 I've been here since Thursday is my first time in Canada and a lot of people I've met, including a woman walking her dog in Dartmouth yesterday who want to know about Brexit. And I'll just say this that instinctively Brexit doesn't fit with the geography of hope. Because I've been here since Thursday at the honour and privilege to meet people like Tracy a gael ymnyddio lle o'r mhwyth a phan o'r llyfrwyng yng Nghymru. Maen nhw'n gweld fy mhergylch, i gynnig o'r Llyfrgellhwyr y guessing a'i hosid a'n ffordd i'r hosid eu bod ymweld ymweld yn gwneud, mae'n ceisio ac yn amlwgog. Felly mae'r gweld eich gwelio ei wneud. Mwy tu'n rhaid i'r Llyfrgellochol a'n ffannu nhw i'u ceisio ymweld ymweld. Mae'n gweddyllach oddi gwn, yn y cwmysgol. I want to thank Jen. I won't give her too much praise because she finds that difficult as I've discovered. And I want to thank her because she's asked me to come here and speak. So she obviously thinks I've got something useful to say, which you want in ten minutes time. One other person I want to mention before going is Nigel Richardson, whose job you nearly gave me. He was, I could see him laughing over there. He thinks I'm after it anyway. But Nigel's been a real inspiration for me and introduced me to restorative practices and has created the conditions in Leeds where I work for restorative organisation to develop. So I've travelled 2,773 miles to be here. I could talk for a long time about the working Leeds. But the one thing that I would say is that there is a direct correlation between leadership behaviour and the behaviour of frontline practitioners when they engage with families and children. That's my message from this presentation, so you can ignore the rest of it. I'll put some context around it, but really what we've done in Leeds is to try and create a restorative organisation and a restorative organisational culture so that social workers in Leeds, when they engage with children and families, behave restoratively with them. Our mission in Leeds has been to try and move to something closer to the New Zealand model to try and get to a point where actually things like family group conferencing are an entitlement for people before the state intervenes through formal processes like child protection conferences and care proceedings. Nigel talks about this idea of the family being the greatest utility of the 23rd century and it's the greatest underused utility of the 21st century. Through methodologies like family group conferencing, we can reach out further into families and find solutions for children to remain within those family and friendship networks. Because we're going to go so big in terms of things like family group conferencing and trying to involve family at every stage, and one of the things that it really takes is for us to be able to suspend our professionalism to an extent, to be able to give power to families to determine how they're going to resolve the difficulties that they face and if you're going to do that in an organisation the size of which I lead and manage, you have to do something about the culture. So we designed a restorative leadership programme which wasn't just training, it was about engaging in six months' worth of work and everybody from front-line manager to myself got involved in that piece of work. And we met in small groups, randomly selected from across the organisation. We met in small groups and we learned some of the theory around restorative practice. We looked at our practice and we set ourselves homework that we went away and practiced and then came back together as a group to reflect on what we'd learned and how some of those processes had worked out for us. So over a period of time what we developed was a culture of restorative leadership. When you're trying, again, one of these things when you're trying to do that, Mahatma Gandhi said be the change that you want to see in the world. So there's something for me personally in this journey and I'd been in a senior position at times when the organisation had been punitive in its approach to relationships with managers and staff. I had to take that journey of changing that through this process but I also stood up in front of 90 managers across the service, apologised, talked to them about what the organisational culture had been like and why perhaps, but acknowledged how that had left them feeling, apologised for it and then asked them the question what is it when you look up the organisation towards me that is now not restorative? And if you want to ask social workers what's wrong with their organisations, they're very quick to tell you. They're really skilled at telling you what's wrong with leadership and what's wrong with the organisational culture and they came up with half a dozen things that were really problematic in the way that we were leading the organisation. So we listened to that, we took them and we changed them. I'll give you one quick example. One was that when we undertook performance management the style that we used was to send out lists to the social work teams telling them about the things that they hadn't done. So in this conversation I was having with the staff they were saying that really pisses us off and it's not restorative. Stop sending the lists. So we had this conversation and I said, is it okay for me to know this information? And they were like absolutely yes. I was like okay, that's good. So you're okay with me knowing this. It's just the method of delivery. They were like yes. So I kick the layer of managers beneath me, they kick the layer of managers below them, they kick the managers below them, they kick the social worker, ultimately the social worker goes out and kicks the family. That's the kind of culture that you've gotten through those lists. So we sat down and talked about how we were going to change that. And we came up with around 10 basic things that we really wanted them to do very well. And they came up with what those 10 things were. And those were about reassuring everybody in the organisation that children were being kept safe. But also that they could talk about why the performance in certain areas was in a particular way. And we turned the whole thing on its head so that they reported that upwards through the organisation, rather than me sending them a default position around their performance. They would on a regular basis gather that information, put a story around it, what's gone well, why's it gone well, what hasn't done so well, what you're going to do about it. And they would tell that story and they came together as teams and started doing that. And that would work its way up the organisation to me so that I know on any given day, in a particular team, if there's an indicator that's giving me some consent, I know what it's about because I've got the real story behind it. So recently we said to them, you don't have to do those reports anymore, you know, we're doing really well. And they were like, no way. We absolutely love doing this. It has now become a way that we actually lead and manage and reassure ourselves that we are safe. In this period of time, Leeds as a Children's Services has gone in 2009 from the external regulator, Ofsted, that Estelle talked about. They also regulate children's social work services and in 2009 they called us inadequate and they said that children in the city weren't safe. When we've taken this restorative practice approach through the organisation and last year Ofsted came and visited and they said that we were good without standing for leadership and management. The culture practice transformed the organisational culture and it transformed social work practice. We want to work with families based around their strengths. We talk about there being 10% of parents who do willful harm and neglect to children and yet we have a child protection system that deals with 100% in that way. Starting to use families and hearing their voice and their own plans is about turning that system on its head because actually in that 90% people will come up with real sustainable solutions to deal with the difficulties that they are facing. Not a social worker going in and saying I need you to do this, this and this. So our work comes much more about enabling families to take control of their own lives. Thank you.