"A passport to disaster becomes ticket to a new world"

Ruth Wishart

The Herald

The nine young people had been "looked after" in a variety of ways. Some in residential schools, some in local authority homes, some fostered. They were aged from just 13 to 27. But they were all experts. Experts in what happens to children in care; what goes wrong, what they need and what could make the experience more positive. And, at Robert Gordon University (RGV) in Aberdeen, they became tutors to a fresh intake of social-work undergraduates.
The methodology was nothing if not imaginative. The students lay down on a large piece of paper while their body outline was traced. And inside the tracing was subsequently written all the qualities that would make up a good social worker. And, guess what? It had nothing to do with being taken to burger bars or slipped illegal cigarettes. It was about being listened to, being respected, being allowed to forge a relationship on which they could rely.
This group, along with one RGU lecturer and two other adults involved in child care, were among the graduates of a pilot scheme run in Scotland over the past three years, funded by the Scottish Education Department, delivered by the Columba 1400 leadership centre and aimed at turning around the lives of young care leavers.

At any one time in Scotland we have about 12,000 kids "in care". In any one year about 1000 of them have to take their chances in the big, bad world outside. It's a tough step for any teenager; for young people who may have bounced around the system, who have had no continuity of adult support (but often continuity of abuse or neglect) and have fewer qualifications, it's too often a passport to unemployment, homelessness and worse.

Children from a care background will feature disproportionately in any set of bad-news statistics. Sixty per cent will leave school with no qualifications compared with 4% of the community at large. Sixty per cent, as a corollary, are not in education, employment or training. But the Columban scheme, based on their earlier work with young people from what they term "tough realities", is geared to focus relentlessly on the positive; not what these kids haven't done, but what they could do given respect, encouragement, an insight into their own potential and a belief in fulfilling it.

Not just the young people, but adult professionals from local authority social work departments and the voluntary sector, went through a programme involving "taster" sessions and a rigorous follow-up as well as the heart of the matter; a week-long intensive experience at the Columban centre on Skye.
The deal here is that, within a safe environment, there is no hiding place. The programme is geared to bringing focus into often unfocused lives, to building emotional intelligence instead of anger and, above all, to nurturing the kind of self-awareness and perseverance that gives them ammunition when they are decanted from the glories of a Scottish island to the pressures of the urban jungle. Everybody – adults and young people – had to sign up for the same activities on the same basis.

Nobody graduated at the end of the week unless they had done what was asked of them and what they had to ask of themselves. Nevertheless, 74% of some 400 young people, many of them all but written off, became Columban graduates. That outcome, and the number who went on to make quantum personal leaps in terms of employment, self-reliance and coming off drink and drugs, gives credence to the programme managers' insistence that "the soft stuff is the hard stuff".  The follow-up evaluation of the first group to go through, two years ago, shows that 107 out of 145 have continued to progress in terms of education and employment. Thirteen of them had managed to find a tenancy before the programme, now 37 have their own accommodation. Yet, arguably, this experience is just as important for the adults who go back to working with care leavers. Because of their daunting workload, because of the myriad of boxes now needing ticked, because of the furore when something goes pear shaped, innovative young social workers too often become risk averse, burned out or both. The comments from adult staff in the final report from the pilot scheme are every bit as arresting as those from the young people in terms of being forced to rethink how they behave and what the consequences are.

This is another area where being a small country offers huge advantages: it lets us look at what works and then roll it out. But it also means looking at what works and continuing to invest in it. So often in social policy, politicians are seduced by the new at the expense of the road tested. When we get things rolling, we don't need to reinvent the wheel.

Ruth Wishart sits on Columba's Board of Trustees.

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