Wiltshire Council (September 2021)

The Families and Children’s Transformation (FACT) Programme was initiated in Wiltshire in 2018 and a central component to the programme was an ambitious training plan, started in 2019 and delivered in partnership with KCA. This programme has now spread across the system reaching a range of organisations from schools to Wiltshire Police, through to VCSE organisations, including Wiltshire Wildlife Trust.

The training programme was built around KCA’s model for promoting secure attachment and building healthy relationships (Five to Thrive), which enables people to notice and enhance connected relationships. This strengths-based approach was already known to some stakeholders in Wiltshire who found it transformative. The FACT programme wanted to build on this foundation to develop trauma-informed practice knowing that KCA already delivered training on this across various parts of the UK.

A place based co-creative approach was taken with the Project Lead to explore and understand the needs of the workforce within the perimeters of the project leading to the design and implementation of the programme. The co-creation continued with a redesign of the structure and delivery in response to the arrival of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the subsequent changes to priority and ways of working.

The first phase of the programme targeted the training of 500 Five to Thrive/ trauma-informed Champions and the identification, development and support of a group of trainers who would go on to deliver further training to a wider group of Wiltshire County Council staff.

This initial cohort was to be drawn from three broad areas of the children’s workforce – Early Years, Education and those working with children and families with complex needs. This initial phase soon lead to running a system leaders course and an extensive training offer to Wiltshire Police.

Since the beginning of the project KCA has delivered, to date, 44 training events reaching 1155 participants, incorporating trauma informed awareness raising sessions for front line staff, Champions training and a ‘Resource the Trainer’ programme.

From those sessions feedback has been gathered from 889 participants with the following KPI scores:

Partner trainers who completed the ‘Resource the Trainer programme have gone on to deliver 60 internal training events.

An impact study being led by the project lead is currently underway with the following early indicators of positive impact:

Quotes from participants: