New Safe Space Pocket Guide

The latest version of the Pocket Guide received with this year's membership card has an extra panel added, making it slightly larger than the last one. The new panel includes the wording of the Volunteer Code of Conduct on one side, with the line I love:

"Follow Girlguiding policies and procedures and re-read them from time to time as they may be amended."

The other side of the extra panel talks about the Volunteer Responsibilities under the 2018 Working together to safeguard children guidance e.g follow through within 24 hours if it is an emergency or an immediate risk of significant harm.

There are smaller, pocket size versions of the guide available from the safeguarding team that can be carried easily.

100 year Centenary Maze

I've had a lovely Mother's Day trip today to the Centenary Maze at Crystal Palace Park. It's been on my wish list for a while as I was living in Germany when Girlguiding renovated the maze as part of centenary celebrations. (This is where the original Scout Rally was held, where some girls turned up who wanted to join in, the rest is history).  Even my teenage boys enjoyed getting to the centre of the maze, even though they scoffed as the hedges were only waist high it wasn't a dodle.

It was gorgeous weather, and lovely to hear children laughing and calling to each other and parents to try and find the centre of the maze. I love the words in the middle "follow in their footsteps, pause here a while, listen to the echoes past, present, future" we used the cheat gate to get out; as we had a table reserved at Brown & Green café at the Triangle, which I can recommend if you are over that way ever. I earned the badge!

Glad I printed off the park map as there were none to be had in the park. There were some brass pictures mounted in the ground around the maze - an owl and an oak leaf were obvious but I didn't get the connections of the other ones. I suspect there is a document somewhere about the renovation of the maze that will describe the significance of the brass pictures but I can't find it!

New Mentoring resources

We now have a Mentoring Handbook which outlines the key responsibilities of a mentor, a mentor agreement (similar to the tutor/prospective trainer one) but this one makes reference to Girlguiding's Code of Conduct; and sources of support for mentors.

There are additional hand-outs Getting back on track giving advice on how to reconnect with leaders in training and Seeing it in action a checklist for doing an observation. Nice to see the artwork, based on the concept of cogs & wheels in motion, just a shame they are not dated. How will we ever know if they have been updated?

Reflection Safe Space training L4

The audience was predominantly Division Commissioners in Hampshire West I was incredibly well looked after - I felt much more on the ball because I travelled down the night before so instead of being 99 miles away I only had 3 miles to travel from the hotel to the training venue before delivering the training and driving home again. It was a leader who helped me set up, that suggested the star layout which worked really well and I will use it again.

I made sure this time to use the scenarios I hadn't previously used e.g number 5 each time to get a different perspective. I included a few items from the L3 training addendum notes on data protection, altered the slide order more and cut a few extra ones, and rotated the examples of challenging behaviour before drawing the commissioner and her attributes. This meant they were much quicker to come up with attributes of commissioners in order to be effective, then we revisited the challenging behaviour post-its. Seemed to flow much better. There were a few Commissioner tutors in the audience and it was really useful having them there, but they hadn't received a copy of the Comms booklet but that is being resolved by the county team.

There were 2 significant questions that came up:

• how do new DC's find out about sanctions against leaders as traditional hand-overs don't happen anymore? The L4 guidance book does say sanctions are recorded on GO but not who or how they can be seen.
• how do DC's know that Risk Assessments are being done and revisited on a regular basis?

It was interesting how much of the challenging behaviour related to non-compliance especially in relation to willingness to adopt the new programme. The county had printed the feedback forms which I gave out and received some positive comments (shame its not Trainer renewal time) the comments referred to how I had made the scenario's come alive with real experiences. There were a lot of comments about Risk Assessments and we explored the new checklists & the volunteer Code of conduct as tools to gain compliance. There were  a couple of comments that the training was just too long.  

   

Illustrating the new 5 E's poster and how to craft it together.

New Layout - start shape worked really well

Good Guiding is ...... replaced by the Girlguiding Checklists

I have had confirmation that Good Guiding is …. has been replaced by the Girlguiding checklists, links to all 3 can be found at the bottom of this page https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/making-guiding-happen/how-were-being-our-best/doing-our-best/

This page also contains a link to the Doing our Best poster which is a lovely bright new training resource which requires some paper crafting skills to assemble as a poster, 9 pages, but worth it when you do! There is a pdf version which is only 2 pages to print, and it can also be ordered as a resource from trading.

It also ticks the box on the trainer observation form that asks if relevant displays have been used!

"Doing Our Best poster template Instructions
1. Cut out each section of the poster
2. Stick together as shown below."