Introducing social pedagogy into Scottish residential child care : an evaluation of the Sycamore Services social pedagogy training programme

This report provides an introduction to the approach to child care known as social pedagogy and an evaluation of a social pedagogy training programme delivered to a group of child care staff employed in Sycamore Services. It is a 1st stage evaluation which gathers information from participants during the training programme and over the first few months following the training. This was a pilot programme and the Sycamore Services management have decided that the programme will be run again, and will eventually be offered to all staff. A further evaluation will be carried out in order to identify benefit and impact one year on from the end of the pilot

Guidance on minimising the use of physical restraint in Scotland’s residential child care establishments

This guidance has been developed by a working group drawn from a comprehensive group of stakeholders representing all sectors, including the regulatory and inspection agencies and advocacy services. The main task of the group was to, building on the guidance in Holding Safely, clarify procedures for staff, service users and regulators, and help staff to understand when it is safe and appropriate to restrain a child

Residential child care : between home and family

Government statistics show that around 1,700 Scottish children and young people are in residential care at any one point in time. In addition several hundred others, including those with significant learning, physical and communication disabilities, receive regular periods of respite care in residential units. Residential child care has also been the focus of a considered amount of government policy-making. There have been changes in the average size and location of residential units, changes in staffing structures and repeated attempts to better train the workforce. Residential care has also been the focus of considerable regulation and scrutiny, much of it in response to scandals associated with abuse; both contemporary and ‘historic’. Scotland’s residential care services are strongly supported by central government policy and the government continues to play a major role, particularly for the most disadvantaged or ‘troubled and troublesome’ children. The sector is noteworthy in that Scotland does not have a separate juvenile justice ‘detention’ sector and it only has a tiny in-patient child and adolescent mental health service. Another notable characteristic of the Scottish children’s homes sector is that a significant number remain under local authority control. Meanwhile there has been a steady decline in voluntary sector provision and a steady growth, from a low base, of private provision. This is the first dedicated study of the Scottish children’s residential care sector. Throughout appropriate comparisons are made to parallel provision elsewhere in the UK and in Europe. The result is a text of great interest and utility to all those working, training to work or formulating practice and policy for the children’s residential care sector in Scotland

Social pedagogy and inter-professional practice : evaluation of Orkney Islands training programme

From February to September 2011, a social pedagogy training programme was provided for 18 staff from across Orkney Islands Council education and social care services. The initiative was jointly funded by Orkney Islands Council and the Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care (SIRCC), now the Centre for excellence for looked after children in Scotland (CELCIS). The Orkney initiative was the first instance in Scotland of an inter-agency group of participants undertaking the course together. The purpose of the evaluation was to provide systematic evidence of the impact that the social pedagogy training had on participants’ day-to-day practice and inter-agency or inter-professional working. The evaluation questions were: 1.What was the impact of the training on participants’ day-to-day practice? 2.What impact did the provision of social pedagogy training to multi-agency participants have on their inter-professional and inter-agency collaboration? 3.What helped and hindered the process of building inter-agency collaboration and what key challenges can be identified

Care in mind : improving the mental health of children and young people in state care in Scotland

Some five thousand children and young people are in residential and foster care in Scotland. Many experience poor outcomes and concern about the quality of care has led to a number of government initiatives including the registration of care services and the social care workforce. Children and young people in state care experience a high level of mental health problems. Mental health services, however, have not served this vulnerable group well. The issue of the mental health of children and young people is now high on the government's agenda. A national needs assessment has set out an important agenda for the development of services. In addition, a number of innovative projects have focused on meeting the mental health needs of children and young people in state care. It is important that these developments lead to integrated and flexible mental health services in order to improve outcomes and well-being of children and young people in state care in Scotland

Assessment of the Foster Care Pilot Project in Albania

CELCIS was contracted by UNICEF Albania in August, 2013, to carry out an evaluation of the pilot foster care project (FCPP). UNICEF had contributed to funding for a foster care project which operated in Tirana and Shkodra. The operational aspects of the projects were run by two non-governmental organisations (NGOs) called Bethany Social Services (BSS) and Every Child Albania (EC). The consultants carried out a brief literature review and a desk review of relevant documentation. They also undertook a period of fieldwork in Albania, interviewing key stakeholders and carrying out observational visits

Finding Community in the Ruins of GeoCities: Distantly Reading a Web Archive

Ian Milligan. “Finding Community in the Ruins of GeoCities: Distantly Reading a Web Archive.” Bulletin of IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries, Vol. 11, Issue. 2 (October 2015). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.This paper provides a brief overview of my work with the GeoCities web archive. Asking the question of “can we find community,” I use it as a case study to explain various methods for distantly reading web archivesSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) funded this project through an Insight Development Grant and an Insight Grant || Student support forthcoming from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation’s Early Researcher Award program || The University of Waterloo

Open Data’s Potential for Political History

This article appears with permission by the original publisher: Canadian Parliamentary Review, Winter 37(4), 2014.The recent trend of “open government” initiatives has provided an exciting new source of material for digital humanities researchers. Large datasets allow these scholars to engage in “distant reading” exercises to provide context in ways previously not possible. In this article, the author provides examples of the tools researchers can use to expand their understanding of the country’s political history and of the changing nature of parliamentary institutions and debates. He concludes with suggestions for ways to gain the maximum benefit from these data releases

Lost in the Infinite Archive: The Promise and Pitfalls of Web Archives

The version of record can be found at http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ijhac.2016.0161.Contemporary and future historians need to grapple with and confront the challenges posed by web archives. These large collections of material, accessed either through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine or through other computational methods, represent both a challenge and an opportunity to historians. Through these collections, we have the potential to access the voices of millions of non-elite individuals (recognizing of course the cleavages in both Web access as well as method of access). To put this in perspective, the Old Bailey Online currently describes its monumental holdings of 197,745 trials between 1674 and 1913 as the "largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published." GeoCities.com, a platform for everyday web publishing in the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s, amounted to over thirty-eight million individual webpages. Historians will have access, in some form, to millions of pages: written by everyday people of various classes, genders, ethnicities, and ages. While the Web was not a perfect democracy by any means – it was and is unevenly accessed across each of those categories – this still represents a massive collection of non-elite speech. Yet a figure like thirty-eight million webpages is both a blessing and a curse. We cannot read every website, and must instead rely upon discovery tools to find the information that we need. Yet these tools largely do not exist for web archives, or are in a very early state of development: what will they look like? What information do historians want to access? We cannot simply map over web tools optimized for discovering current information through online searches or metadata analysis. We need to find information that mattered at the time, to diverse and very large communities. Furthermore, web pages cannot be viewed in isolation, outside of the networks that they inhabited. In theory, amongst corpuses of millions of pages, researchers can find whatever they want to confirm. The trick is situating it into a larger social and cultural context: is it representative? Unique? In this paper, "Lost in the Infinite Archive," I explore what the future of digital methods for historians will be when they need to explore web archives. Historical research of periods beginning in the mid-1990s will need to use web archives, and right now we are not ready. This article draws on first-hand research with the Internet Archive and Archive-It web archiving teams. It draws upon three exhaustive datasets: the large Web ARChive (WARC) files that make up Wide Web Scrapes of the Web; the metadata-intensive WAT files that provide networked contextual information; and the lifted-straight-from-the-web guerilla archives generated by groups like Archive Team. Through these case studies, we can see – hands-on – what richness and potentials lie in these new cultural records, and what approaches we may need to adopt. It helps underscore the need to have humanists involved at this early, crucial stage.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council || 430-2013-0616 Ontario Early Researcher Awar

Mining the ‘Internet Graveyard’: Rethinking the Historians’ Toolkit

“Mining the Internet Graveyard” argues that the advent of massive quantity of born-digital historical sources necessitates a rethinking of the historians’ toolkit. The contours of a third wave of computational history are outlined, a trend marked by ever-increasing amounts of digitized information (especially web based), falling digital storage costs, a move to the cloud, and a corresponding increase in computational power to process these sources. Following this, the article uses a case study of an early born-digital archive at Library and Archives Canada – Canada’s Digital Collections project (CDC) – to bring some of these problems into view. An array of off-the-shelf data analysis solutions, coupled with code written in Mathematica, helps us bring context and retrieve information from a digital collection on a previously inaccessible scale. The article concludes with an illustration of the various computational tools available, as well as a call for greater digital literacy in history curricula and professional development.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council || 430-2013-061