Adverse Childhood Experiences: improving life chances through interprofessional collaboration Erasmus Project

Project Title

Adverse Childhood Experiences: improving life chances through interprofessional collaboration

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Health and wellbeing; International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation

Project Summary

Increasing evidence suggests that there are several social determinants of educational outcomes and half of all mental health conditions are established before the age of fourteen. Identifiers of these social events present as poor school attendance, disruptive and aggressive behaviour and poor transition to secondary school and are frequently seen in children and young people at risk of exclusion. This may also result in unfocused, disruptive, controlling, withdrawn, and destructive behaviour within a school setting. In addition there are iatrogenic factors affecting school attainment, where a lack of training and collaboration may prevent a deeper understanding of the problem.
Stressful events occur in the lives of children aged 0-18 years old involving neglect or abuse. Indeed, neglect can be physical, emotional or sexual and neglect can be physical or emotional. Household dysfunction is an important social determinant and can be caused by mental illness, a relative in prison, domestic violence, divorce and substance abuse (alcohol and drug) in the family, often unrecognised for a significant length of time. Other factors affecting childhood academic achievement are poverty and children’s caring responsibilities as well as parental separation.
Adverse child experience (ACE) provides links between adversity, learning and behaviour and supports the concept that schools can have a significant role in providing an inclusive environment for such children experiencing stressful events occurring between the ages of 0-18 years old.
New learning paradigms for professionals to explore new ways to combine expertise, delivering IPL programmes where child safety and quality of care can be improved. Collaborative activities with IPL should be considered as important in childcare training, ACEs can be identified and strategies put in place to address these. Building teams in this interprofessional way requires an understanding of team dynamics and leadership values. Five elements have been identified to support this; participation, training in group skills, networking, information sharing and lastly critical reflection.

Aims
• Improve the social context so that children are better able to learn in school.
• Improve the communication and collaboration between professionals involved in safeguarding for school age children.
• Promote improved trust relationships, particularly in the classroom and potentially reversing the effects of toxic stress in a child’s life
• Training programmes to promote the understanding of the science of toxic stress
• Strategies to address this are proposed.
• Explore interprofessional strategies to improve learning environment for children experiencing toxic stress with implications for practice.
• Innovate interprofessional collaboration experiences

Objectives
• Familiarizing the employees with the job descriptions of employees in other agencies/organizations
• Discussing what inter-professional collaboration means to each individual employee and to different professions.
• The training will discuss what the perquisites of inter-professional collaboration are and how it could be promoted.
• Disseminate experience and outcomes using press, blogs, local TV and radio stations
• Sharing information gathered government officials, educational authorities, professional training establishments
• Enabling professionals to meet trauma with understanding not discipline
Action Intervention
• International participation, transnational learning, teaching and training
o Training in group skills
o Transnational learning
o Networking
o Information sharing
o Critical reflection
• Equipping professionals with toolkit to address ACE
• Action research (develop questionnaires and open-ended questions to guide the key interviews, prompting reflection and conversation.
• Evaluation of impact
• Development of electronic learning using analogues and cases studies

Intellectual outputs
• Pilot course for interprofessional learning in collaboration
• Handbook of strategies and procedures
• Teaching resources
• Electronic learning in decision making using virtual case studies
• Presentations on results
• Webinars on interprofessional learning and collaboration
• In-service training

Project Website

https://www.cerceda.es/aceipw/index.html

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 231987 Eur

Project Coordinator

Westcountry Schools Trust & Country: UK

Project Partners

• Devon County Council
• IES Polígono Sur
• Lärandeförvaltningen, Hudiksvalls kommun
• Centro Público Integrado O Cruce
• Bromangymnasiet
• Istituto Comprensivo di via Montebello
• Devon Cornwall Police