‘Difficult Conversations: developing research-led training in dealing with care experienced and adopted children’s difficult life story questions’

This project seeks to co-create training tools and mechanisms of delivery to help adoptive parents, foster carers and social workers deal honestly and directly with difficult questions and conversations around life story and help the child in their care build secure and positive identity. Difficult Conversations follows on from research around and creation of trove, a digitally enhanced memory tool to allow children in care and adopted children to develop a sense of self using important objects and processes of self-narrative (Watson et al, 2018; 2019).
the design includes:

i) Recruiting 7 stakeholder development groups (foster carers, care experienced young people, adopters, adopted children, adopted young people, social workers, n=6 in each) to work with us in creative arts participatory workshops to develop the material for the training;
ii) Development of an ‘expert’ group drawn from the 6 groups to co-write the training materials;
iii) Collaborate with CoramBAAF to explore materials, scaling up the training provision, marketing and developing hard copy materials to be published by them online and in print;
iv) Piloting of the training with partner and development of evaluation process;
v)Developing licencing and business model to allow delivery of the training and CIC spin out.

Beneficiaries will be adopted and fostered children - by enabling ‘communicative openness’ (Brodzinsky, 2013) in the home.