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Blue Cabin’s work with care-experienced people is rooted in social pedagogy – a relationship-centred way of working which seeks to recognise and promote individual potential.
Jane McPhail, one of Blue Cabin’s care-experienced consultants, and Emma Pybus, the charity’s marketing lead, give an insight into Blue Cabin’s recent staff training on social pedagogy.
Jane: I first came across social pedagogy at university, during my youth and community work degree. I remember studying a module on it with an amazing lecturer called Graham Bright. He was so passionate about it, and what I took away was that it’s a relational theory – all about building relationships with the people or communities you work with and learning from them. It’s not about having a set outcome or being the expert who tells people what to do. It’s very person-centred, and that always stuck with me.
Emma: I only heard the term ‘social pedagogy’ when I started working with Blue Cabin. It underlies the way Blue Cabin works with children and young people and my first impression was that it’s the opposite of a top-down approach. It’s about working in partnership and co-creating with people, rather than imposing your own views.
Jane: The most memorable part was learning about the Three Ps framework. That really stood out to me because, being care experienced, I’ve often been encouraged to talk about personal experiences. The training helped me reflect on what’s appropriate to share, and what’s not. We all have different limits, so having that structured way of thinking about it was really powerful.
Emma: The Three Ps was the bit that stuck most for me too. It’s something I was conscious of, but until the training I’d never been given a framework to formalise it. Now I can use it to reflect before or after meetings and projects, and it’s such a practical tool.
Emma: We started the training by learning about some of the prominent people in social pedagogy, like Maria Montessori, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Paul Natorp. I was surprised to find out how long the history of social pedagogy is and that people were talking about it more than 100 years ago. There’s a solid groundwork behind the approach.
Jane: It was surprising to find out that their views towards learning were so progressive and in some ways it was sad to think that we still have so far to go in embedding social pedagogy in learning today.
Jane: We all received a pack through the post in advance of the training which contained creative materials – pens, paper, a frame, stickers. It was a lovely surprise and made me excited to take part in the training. I’m a creative person so when I found out the training wasn’t just sitting and listening, it involved group work, discussion, art and creativity I was invested!
Emma: Receiving that pack through the post immediately made me think, ‘this is going to be different from any training I’ve done before’. Nic Golightly who’s one of Blue Cabin’s associate artists, led part of the session and the doodling and drawing we all did helped me remember a lot of what was discussed.
Jane: And the whole way the training was delivered gave the message that there isn’t a hierarchy of expertise. I felt valued and that my input was just as important as everyone else’s. Right from the start, this makes you feel motivated to take part.
Jane: It instilled confidence that my voice as a care-experienced consultant is important. Blue Cabin is an organisation that genuinely values lived experience, and the way they centre social pedagogy reinforced that. In my role as a life story worker too, it’s encouraged me to think about how we can be led by the voices of the children and families we work with.
Emma: In my role, I write about the work Blue Cabin does so having a better understanding of the social pedagogy that it’s all rooted in is so useful. Outside of my work with Blue Cabin, I work with lots of different clients and it will be interesting to be able to think about how social pedagogy can be applicable in completely different sectors and organisations.
Thank you Jane and Emma for sharing what it was like to attend this training!
