A County Council wanted to improve the reach and impact of their services for young children and their families. We developed a coaching offer to strengthen frontline practitioners' relational practice.
After years of efficiency, accountability and target setting, Early Years workers found that their opportunities to connect deeply with families had been reduced. The result was that they could not reach some families who most needed support.
Our team of relational experts and service designers carried out an enquiry to better understand the challenges to relational working within the Early Years service ecosystem and we prototyped a learning offer for frontline workers to boost their relational capabilities.
To begin with, we held ethnographic interviews and 'pop up' sessions with families, as well as a focus group with frontline workers to explore:
We discovered that:
"I felt that if I admitted I had aproblem, I’d be judged. I didn’t tell anyone anything.”
Mother
"Everything is regulated in what we have to do. But families don’t work to a rigid schedule. Their life is chaotic."
Early Year worker
Based on our research, we concluded that the learning offer should aim to:
In order to maximise the impact of our intervention, we created a learning programme consisting of four one-to-one telephone coaching calls with relational experts and three in-person group sessions with practical exercises to facilitate sharing and feedback between practitioners. Before starting the coaching, the relational coach observed the worker during a client meeting to form a direct impression of their practice.
The offer was codified into a Coaching Manual, leading coaches and practitioners through key milestones and exercises.
.jpg)
The prototype engaged a group of 8 practitioners and lasted 2 months. Practitioners were selected from across key services and their supervisors were required to sponsor and support them along their learning journey. We particularly wanted to ensure that participants would have permission to try new things in their practice.
The Coaching Manual was designed to create a balance between: exploring new concepts, trying them out in practical experiments in daily practice (for example, actively trying to identify and remedy ruptures in a client conversation); reflecting back on them individually and with the coach and then planning new practical experiments. Reflection prompts were provided within and outside coaching calls to consolidate learnings.
In the group sessions practitioners shared tips and impressions from their learning, brought cases for discussion and engaged in practical exercises and role plays with colleagues.
As part of our own learning and iteration process within the prototype, our team met weekly to reflect on the learning materials, iterate elements of our offer and download insights about individual practice and system constraints.
Our starting hypothesis was that both external and internal factors were at play in limiting the impact of Early Years services. External constraints to what practitioners could do (set by the service, like administrative burdens or time limits to interventions, or or determined by the wider system, like poor coordination between different agencies) and a need for to broaden individual skills and improve practice.
The purpose of our work was therefore two-fold: understanding barriers to relational working in early years services and prototyping a learning offer, which built relational skills within practitioners and across the team.
We conducted a 'double lane enquiry' throughout the programme. On the system analysis front we generated a set of 'provocations' around what barriers stood in the way of deeper relational work with families and how services may explore ways to overcome them. These were shared widely across agencies and contributed to the ongoing strategy review.
On the learning prototype front, we established a baseline level of skills and practice through observations at the beginning of the programme and carried out in depth interviews with participants at the end, as well as gathering our team's learning throughout.
All 8 participants reported feeling more confident and reflective in their work with families and there was an improvement in their observed skills at the end of the learning programme.
"The coaching helped me understand some specific things I needed to focus on and consider doing differently in my relationships.”
Midwife
"I would try to avoid those conversations with the parents, whereas now I feel comfortable and I feel I can talk to parents … I feel like that has made a change … giving parents more time… letting them know after a group that I am still available..."
Health Visitor
Greater confidence liberates better judgement. We observed that, as practitioners' confidence in their relational skills grew, so did their appetite for trying out new ways of engaging with families and making more creative time management decisions.
Contextual enquiry is key to creating tailored and applied learning experiences. Front-loading investment into a system enquiry afforded us a nuanced understanding of barriers to relational interactions. This in turn enabled us to tailor our curriculum to the specific challenges we had observed in services.
Drop me a line at fcignola@gmail.com
