Communication, celebration and collaboration

Feedback is at the core of how we work, and we had embedded several different ways of doing this in Leicestershire:

1. The Care to Dance team – our social work staff and dance teachers would meet regularly to talk about what had been happening in classes, reflect on what young people needed and any adjustments to classes based on this.
2. Young people – speaking to young people about their experience, what they needed and how they were feeling, as well as what was most important to them about Care to Dance.
3. Leicestershire Virtual School – we had a strong feedback loop to make sure we were sharing information to enable us both to best support the young people.

With the support of Blue Cabin’s Artful Alliance project, we set about gathering all of these insights, as well as having an additional feedback session with each group.

1. Community – for many young people, Care to Dance becomes like a second family. They feel a real sense of belonging, acceptance and can be free among others who understand their situation and who they can speak to about their families and carers. All our young people spoke about how this is one of the things they valued most from Care to Dance.
2. Challenge – some of our young people wanted to really push and challenge themselves with more complex dance styles and skills, but didn’t want to leave the Care to Dance classes as they didn’t feel they would get the same sense of safety and belonging elsewhere.
3. Context and contemplation – the Care to Dance team reflected that having more information about the context of each young person in the class would be helpful. They also felt having more time to contemplate what this would then mean in practice, and for staff with different skillsets and backgrounds to share insights with the whole team to ensure everyone was best equipped to support the young people, would be really beneficial.

Off the back of our research findings we took a number of actions, including:

1. Rise – in partnership with Leicestershire Virtual School and Jayna’s Dance Academy, we created a new programme specifically for young people who really want to push and challenge themselves with dance, and who want to or are considering pursuing dance as a career. Rise is an intensive training programme focusing on dance technique, choreography and fitness, as well as developing the mental resilience needed in dance academies. We also connect young people with the dance industry and give them a taste of professional dance classes.
2. Social event – we changed our social event by extending the invitation to key adults and carers of our young people. By enabling each young person to bring someone along with them, we found a whole new level of connection between the group, and between the young people and the person they brought along. Together, we all attended SIX, the musical. This aimed to build on and strengthen the sense of community.
3. Extended reflection – once a term, the team meets for a longer reflective session to discuss the context of our young people, how to tailor trauma-informed practice based on this information and to develop the knowledge and skills of the whole team more holistically.

The key outcomes from these actions were:

• Our Rise programme was a real success, and we will now be rolling this out across all regions
• Carers have become a lot more engaged in our programmes and with our young peoples’ dancing
• More young people were talking about their experience of Care to Dance in meetings with social workers
• More of our young people began engaging with dance and drama classes, and with our end of term performances

This piece of research taught us a lot, both about what was working well and things we could try and build upon. It also reiterated just how much working in a partnership with a Virtual School where everyone is equally invested makes our programmes much more impactful.

Communication, celebration and collaboration are vital aspects in this partnership.

Thank you to Beth for sharing the outcomes of your action research.

Care to Dance helps care-experienced people feel a sense of belonging and freedom, but also to process what they’ve been through. It builds inclusive communities where they feel safe, among people they trust
and can express themselves freely.

Learn more about Care to Dance here>>

During Artful Alliance, four Virtual Schools and four creative organisations tried out existing or new project ideas with care-experienced children and young people and the trusted adults in their lives.

Find out more here>>