Dr Erika Laredo

Frances Crook (Chief Executive, Howard League for Penal Reform), Sonia Crozier (Director, National Probation Service), Dr Erika Laredo (Senior Lecturer, Leeds Beckett University) and Michael Booth (Criminology Student, former service user) addressed the Probation Professional Session, followed by a question and answer session.

Connect together is an innovative Social Prescribing service for children and young people providing support through one-to-one sessions, group work and engagement with services that improve health and wellbeing. The service was externally evaluated by Leeds Beckett University.

Informed by the phrase bell hooks uses in her work on love and social justice (hooks, 2001: 22), this paper explores what a ‘love ethic’ looks like in a practice context. It explores the idea of ‘professional love’ (Page, 2011) and the ways in which this form of love is both expressed and performed at the Joanna Project, a faith-based initiative offering support to sex workers in Leeds. The Joanna Project embraces the idea of ‘professional love’ as a foundation of its practice, and consciously promotes a loving practice as central to their work. It is a faith-based project, operating outside of the confines of the statutory sector and because of this, can weave into its narrative a vocal, positive and performative ‘love ethic’. The following discussion reflects on six interviews with the workers at the project, during which they were asked to reflect specifically on the importance of love in their professional lives. The research findings suggest that incorporating a discussion about the ways in which love is integrated into our practice is a necessary foundation for building authentic relationships, and radically transforming practice.

This poster will reflect our experience of flipped learning and the way it can enhance student engagement and performance within an HE Health and Social Care programme. Our aim is to share the positive learning gained from this experience, demystify the process involved and encourage others to consider using a flipped approach as part of their teaching. The objectives are to produce a visual narrative that captures our motive, explains the technical process involved in producing materials and identifies the student’s experience of flipped learning through feedback and evaluation. Finally, the poster will offer a pedagogical reflection on what makes this approach innovative, performance enhancing and highly relevant to a new generation of learners and health and social care practitioners.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of public discussions and (moral) panics about a range of pornography-related topics, the expansion of pornography across the internet, its putative links to rape and sexual violence, and erotic life-styling or the oft-cited ‘sexualization’ of culture. Horvath (2013) makes the point that access to pornography is frequently done by young people on their own, or in peer groups away from adults, making supervision difficult and regulation of the images impossible. This is in keeping with other recently published and frequently cited work which highlights the potentially negative consequences of this unrestricted access, arguing that it results in increases of sexual bullying, harassment and sexting. (Horvath et al, 2013,Ringrose, et al and 2012, Phippen 2012). There is clearly a worry that this unfettered access poses risks to young people, most notably in terms of the detrimental impact on their ability to develop a healthy sexual identity and form healthy relationships. This paper will share our preliminary research findings from an ongoing project, which involves young people as active participants and captures their experiences as consumers of porn. Initial findings suggest that young people are not simply passive consumers of everything they view. They are adept and use a critical range of skills and perspectives to interpret sexual content. Overwhelming agreement seemed to be that young people were using porn to gain a wider understanding of their sexual identity and fill in gaps about sex education. (246 words) Bibliography Horvath, M., Alys, L., Massey, K., Pina, A., Scally, M. and Adler, A. 2013 “Basically... porn is everywhere” A Rapid Evidence Assessment on the Effects that Access and Exposure to Pornography has on Children and Young People Education Journal, 164 Phippen, A. (2012) Sexting: An Exploration of Practices, Attitudes and Influences NSPCC/John Wiley and Sons Ringrose, J. Gill, R. Livingstone, S. & Harvey, L. 2012 A Qualitative Study of Children Young People and ‘Sexting’ : A report prepared for the NSPCC/John Wiley and Sons Dr. Erika Laredo Youth and Community Development at Leeds Beckett University

In this paper, we will explore some of the collaborations we have been involved with over the last few years, and in the process reflect on the challenges, the learning opportunities and the overall how these experiences have enriched us as educators, in effect to begin to more fully appreciate the process of education as both a collaborative and a creative process. As academics on a youth work and community development programme we have always worked closely with a broad range of community partners, but does this in and of itself mean we manage to successfully navigate, what Martin and Brown (2013) term the distinction between the ‘in here and the out there’ In our teaching we emphasise the importance of relating theory to practice, and are aware of Raelin’s (2007) warning that theory can very easily lose its vitality if we have no practice on which to reflect.

This paper will address a number of issues that have arisen from our joint volunteering/research in the Managed Area in Holbeck, Leeds. In October 2014, in response to safety concerns for street sex workers and the increasing need to promote community cohesion between local residents and the key stakeholders, the Leeds Strategic Prostitution Working group introduced the non-enforcement of soliciting legislation in a small area of Holbeck. Prostitution and in particular street based sex work is at the centre of a powerful ideological debate which is polarised, frequently vitriolic and in reality doesn’t address the practicalities of the lives of these street connected women. In this paper we will outline the background against which debates around sex work occur, before exploring two local intervention strategies, which foreground the women who work on the streets of Holbeck. Despite divergent starting points, both projects are motivated by a desire to deliver the best services and as a long-term goal promote transformative systemic change. Street sex workers are affected by a range of health-related issues, not least because the majority of the women we encounter are intravenous heroin users, but also a combination of complex issues revolving around stigma, shame and chaotic housing prevent women from accessing healthcare.

