Trauma Informed Practice and Motivational Interviewing – Cheshire West and Chester

We were delighted to collaborate with Cheshire West and Chester Trust to develop and deliver a large-scale training program across a wide multi-agency workforce. Their Our way of Working approach was funded by DfE to research and understand excellent practice with children and families. The purpose was to achieve a common and consistent approach to working in a trauma-informed way with families.

Work initially comprised of over 120 days of training to multi-agency partners across Health, Children’s Social Care, Early Help and Prevention, Schools, Education, Fire, Police, the third sector, Commissioned Services, Adult Services & Youth Offending Services. The program was extended for a further year. The partnership wide training programme reached over 2000 professionals.

Work also included supporting the implementation of learning conversations to enable professionals to constructively discuss, reflect and review their joint working to address practice/service issues to be more effective in making a difference for a family.  Additionally, a specific focus on multi-agency group supervision provided a means to address case specific issues particularly where concerns are escalating, by providing a managed forum for professionals to share, reflect, assess need and risk and optimise available resources to keep children safe.

An independent evaluation of this work was carried out and found evidence that the changes in practice to work in a more trauma-informed way are positively impacting on children and families. Work in this area is being held up as national good practice and we were delighted to be central to this.