A workshop for social workers and supervising social workers working with care networks around children and adults.

This workshop identifies ways professionals can Create Opportunities for Reflection and Expansive Learning in Multi-agency Care Networks and provides practical tools for :

• unpacking assumptions
• noticing how language does more than merely describe
  slowing processes down
• developing awareness of how assemblages of ideas move care networks in certain directions
• noticing how child-adult relations are constructed and reconstructed
• creating safe conversational spaces
• emphasising opportunities for listening attentively
• enhancing curiosity
• generating openness

Dr Stephen Mills is a systemic family psychotherapist and has worked with multi-agency professional care networks around children for over 7 years. His doctoral thesis (2021) focused on children in care and how to create opportunities for reflective relational practice and expansive learning within their multi-agency care networks.
He will use creative examples based on his own clinical experience to illustrate the use of these tools in practice.

The benefits of this approach for care networks are

• a lessening of anxiety for individual network members
• enhanced communication across the network
• greater understanding of differing agendas within the network
• an increased capacity for effective individual and collective thinking
• an increased ability to attune to self, colleagues, and the child/client
• and an increased capacity to tolerate uncertainty and engage in relational practices
• opportunities for expansive learning within care networks