This case study focusses on the work of the Joanna Project (JP); a small, faith-based project, which supports street sex workers in Leeds. This study will explore some of the challenges arising when working with this service user group and some of the ways in which the values of community development contribute towards tackling the systemic disadvantage and disempowerment experienced by women who sell sex. The workers at JP have an explicit commitment to work with the marginalized and dispossessed, and it is their Christian beliefs that in turn feedback into the project and has helped to create a strong and consciously realised identity which forms the core of its philosophy and identity. These ideas have helped the project to identify that for a group of marginalised, stigmatised women simply valuing that person for themselves is an important act of humanity and helps, in that moment, to give back some dignity or love that life on the streets may have stripped away. The fundamental nature of the work is relational, with an emphasis on building positive relationships based on unconditional positive regard for another human being

The primary objective of the Erasmus International Street Work Intensive Programme (IP) is to facilitate a European shared learning experience for street based practitioners, students and academics. Street work is an emerging community of practice within a European context and the specific focus is working with the most vulnerable groups whose lives are lived on the streets; such as homeless people, people with complex mental health needs, asylum seekers, Roma people and increasingly the young unemployed.

"This book innovatively explores the policy, practice and pedagogy of community engagement in higher education settings, contributing to the evaluation of adaptive practice and responses in addressing inequalities further exposed by the ...

This study critically examines the impact of public service co-production on professional practice. It addresses a gap in the literature, in which little attention has been paid to how co-production shapes ideas of professionalism and the professional practice of staff working in public services. The study comprises a novel synthesis of theory from public management, the sociology of professions, and Bourdieu’s theory of practice. It involves a qualitative case study of the implementation of a policy oriented towards co-production. Following Bourdieu, the case study is conceptualised as a “game”, in which players possess forms of capital that they use to maintain or gain power and influence. The study critically engages with Bourdieu’s theory, by asking what happens in a game defined by a logic of co-production, not competition.  Research was undertaken at two interconnected levels. Macro-level critical discourse analysis of policy texts revealed the colonisation of the policy space by neoliberal discourses. These set limits to what local actors deemed possible. Micro-level research comprised 31 interviews and observation of 21 meetings of professionals involved in policy implementation. Data were explored in a thematic analysis. Local actors typically understood co-production in organisational terms, rather than in front-line work with service users. Other themes pointed to a layered experience. Actors with pre-existing positions in the field were able to extend their professional jurisdictions in one part of the game. In another, new actors were able to legitimate an alternative mode of professional practice closer to conceptualisations of service user co-production in the academic literature.  Along with theoretical insights, the study’s empirical findings have implications for a number of professional communities and for the design and delivery of public policy. Findings elucidate gaps between high-level policy discourse on co-production and front-line implementation, and between the academic debate and how co-production is understood in the practice of staff working in public services.

This paper develops the theoretical position proposed by Zygmunt Bauman (2009), that one of the greatest contemporary ‘social evils’ or injustices we face in society, is the total marketization and individualisation of our lived experience. Bauman (2009) along with Harvey (2005) argues that the last forty years of social, political, and economic reform under the zeitgeist of neoliberalism have transferred the burden of care from the state to the individual. This paper will explore the position that the dominant neoliberal culture within social work, in the form of ‘new managerialism’ has reconstituted social work institutionally as one where interventions now focus on minimum statutory interventions emphasising; risk management, resource allocation, audit culture, and the promotion of self-care through a case work methodology. The discussion will analyse these macro social, political and economic discourses using an ethnographic approach based upon Michael Burawoy’s Global Ethnographic (GE) methodology (Burawoy et al, 2010). Despite the current landscape the research highlights the importance of the personal reframed as the political, and the nuanced ways in which acts of defiance and resistance against the prevailing orthodoxies have been adopted by social workers on the front line.

This conceptual paper aims to introduce and explore the practice of social streetwork. Streetwork is located as a historical professional discourse that has contemporary relevance fora rapidly changing and globalised world. Streetwork as a practice discourse occurs across a range of community based helping professions including social work, youth work and community work. The social work profession is increasingly becoming clinical and situated within statutory organisations placing a greater emphasis on outcome based targets, rather than building relationships; and as a result of austerity, traditional youth workers are becoming invisible, often moving into statutory education settings and complex needs welfare agencies. This paper will argue that for the broad helping professions to remain relevant we must engage with vulnerable and complex populations where we find them: at a street level - promoting a direct practice of social justice at a micro level. Within this discussion, we will define and explore a streetwork approach by examining the methodologies and objectives of street work practice. We will argue that by keeping to its origins of using informal and non-formal education as its primary tools, street work as an intervention works to combat poverty, social exclusion and discrimination. The paper articulates a foundation for practice based on the promotion of low threshold interventions with complex and hard to reach social populations. One of the key themes we will explore is how to locate streetwork practice as a form of social support, accompaniment and as a tool for promoting social inclusion and social democracy.

