Practising with care in mind: Supporting social care training

Photo credit: Professor Crafter

Prof Sarah Crafter from the Open University and Dr. Evangelia Prokopiou from the University of Northampton, have developed an online training course for social workers, senior practitioners, personal advisors, differently qualified and other professionals working with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. In this blog, they say more about the course and how it builds on a research project called Children Caring on the Move.

Children and young people who travel across borders without kin are often called unaccompanied minors. If they seek to claim asylum once they arrive in a new country they are sometimes called unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Professor Sarah Crafter, along with a team of colleagues, led a project called Children Caring on the Move.

The Children Caring on the Move project set out to examine Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children’s (UASC) experiences of care, and caring for others, as they navigate asylum and welfare systems in England. We started with the premise that care is not necessarily limited to what adults (or the state) provide for young people. Our work has shown that young people provide a lot of care for each other, but we wanted to understand what that care looks like.

One of the outputs of that project was the development of a course for social care practitioners. To find out more about the course, you can read this blog.

You can also read more about the project here :

Professor Crafter is Professor in Cultural-Developmental Psychology and Director of Research in the School of Psychology and Counselling in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences