Supporting transitions and throughcare : some lessons from secure care

This paper is based on 7 evaluation reports that were submitted to the Scottish Executive on the use of the secure transitions fund, a pilot project. The aim of the fund was to reduce readmissions into secure care. Celcis was commissioned by the secure units to evaluate the use of the fund. Evelyn Vrouwenfelder was the Primary researcher and principal writer

Children's rights : how to promote a rights based approach in residential child care

This paper promotes the use of children's rights in residential childcare. The 4 key principles of the UNCRC are used as tool to safeguard decision-making in Residential ChildCare. Examples are provided and the paper promotes a critical discussion throughout

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

Contextualising the findings - the Orkney social pedagogy evaluation

CELCIS, formerly SIRCC, has funded a series of ThemPra social pedagogy courses for residential childcare staff across Scotland. ThemPra is a small social enterprise consisting of German, English and Danish social pedagogy trainers. Their 10-day courses facilitate experiential and reflective learning, combining grounded childcare theory and social pedagogy principles and practice. Orkney local authority ran this course in 2011, cofunding delivery for a multi-agency group of 18 staff. CELCIS commissioned the Orkney training evaluation and the subsequent report was published in March 2012. The article provides a summary of the key findings which were captured over a period of 6 months. It also describes ‘what happened next’ in Orkney and considers this in terms of academic writing on learning transfer and sustainability of evaluation outcomes. A key aspect of the article is the link between the methodology of the course and its subsequent outcomes

Book reviews

There has been a bumper crop of books dedicated to social pedagogy this year – a fortuitous situation for providing a series of relevant reviews for this special issue of the Journal. This offers a nice opportunity to compare, in this case, three newly-published books on social pedagogy. Each of our reviewers gives a nice sense of the tone and slant of their books, giving an indication of some of the differences between them. I hope this will be helpful in deciding about further reading. Another of our reviews in this issue is on a book dedicated to storytelling and while it does not explicitly address social pedagogy, the reviewer clearly and adeptly provides strong connections between the book's content and the practice and philosophy of social pedagogy. Finally, it was no mean feat to find a seminal text or author from the social pedagogic tradition written in English, but we have managed to do so and thus provide a review of a book originally written by Janusz Korczak. Thanks to Ian Milligan, Robyn Kemp, Kiaras Gharabaghi, Dawn Simpson and Evelyn Vrouwenfelder for their generous contributions to our book review section

In Residence : A series of 12 papers

This re-issue of 12 papers written over a period of six years has been produced to celebrate SIRCC's 10th anniversary – the organisation launched in April 2000. I'd like to express my appreciation to all the authors, who are drawn from SIRCC staff and residential practitioners currently working in various settings. The papers are circulated free of charge to all Scotland's residential homes and schools, and are available for download on our website. A recent survey told us that the papers are valued by those who read them, although that survey also prompted us to look again at how we promote them, and try to make sure they don't get stuck in a manager's office! This re-issue has been substantially augmented with material for supervisors linked to each of the papers. We hope this will help workers look at how they can transfer the learning within the paper into practice, with the help of their supervisor. We have also asked subject experts to review the earliest papers and add their own foreword which provides a reflection on the original