
Training for emotional care and wellbeing
‘Supporting People with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities, Core and Essential Service Standards’ (Doukas et al, 2017), is a quality of service provision audit tool. One of the standards is about ensuring:
“effective support to promote the health and wellbeing of each person, including any specialist health care needs that increase the vulnerability of the person.”
Evidence of this standard being met is that:
“Staff receive training in supporting the emotional wellbeing and mental health of people.”
The 0-25 Special Education Needs and Disability (SEND) Code of Practice (2015) identifies four broad areas of special educational need, support and assessment, which are:
- Communication and interaction
- Cognition and learning
- Social, emotional and mental health
- Sensory and/or physical needs
These four areas are included in Education and Health Care (EHC) plans and according to the SEND Code of Practice, Care Plans should include outcomes such as the development of ’emotional resilience and stability’.
Supporting mental health is specified as a core aspect of curriculum in Ofsted’s Education Inspection Framework (2019), where it is stated that inspectors will look for the extent to which:
“the curriculum and the provider’s wider work support learners to develop their character – including their resilience, confidence and independence – and help them know how to keep physically and mentally healthy.”
The training NAC offers can assist providers in implementing the Recovery Curriculum (2020), developed by Barry Carpenter in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“All of our learners will need a holistic recovery, some may need a focused recovery intervention programme, personalised to their needs; others may need a deeper and longer lasting recovery period, enabling a fuller exploration of the severity of their trauma and emergent attachment issues.”
Barry Carpenter
NAC training can help by increasing carer’s knowledge, understanding and skills in how to deliver emotional and mental wellbeing care and support, i.e. what to do and how to do it.
“If we consider the definition of a relevant curriculum as the ‘daily lived experience’ we must plan for experiences that provide the space for recovery.”
Barry Carpenter
We agree with the learning disability training and development organisation, Paradigm (2020) that carers and support workers should:
“be valued and recognised as essential and highly skilled members of the Social Care workforce.”
Care, support and teaching are skilled professions, often with a high degree of complexity and responsibility. Training, staff development and supervision are therefore critical for ensuring that the people in those roles have the appropriate knowledge, skills and support to deliver services in such a way as to best be able to meet the emotional and mental wellbeing needs of the people they care for.