ChildLine does us proud

Now here’s some good news. It cheered my day to hear that ChildLine is now offering a website where children can get online support. Yes, there are others, for sure, but ChildLine has a place in our national consciousness and will be well used, I reckon.

Funnily enough, this seems a really sane move. And that’s partly because the Government wants to start careers advice for kids as young as seven, according to a report in the Telegraph yesterday. In a perverse way, the more the powers-that-be roam into bizarre territory, the more the people out there that need our help will feel they must access it. It kind of plays into our hands as the sane ones! After all, we can’t be madder than the authorities who dream up these mad schemes! Children who are bullied, beaten or bereft of an attachment figure are hardly going to be thinking, Now do I want to be a gardener, a pilot, or a check-out person?

Anyway, this is a website address to have to hand for when it seems appropriate to mention it to a client: http://www.childline.org.uk/Pages/Home.aspx

So if people are going to turn to us more and more, isn’t it just timely that, for those of us in agencies and connected to commissioning (and everyone else if they feel so inclined), there is now a short publication available from the Family and Parenting Institute that talks us through using measures to keep track of change. It helpfully lists all the posh terms involved in such work and points us to suitable measures, with practical discussion on each. Really useful. You can download it from here.

And remember, next time a child says they are going to be a famous footballer, it won’t be juvenile role-yearning. It will be the result of a careers advice session…