KUF Symposium
BIGSPD
2012
Neil Gordon, Kath Lovell,
Andrea Milligan, Jina Barrett,
Vicky Baldwin
Overview
 Introduction and overview of symposium
 Some KUF figures: Awarenesss -10,000, BSc 15, stand
alone 80, MSc 70
 Responding to policy and strategy: adapting the KUF,
a contentious issue-a prison officer example
 Service-user and professionals co-facilitating, looking
from both sides-a dialogue
 An organisational perspective, what’s that got to do
with anything?
 Future plans and opportunities-where are we going?
Adapting the KUF
a prison officer illustration
Context and challenges: a reflection on theoretical,
educational and organisational issues
Dr Neil Gordon
IMH
BIGSPD 2012
Key themes to be explored
 The rationale and catalyst for adaptation of KUF awareness
materials–Offender Personality Disorder Workforce
Strategy(Draft)
 A review of the educational philosophy that informed the
KUF
 The perceived reality of hard to reach/access workforces-and
a belief that something is better than nothing
 Prison officers as a key target group
 Organisational culture and changing practices in prisonbuilding on the PIPES initiative
 The challenges, educational design and implementation
issues
Offender Personality Disorder Workforce
Strategy (Draft 2012)
 This strategy is proposed as a development programme
integrated into the overarching offender PD pathway.
It seeks to:
 establish more psychologically informed workforces
where the meaning of behaviour and pro social
development is seen in the context of a psycho social
framework
 improve the effectiveness and quality of services by
developing the capability, awareness, knowledge and
understanding of all staff who work with personality
disordered offenders.
Foundation Knowledge
Understanding behaviour in context
All frontline staff
Responding effectively/managing self
Staff with regular sustained contact
Interventions Treatment /Management
Staff with specific treatment/management role
Below awareness?
Leading ,developing
and supervising
teams and individuals
Improving psychological
well-being and increased
awareness of Therapeutic
models
Assessing and managing
risk to self and others and
fulfilling demands of job role
MSc
BSc
PD/Self awareness and self management
skills and promoting pro social behavior
through interpersonal engagement
AW
?
The whole package!
Sustainability
System changing
Multi-agency
Context
Sensitive and
responsive
Organisational Consultancy
Leadership
Supervision
Embedding in practice
Inter-agency Working
Team Development
Risk Management
Care Pathways
Learning Materials
Adapted to context/academic level
Building on participants experiences
Sensitive to professional culture
PO’s
The KUF experiential model
“Knowing that”
Academic
Knowledge
Experiential
Knowledge
EFFECTIVE
PRACTICE
Personal
Knowledge
Things that I know about this
type of service user from reading,
journals/books and attending
formal lectures
Things that I know which have
emerged from my personal
experience of this service user
group, which I have worked out for
myself
Things that I know which relate to
specific situations or particular
people (including myself) which I
have discovered from my personal
experiences
“Knowing how”
Things I can do learnt from books,
instruction from others, or guided by
procedural guidelines and evidence
based research findings
Things that I can do that I have
worked out for myself based on
personal experience of working
with service users and reflective
clinical supervision
Things that I can do which relate to
specific situations or particular
service users who I have worked with
over a period of time
Connecting past
experience and current
behaviours
Making sense of
reactions and
responses
Self awareness
and reflective
skills
Communicating
effectively
Understanding work
place cultures and
teams
Sensitivity to
service
user/prisoner
experience
The learning journey
Problems with ‘reaching the parts’!
 Time and cost
 Organizational/educational culture
 Contextual pragmatics-e.g. lock down
 Commitment and resistance to the
‘message’-the unmotivated and disengaged
 The subversion of the ‘contact’ hypothesis
 Something is better than nothing-the futility
of crop spraying education
“Thank goodness for the nurses,
police, fire service”………?
A dialectic
Elephant in the corner
of penal reform
(Joe Sim, 2009)
Essential benevolence
with a few ‘bad
apples’
Longstanding aspirations (1990)
22 years ago!
 We believe that now is the time to begin a radical
reassessment of the role of the prison officer. If careers
and job satisfaction are to be developed and enhanced, the
picture of a ‘turn-key’ or ‘warder’ looking after people
locked in cells for twenty hours each day must be replaced.
It needs to be re-affirmed that the central role of a prison
officer concerns the care of and contact with the inmates
in his or her charge. The essential skills are listening,
understanding, and responding to the needs of inmates.
