4 healthy behaviours
Any chronic disease 78% (72% to 83%)
Heart Attack 83% (47% to 93%)
Stroke 50% (-18% to 79%)
Diabetes 93% (88% to 95%)
Cancer 36% (5% to 57%)
On one level the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study above is really saying something that I believe the vast majority of parents already know and or have been told at some point:-
- sharing mealtimes is a good thing
a bedtime routine is a good thing
too much tele / computer is a bad thing
Perhaps studies like this can help some people to prioritise these behaviours by quantifying what the consequences of not doing them might be.
That said I firmly believe that relying on information alone can make services sound moralising, which will disengage people from the information we are trying to communicate. We need to start from a wider view than the change we want people to make by asking question like.
What is it that supports parents to ‘get it right’, how can service’s build on that?
What is that puts barriers in the way of ‘getting it right’ and how can services help remove them?
Healthy Start February 11, 2010
Posted by wrays2 in : Civic conversation, Health & Early Years Network, Service Champions, Steering Group, Uncategorized , add a comment
With Healthy Start, you can get free vouchers every week which you swap for milk, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables and infant formula milk. In theory you can also get free vitamins. Healthy Start replaces the Welfare Food Scheme. The vouchers have to be taken to a participating retailer - the website has a list of the retailers searchable by postcode.
It is a means tested benefit that an applicaton form has to be filled in for - part of which has to completed by a health professional - it can be applied for online
Have never been keen on means testing as a method of targetting - probably because I have some not very fond memories of standing in the free school meals queue at Sedgefield Comprehensive. Aside from the stigma issue with means testing I would argue that it is often an inefficient way of doing things - creating large bureacracies in order to establish entitlement and then police the system, and by so doing limiting the take up of the very people that are being targeted. (The only evidence on uptake I have been able to find so far suggests that it is similiar to the welfare food scheme it replaced at around 55% of the potential beneficiaries.) Hence, other people have also to invest time and effort in advising and supporting people to make claims - a quick internet search will reveal the level of confusion about healthy start vouchers - who is entitled, how do you make a claim who fillsi in the form and so on. See Emma’s diary Netmums
Having said that a means tested scheme for supporting early years nutrition for pregnant women and parents on low incomes is better than no scheme.
One of the distinctie features of this scheme is the availability of vitamin supplements. However, I am aware that there has been some difficulties with the supply of vitamins The website has the following to say about the vitamins available on the scheme
Why are vitamin supplements important?
You will get most of the vitamins you need if you eat healthy foods. However:
- your young children may not get enough vitamin A, C and D from their food
- pregnant and breastfeeding women may not get enough vitamin D or folic acid which may harm their baby
Ask your health visitor or midwife where to get the free vitamins for you and your children. Take the letter attached to your vouchers with you to claim your free vitamins.
The Healthy Start vitamins are also for sale at some NHS clinics.
Over the next week will contact all the pharmacies in the Support from the Start target area to ask if Healthy Start vitamins can be obtained and if not why not. I will post the result of this survey here.
Steven Wray
Music and emotional literacy February 5, 2010
Posted by wrays2 in : Research & Evaluation , 1 comment so farDavid had been working with Ross High School and the council’s arts service on a pilot project that showed significant promise.
The evaluation of this pilot can now be accessed on the councils website at:-
http://www.eastlothian.gov.uk/site/scripts/documents_info.php?documentID=895&pageNumber=4
What is emotional literacy?
“Emotional literacy is the ability to understand ourselves and others and to be aware of, understand and to use information about the emotional states of others with competence” (Elizaeth Weare 2004)
The health promoting school website say the following about emotional literacy:-
The environments that encourage emotional and social competence are:
- an enriched physical environment
- an enriched emotional environment.
We now understand that by providing these environments, together with specific training and coaching in personal and social skills, we can enable children and young people to develop emotional maturity far more effectively than we could before. Many schools believe that emotional intelligence can and must be developed because it leads to so many benefits. They are therefore finding ways to explicitly place emotional literacy at the heart of their approach to learning, teaching, achieving, behaviour change and well-being.
Aspects of emotional literacy
The various aspects of emotional literacy as described by Katherine Weare in her book ‘Developing the Emotionally Literate School’ are outlined here.
Self-understanding:
- having an accurate and positive view of ourselves
- having a sense of optimism about the world and ourselves
- having a coherent and continuous life story.
Understanding and managing emotions:
- experiencing the whole range of emotions
- understanding the causes of our emotions
- expressing our emotions appropriately
- managing our responses to our emotions effectively: for example, managing our anger, controlling our impulses
- knowing how to feel good more often and for longer
- using information about emotions to plan and solve problems
- resilience: processing, and bouncing back from, difficult experiences.
Understanding social situations and making relationships:
- forming attachments to other people
- experiencing empathy for others
- communicating with others and responding effectively
- managing our relationships effectively
- being autonomous, independent and self-reliant.