The lead researchers were commissioned by Mind in Bradford to undertake a review of their Youth in Mind (YiM) provision from May-July 2022. Semi-structured interviews with most of the service providers and several of the schools were conducted – the schools being key stakeholders, as they refer the Children and Young People (CYP). The work was conducted in collaboration with the Young Dynamos, a young people’s research advisory and involvement group that is facilitated by Bradford District Care Foundation Trust. The research was designed to review the YiM provision to identify areas of good practice, but also gaps in provision and to determine areas for improvement. The research was asked specifically to examine the accessibility of the YiM provision for minoritised ethnic CYP, and ways to improve service provision.

Connect together is an innovative Social Prescribing service for children and young people providing support through one-to-one sessions, group work and engagement with services that improve health and wellbeing. The service was externally evaluated by Leeds Beckett University.

This paper will discuss ways in which virtual reality can be used as a vehicle within GBL as well as exploring some of the constraints and challenges in developing assistive and interactive technologies. Our research, albeit in its early stages, evidences that virtual reality offers a powerful tool from an engagement and immersion perspective with which to experience and investigate options within various social situations. The aim of the YMCA project was to educate students about the importance of creating a positive consent culture by advocating access to inclusive sex and relationship education at University. This is both and emergent and timely topic, which is being addressed in a number of pedagogical ways, but we felt a GBL approach would have the potential for greater impact. The narrative we developed focussed on the subjective nature of sexual consent and misinterpreted social cues within a fictional encounter. The paper will examine how we developed the narrative structure of the game, before moving on to reflect on issues emerging from the development of the VR prototype.

There is an uncomfortable duality, which sits at the heart of British social work practice, as Leung (2012, p. 348) suggests social work is ‘baffled’ by a basic dissonance in its intention to help people accommodate to the status quo, whilst challenging the status quo by attempting to bring about social change. In this chapter we will take a long view of the profession, examining the historical dislocations of attempting a professional accommodation to this seemingly contradictory position. In writing this chapter we must collectively acknowledge that it is written from a Critical Theory Position and draws heavily upon Post Structural, Marxist and Radical Social Work Theory; we make no apologies for this. The history we explore within this chapter is not chronological, it is thematic and based upon discourse analysis and identified themes that intersect with power relationships and social class. We are making the case that social work is part of a vast system that perpetuates systemic violence and that we contribute to a system of “benevolent violence”, in which we offer a complex system of care and control, that has mitigated and supported the rupture of indigenous people from the common land in both the UK and abroad.

Within this article we highlight that social work is both a political as well as a professional practice. Despite years of technical specialisation and a policy context that has focused social work on risk management and resource allocation, there remains a deep commitment to care, compassion, and solidarity within contemporary social work practice. The article and its analysis make the case for a more politically informed social work practice, one that is based on solidarity; in opposition to a system that isolates individuals and internalises complex social problems. We posit that the application of solidarity within social work delivers a practice that promotes social inclusion and is based on the provision of practical social support. It is from this perspective that we will present evidence from ethnographic research, drawn from community social work practice, to highlight the importance of social solidarity and provide an insight into different ways of working.

Executive Summary A better community home care system is possible. The Community Wellbeing Pilot (CWBP) has provided a radical and innovative system of home care to service users and carers. The CWBP marks a radical change to the current model of care delivery: time and task. This model has created a system that places emphasis on organisational need, process and managing risks, it lacks adequate flexibility to meet the needs of service users and carers. The model introduced by the CWBP offers new methods based on principles of a co-produced person-centred care, which is flexible and adaptable. The CWBP was delivered in partnership with two externally commissioned Care Agencies (CA) across two geographical areas of the city. This new approach to care was delivered using a multi-disciplinary approach and working collaboratively with a range of health and social care professions. A core component of CWBP was a commitment by professionals to actively encourage community support networks. This report provides an evidence base to illustrate not only was better care possible, it was delivered during a challenging and complex global pandemic. The significant challenges resulting from this difficult period were met by health and social care workers with professionalism, diligence, and commitment to the service users. Evaluation Findings The CWBP evaluation has highlighted the following key outcomes: • Improved outcomes for service users and carers • Increased job satisfaction for Home Care Workers leading to improved recruitment and retention. • Improved efficiencies and savings • The sustainability of the project • The transferability of the project

YMCA: using virtual reality in narrative spaces

A study of the placement experiences of Black and Global Majority students in Nursing and Social Work Practice Placements.

New technologies for representing and communicating autoethnographies make it possible to be publically visible in new and interesting ways that weren’t possible prior to the digital revolution. An important ingredient in this process is the internet platforms that can make the digitisation of performances accessible across the world, even for short, modest creations from less experienced digital storytellers and film makers. As an illustration of the potential applications of digital technologies for ‘taking’ autoethnographic research to the ‘public,’ and making our research accessible to a wider audience we share ‘Reverberations,’ a collaborative autoethnography exploring bullying, homophobia, and other types of sexual harassment and associated feelings of shame, embarrassment and fear which often surround these topics.