Dissenting voices? (HL, 2009)
The government focus on training instead of occupational
education is misplaced. Short training courses can enhance
specific skills but cannot provide professional expertise to a
workforce. In the same way that no one would expect to place
a teacher before a classroom or a nurse in a hospital ward with
only a few weeks’ training, we should no longer expect prison
officers to walk onto a wing of 200 adult male prisoners and
deal with the wide range of duties and challenges expected
of them.
Challenges and hopes for the 21st century a
pejorative view of the prison officer?
Howard League for Penal Reform, Turnkeys or
professionals (2009)
In recent years prison officers have been asked to undertake
increasingly complex and varied tasks but have not benefited from
commensurate remuneration, respect or support. There is a
fundamental confusion about what prison officers should be doing. On
the one hand the majority spend most of their time doing menial,
repetitive tasks relating primarily to a mundane view of security
based on counting heads.
On the other hand some staff are expected to deliver sophisticated
offending behaviour courses requiring intensive interaction with
prisoners. There is an inherent contradiction in having a uniformed
and barely skilled or literate workforce expected to form relations
with and support prisoners with a range of mental health and
addiction challenges.
Complex, diverse culture(s)-context
is everything (Jordan 2011)
Socio-Political Context
Wider Prison
Organisation
Management
Group
Health Care &
Wing Staff
Culture Change and Prison
Officers
Rehabilitation
Containing,
psychologically
informed relationships
CARE
Relational
security
CONTROL
Boundaries
and limits
CUSTODY
Punitive
relationships
A typology of prison officers’ approaches to ‘care’
Sarah Tait’s Ethnography (2009)
Attached
“Dangerous”
“Conflicted”
“True carer”
“Limited
carer”
Insecure
Secure
“Old School”
“Withdrawn”
Detached
Original KUF philosophy
what might get lost?
 Educationally sound principles-moving away
from the banking concept of education (Friere,
1972)
 Organisationally influential-systemic approach
 Culture shift at the center-hearts and minds-the
extended experiential dimension
 Interdisciplinary-shared learning and different
perspectives
 Contact hypothesis-more exposure more
training
Principles informing adaptation
‘focus group data’
 Starting with the audience-responsive to ‘micro’ culture
 Carefully re-purposed, stand alone materials with distinct prison focus
 Focus on day to day realities of the work and use of realistic and detailed
case material
 Focus on behaviours, self management and psychological containment
 Need for thinking space
 Pathways and further support
 Opportunity to access VLE (Voluntary)
 A pre commitment focus-to be built upon
 Service user co-facilitators
 Train the trainer model
Service-users and professionals cofacilitating, looking from both sides:
A dialogue
Kath Lovell (Emergence)
 Andrea Milligan (IMH)
A Dialogue
Organisational perspective:
what’s that got to do with anything?
Jina Barrett
Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust
Future plans and opportunitieswhere are we going?
Victoria Baldwin IMH
KUF Awareness Training update
 KUF National Protocol implementation
 KUF Awareness level survey
 KUF Refresher days – TTT/Coordinator roles
 Online developments
Online Developments
 Accessibility developments - Transcripts and subtitles
for audio and video clips
 Advice/Information pages for staff with education
needs e.g. dyslexia
 Format of audio clips
 Facilitator only access area and private forums
 Audit process to establish engagement in the
programme
Developing new approaches to
delivering the KUF Awareness
Training
 New contextualised models – Prison, Probation and
GP Settings
 Key aspects:
 Refining core themes
 Developing short sessions
 Offline
 Responding to context specific needs in more depth
Emerging challenges
 Ensuring the core messages of the KUF are not lost
 Accessibility and engagement
 Service user involvement – co-facilitation
 Implementation and identifying relevant trainers
 Engaging the right stakeholders
BSc and MSc Developments
 Implementation of regionally based stand alone
modules
 Development of 2 new modules focused on gender
specific aspects of working with personality
disorder
 Core focus on working with women in
forensic/prison based settings
BSc & MSc Stand Alone Modules
 Opportunity to access individual places or full
modules across different regions
 Commencing with 2 modules at BSc and MSc level
in London and Nottingham over 2012/20/13
 Staff can access credits or accumulate credits for
awards (Certificate, diploma, degree, PGCert,
PGDip)
New MSc Cohorts
 2 new cohorts commencing in 2012:
 London based cohort commencing May 2012
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Deadline for applications: 9th March
70+ applications
Interviews – End of March/April 2012
Induction and Module 1 – May 2012
 North based cohort commencing in October 2012:
 Deadline for applications: 31st May
 Interviews – June/July 2012
 Induction and Module 1 - October 2012
Questions and discussion?