The above strikes a strong resonance with Dr Harry Burns recent summary of what creates the conditions for positive health outcomes in human beings, particularly in the early years of life. (based on the work of social researcher Aaron Antonovsky and the body of biological research that has identified how the body and brain responds to chronic stress)
To be healthy he argues we need to have an environment that is :
- comprehensible
- manageable
- meaningful.
In other words we need to be able to make sense of our personal worlds, have some sense that we are in control and to be able to value our experience of the world.
We are social animals and have to be able to make sense of (comprehend) those that are in our lives. We also need to be able to deal with disputes, negotiate help when we need it and generally get on with other people (manageable). Finally we need to be loved or at least valued by the people in our lives (meaningful). If we don’t learn the skills need for this we can literally be lost in a world that has little meaning, seems beyond our ability to influence and is difficult to understand. In other words a place that is either frightening, dangerous or both.
Reflecting on my own childhood experiences understanding, managing and valuing emotions and relationships was not something that was addressed verbally and I can’t recall emotions or relationship being talked about in a classroom context. Having said that I always felt loved (if not understood) by my family, valued by my friends and their was a lot of emotional expression (not all of it very literate) So no doubt whatever degree of emotional literacy I developed I learnt, in large part, experientially and through role models.
I understand that I was lucky to be in a relatively stable and loving family situation, and I am sure I absorbed a lot of emotional awareness if not literacy from that environment. However, I think other strands of my learning were less dependant on family and these were stories, music and sport. For a boy growing up mostly in the north east of England participation in football (mostly in the street - that how old I am) was both an experience that allowed me to feel a wide range of emotion but it provided a medium and language to talk about those experiences to my peers. The experience of Success/ failure - elation / disapointment - rage/pride were daily occurrences and you can’t be emotionally aware / literate if you are not in an environment that offers you emotional experience. So for me learning about emotions had a lot to do with the physical environment that I could access. In the present its not unknown for my wife to accuse me of being selfish, and for me the emotional content and understanding of that word is still tied up with the feelings that went along with boys that refused to pass the ball.
I come from a large family and dealing with strong emotions often meant not being in the same physical space as annoying brothers, which meant being outside. Today being outside preferably amongst or close to trees has a pretty much instantaneous effect of calming me.
Exposure to reading and stories was probably another way that I learnt about emotions - when we put ourselves in the place of a character in a novel we learn about their feelings and our reaction to them. My first independent reading experience was the Victor comic book - even that which is not known for its emotional range gave me a vicarious access to the emotions of others and the words that describe them. Television was another way that I accessed stories - and stories where the emotional nuances were accented and defined by music. My environment was not music rich (apart from a couple of Elvis Presley LPs) and television was really how I experienced music. Some words / stories for me have emotional connotations that are intimately connected to the music of television programmes. If I hear the word holocaust the theme music of a t.v. programme called The World at War leaps straight into my mind followed by the mixture of horror, disbelief and anger that that I felt as I was first exposed to the image of a bulldozer pushing skeletal human bodies into a mass grave.
The experiences available to us in our in our physical environment have emotional contexts and therefore learning opportunities - its not all about words. Too much emphasis on words and intellectual understanding of emotions for me easily slides into therapy, and that can be dangerous if you don’t know what your doing. ( Carol Craig of the centre for confidence and well being I think has made a similar point).
Thats what I like about the use of music for developing emotional literacy - it connects the internal to the external world as does sport and being in a natural environment. For children that don’t have the benefit of stable or perhaps even caring families maybe the learning value of the emotional environments outwith the home become even more valuable. That would make access to those environments and the right learning experiences a powerful tool. - Do we use music to learn about emotion, do we use sport to learn about emotions, do we use the outdoor environment to learn about emotion?
Curricullum for excellence - perhaps it start with the question - What does that feel like?
Champions Get Together February 5, 2010
Posted by pmclaren in : Service Champions, Steering Group, community champions , add a commentJust before xmas the Service and Community champions met to review how the test site had developed over the last year. The first part of the session was an informal chance to catch up with each other and review the year using a timeline. The timeline showed key activities since the test site was announced and champions were asked to record their impression with sticky post its.
Below are photographs of the Support from the Start Storyboard which was displayed at the Champions Get Together, held on Monday 21st December 2009 in John Muir House Haddington. Th notes from the discussion are linked get-together-group-discussion-notes
This event was a good opportunity for the Service Champions and Community Champions to meet each other, the Project Board members and East Lothian council Chief Executive Alan Blackie was in attendance. It was a fun event with relaxation and culminated in a facilitated group discussion looking at future priorities.
The storyboard is a timeline for the test site from initiation in October 2008 to the time of the Get Together in December 2009, which details major events and deliverables from the project and lists the outcomes driving the project forward. There is also a list of the Service Development Fund proposals and many of the activities which have taken place. The Champions were encouraged to add their thoughts to the storyboard of what inspired them/disappointed them and what have been the achievements or barriers. These thoughts are also listed here.
Champions Thoughts
