Holding the space: an evaluation of a therapeutic intervention with children and young people in residential care

The Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care was asked to evaluate a training programme which focussed on developing the skills of residential child care staff to work with children using 'deep listening'. The techniques used to train the staff drew upon Roger's core conditions and also upon techniques used by indigenous people in North America. The training programme was implemented in a children's home in Sunderland in England, and has now been rolled out to six children's homes in Scotland. The paper links to the conference theme by looking at how and why interventions work. The evaluation focuses on residential child care and looks at the impact of training residential care staff in a deep listening technique called Way of Council.