 Greetings to all of you who care for and look after and help other people. I'm really delighted to be here. Greetings to our brothers and sisters from the Mi'kmaq tribe and community, African Nova Scotians and all of you here today who have this shared interest in working relationally and restoratively with families and communities. We were having pre-conference drinks last night in a pub called Dirty Nails and they had this open mic with a guitar and people were being encouraged to play so after a few drinks got pushed to the front and banged out a couple of scratchy songs just to keep the group happy. And the guy who was a real cool guy with a hat and nearing beard came up to me after me and he said, not bad for an old father. So I wasn't quite sure if that was a compliment but I took it at that. So, old father. I guess it's a colloquial local term, is it Janet? So I'm going to talk a bit about how professionals regulate and how rather than systems, procedures and bureaucracies provide that regulation, how that can be done relationally in the way we position professionals with families and communities. But just to give you a little lesson on how when you do that with children they keep you honest. So my partner as a social worker, I've been a social worker for 25 years and so have I and we've got three kids and so there must be some concerns about the long term psychological wellbeing of the children. But one day Karris said to Nick, Mummy, what does daddy do at work? And she said, well, he tries to help mummies and daddies who are having problems looking after children. So Karris said, do you mean like you mum? Which is great. Karris pointing out that we're not at all different to the people that we work with of course and a salutary reminder of our relationships with children. So one of the things we're going to make here today is that children should regulate professionals and if you find ways of doing that that can be a very powerful thing to achieve. A little bit of history in New Zealand. 1988, poor art theatre too occurred which was a community consultation looking at what was wrong with the current system with too many Māori children government systems in corrections and in care and not enough Māori social workers and institutional racism across the country. And that process brought out a strong indigenous voice, a leadership voice as the panel travelled around the country and listened to and spoke to community experts who articulated and defined the need for a different approach to decision making. But in particular one that repositioned the role of professionals, redefined the role of professionals where they met at a different place at the borderline between the state and the family. Reshaped the role of professional as well as helper and resource provider and positioned the family as key decision maker for outcomes for children. Now that's been running since 1989 and the effect of that is in New Zealand there are very low numbers of children in care. In fact in a population of four and a half million we have 1,700 children who are places with strangers, the rest are with family and low numbers of children in the criminal justice system. But what's important about that lesson for me is that over time practice has been recolonised and the relationship has been recolonised by the agency and seen significant changes which has watered down and undermined the essence of what was intended in the first place. Coordinators now located in government agencies, meetings held in the office of government and social workers, shortcuts being taken place in practice that are driven by cost and organisational convenience rather than generally relational engagement and the needs of the family. Family group conferences in New Zealand occur on industrial levels. We do 8,000 FGCs a year, a lot of conferences for a lot of serious cases but they operate in an environment where there are significant fiscal constraints and creeping bureaucracy which is starting to occupy the space that exists between families and professionals and as that bureaucracy creeps and encroaches on that space it reduces the capacity for families to lead. This greater proceduralisation of practice which encroaches and pre-defined the way we work with children and their families means that families experience having their participation managed rather than being leaders in change and decision making for their children. This environment shifts attention from doing the right thing to moving us to thinking more about defensible organisational decisions. So we do need to find radical ways to enhance the participation of children and families so their voice becomes more strong and redefine their relationship with front-line professionals. I think that's a more powerful regulator than bureaucratic standards and systems and approaches. One of the things that's really struck me about the work that's been done by our Maori leaders in Moana spoke this morning is that they've built up knowledge from the grassroots and the ground. They've listened to front-line Indigenous practitioners on what they're doing and how they're building relationships and how they're working in culturally responsive ways and taking that back and learning and trying to apply that across the whole country. We had a conference last year in Auckland which was called Cultural Responsiveness in a Multi-Agency World and there was one incident that stuck in my mind was a social worker from Australia came to visit the conference and she never had met her dad, her father who was Maori and he actually died in Auckland, she'd never met him and she started to speak to the Indigenous practitioners in Auckland and by the afternoon they'd made some calls and a car had arrived for her to take her straight to people who knew her father really well and they talked to her about her father and his history and his relationships and that would have never happened if those practitioners weren't already community-oriented and had that confidence and relationship with the community. So what can we do to shift some of the actions of professionals? What can we do to redefine this balance? I'm just going to give you some examples of that. One of the things we've been doing which has been quite innovative is involving children and staff appointments. So when you appoint a social worker or a staff member you have children sitting on the panel who have 30% of the score in terms of what the final decision is about the applicant and this is important for two reasons. Firstly it communicates very strongly to the applicant what's important in terms of their relationship with children but secondly children are great at sussing people out and I'll give you a really good account of why they think they're a good applicant or not. Children design their own questions and run their own approach and that 30% can swing the appointment one way or another but it's a strong representation of an effort to engage community in the appointments of professionals. Second and Gail touched on this before is families bring their family to when they're being interviewed they bring their family with them to the interview because part of that process is the family checking out the agency is going to look after their family member and make sure that they're going to work in a safe and good environment so it cuts both ways and becomes really important. Involving clients in the education and training of social workers so you see service users talking directly to frontline practitioners but how their practice needs to be different and creating strong feedback loops in dates they practice so services give you feedback on your practice and what needs to change quickly in order to make it more effective. I was really struck by some of the research I was looking at in terms of co-constructed evaluation just a little story about that was studied in the Department of Health in the UK which was concerned with the sexual health of sex workers and they were seeing a problem in terms of safety of sex workers and so they commissioned a research project and this set of researchers went out and started to interview sex workers in the community and after a while they said look you're asking us the wrong questions you're asking us the wrong questions these aren't the things that are happening or keep us safe and they made a fundamental error which was they assumed they knew the right questions to ask rather than engaging sex workers early on in what are the sorts of questions we need to ask to keep you healthy and safe what are the important things we need to know so involving services, involving family, involving children in shaking the orthodoxy and moving us to our most innovative ideas which often come from the community is a really important step in providing some form of regulation on professional organisations and activity how could we involve children more in the design of assessment and decision making around their needs and their futures so that adults know what is best for children particularly when perhaps especially when they won't be the consumers of whatever decision is made for them what if children had the vote what if we gave children from the age of ten upwards the vote as citizens in their own right what would politics look like we wouldn't have had Brexit politics would look different I think you'd see a more humane a more imaginative a more communitarian type of politics which is what we need getting a stronger client voice and participation is a great way of managing the relationship with professionals and ensure that they know their position and place in relation to family and community workers we need to create space we need to create space that empowers social workers to create space for children and families to lead with endless regulation, proceduralisation and bureaucratisation of social work we see that space is crowded out by organisational demands rather than the relational aspects of keeping children and families at the heart of the work we do so wouldn't it be great if the next restorative conference we had lots of children here describing to us how this practice should look I can only imagine that they would start to define and reimagine practice and services and how they could look in different ways than we can currently imagine and it seems to me that's a really big step towards the future they would stretch the boundaries of what we as adults think is possible thank you very much