1. The Practice Learning Café
Adrian Snowball, Aberlour Child Care Trust
Linda Walker. SIESWE

2. What’s the Practice Learning Café about?
Putting conversations to work
Exploring the potential and realities of practice learning
Generating collective ideas and actions about the potential and realities for practice learning

3. What will the conversations produce?
Ideas, thoughts, questions, suggestions about the future of practice learning in Scotland

4. The starting points Is practice learning everyone’s business?
Do we know what each other’s business is?
How does practice learning relate to the business of social care?
Our conversation will explore some of the implications of current changes to social care provision for practice learning.

5. Context; changing social work and social care
Some of the factors that may influence how practice learning may develop;
The development of workforce planning approaches in social services.
Changes to the ways in which services are funded and provided, and the way in which they are procured,
The introduction of new charity legislation
Changes to the ways in which services are delivered
Regulation of care
The developing role of sector skills councils
The impact of demographics on recruitment
The introduction of standards for Social Work education and key capabilities, and the SCQF

6. Social Care Business
How these factors affect the way in which social care agencies conduct their business is one of the key questions for this workshop.
As service delivery models develop, will there be a consequent change in what agencies need from workers?
Will changes to the workforce mean employers may have different priorities and needs for employment?
What does this mean for practice learning?
Will it mean more of the same models and methods, or will something new develop?

7. The Learning Business
Efficient and successful businesses must be clear why they do things
Effective learning organisations have clear goals and strategies for learning activity
Workforce planning must take practice learning into account
Effective teachers understand the context of what they do – this must include the business context, not just the practice learning context.
Effective partnerships need each partner to know what they do, why and what they need

8. The future for practice learning?
Practice learning may be part of business activity in the future, but not as we know it now!
Changes to recruitment arising from workforce planning may mean those agencies who don’t need Registered Social Workers will not see students as a priority
More interdisciplinary work may mean Social Work education becomes one of many players
CPD for registration may mean that practice learning becomes more prominent.
Developing learning cultures may mean that practice learning has a clearer context
This may lead to more focussed practice learning – less broad brush and more fine detail

9. Questions about the future for practice learning
What are your business strengths that can support practice learning?
Will workforce planning drive practice learning, or will it be the other way around?

10. Café Etiquette Focus on what matters Contribute your thinking
Speak your mind and heart
Listen to understand
Link and connect ideas
Listen together for insights and deeper questions
Play, doodle and draw – you are allowed to write on the tablecloths!
Share your ideas from previous conversations
Have fun!

11. Café to go! We will be having a three course conversation today.
Each conversation will last for 15 minutes
Each table should have 5 or 6 guests , and will have a question menu, and plenty of pens and paper.
Look at the menu and have a conversation about those questions that matter most to you.
Write or draw your ideas on the large pieces of paper as you go along.
After 15 minutes, one person will remain at the table to act as host for the next guests, and the others will all move to new tables. You will move independently – not in the conversation group you have just been in.

12. Table hosts
Remind people to jot down key connections, ideas, discoveries and deeper questions as they emerge
Remain at the table when others leave and welcome new guests
Briefly share insights from the prior conversation so that others can link and build using ideas from their previous tables
Take the collective writings and drawings to the café host’s table for display

13. Future work
We need to;
establish how practice learning and workforce planning and business needs relate to each other
identify the implications of workforce planning for practice learning
identify the implications of CPD for practice learning