Page 3473 - Week 08 - Thursday, 18 August 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Part of that was also around staff, and proper supportive staff. If we are to have a consistent staff team and not see high turnovers and so forth, we need to value those staff. We need to ensure that they have proper support and proper ongoing professional development and that other training is made available to them. They must also be supported in understanding what the policies and procedures of the place are. It is all very well to put them into one big manual and hand them to someone and say, “There you go,” but that is really not the way people are going to understand how they are to do their job day to day. We need a proper process if things are going to change so that it engages staff in understanding what the new policies and procedures, or current policy and procedures, are.
I asked a question of the minister the other day about supervision, because it appeared that ongoing supervision was not provided to staff. There were some concerns around the opportunity for debriefing, particularly after critical incidents had occurred. The minister has come back to inform the Assembly about the number of times people have taken up that opportunity, but I can say that it is one area that I will be keeping a close eye on. If you want a healthy workforce and a consistent workforce, you are going to have to value them and you are going to have to provide them with the supports to do their job properly.
There were a number of recommendations, as we saw, around the need for change in other areas. Bimberi had become very risk averse and therefore there were options that had been shut down for young people to engage in things like training. I remember having this conversation around why more young people were not being able to engage in things like introduction to construction-type courses. It appeared that most of them had been assessed as being in a risk category which meant that they could not participate in a whole range of training. That sort of thing needs to be reassessed. We need to be providing the literacy and the numeracy, those sorts of classroom-type learnings, but we also need to be looking at other sorts of vocational education training opportunities that we can provide to young people.
When Mrs Dunne first put this motion to the Assembly it was very much focused on staff because a lot of the complaints had started to come out from staff in the community. They were complaints that we needed. There were stories and experiences that very much needed to be investigated. What I did was to broaden out the terms of reference to include young people. Part of that was to look at segregation and the restraining of children and young people within Bimberi. Mrs Dunne has touched on this slightly. I think it is a very important one because it goes to the heart of the behaviour management system that is applied within Bimberi.
This is a difficult group to work with at times—there is no doubt about that—but we do need to be looking at other ways that we can manage and change behaviour. We need to be looking at training around de-escalation of behaviour, so that we do not get to the point where a young person has to be restrained, and where we can minimise putting young people into segregation.
Mrs Dunne touched on young people in segregation not being able to access education. In fact, it is a specific recommendation in this report, at 12.14:
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video