This course will be hosted in-person at the Tavistock Centre in London.

Each week there will be a one-hour lecture/workshop in which participants will be actively involved, followed by work discussion group. There will be indicated reading each week.

Please note that there will be a reading week break on 20 February 2025.

To apply for this course, please submit an application form using the ‘Apply Now’ button. Once you have submitted your form, the course team will review your application. They may telephone you to have a brief conversation about the course. If you are successful in being offered a place you will need to book, and pay for, your place as soon as possible, otherwise it may be offered to someone else.

This short course focuses upon the lives and development of care-experienced children and young people and those responsible for their care. It will cover areas including trauma and the impact of abuse and neglect upon development; working with trauma and its impact upon professionals; common issues encountered in contact with the family of origin; the emotional complexities of transition and finding permanence; the challenges professional networks face in their work with children and young people who are in care; the importance of holding difference in mind and issues of race and class in the care system. Through these specific areas you will explore what is involved in helping care-experienced children, young people and their families to better understand their experiences and support them in their development.

Lecture topics are likely to include the following:

• Looked after children and early development: an introduction
• Making sense of challenging and behaviour: finding meaning beyond the behaviour
• Corporate parenting: a psychoanalytic-systems approach to working with the professional network around the child
• Making sense of complex and conflicting feelings: contact with families of origin, issues and challenges
• Holding difference in mind: issues of race and class in the care system
• Therapeutic observation: thinking about infants in the care system
• Transition and finding permanence
• Making sense of belonging to two or more families
• Working with trauma and challenging behaviour: considering the impact upon the worker

Through lectures, seminars, case presentations, non-clinical examples and the course materials you will have the opportunity to consider in depth how children and young people in care face significant developmental challenges. Through the experiential learning offered on the course you will develop a greater capacity to conceptualise and think about the complexities of your work in this field. Working with the unconscious, ideas from psychoanalysis, developmental psychology and systemic thinking will provide the framework though which these topics will be explored. In addition, you will learn about using observation and paying attention to your own thoughts and feelings in order to help you with understanding the emotional complexities of working with disturbing and challenging behaviours. If possible, you will be encouraged to bring examples from your own observations of children and young people from your work. You will also make use of examples from journalism, television and films to analyse the areas being studied.

Before applying, please ensure that you are currently working or volunteering with care-experienced children and young people, or are interested in developing your work within this field.

Library membership

Included in your course fee, you will receive online membership to the Tavistock’s internationally-renowned library for the duration of your course.

Our friendly and knowledgeable library team will help to support you through your specialist CPD course, whatever your level of professional or academic experience. You will have access to an extensive range of eBooks, online journals, all the relevant key databases and our specialist audio-visual collection, plus reference access to all our print books.

Our information skills trainer has made lots of material available on Moodle to help you navigate our comprehensive electronic collections. PCs and photocopiers are available for your use (charges apply for printing and copying), as well as various online resources including audio/video playlists.

Between the modules, one session will be devoted to facilitated consultations where delegates will be able to practice using the tools learnt in the first sessions to the resolution of a workplace dilemma relevant to their setting.