Welcome to KSL

What’s coming up…

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It’s finally here… publicly available, official Youth Mental Health First Aid training courses for England; The first for individual registration will be held on 8-9 September and 20-21 October, near Euston/Kings Cross/St Pancras, London.

Building on our awards celebrations experience, we are managing a contract to provide a Creativity4Health event to promote and celebrate the creative achievements of Looked After Children in the South East region, and to promote health and wellbeing. LA leads are completing an online survey. This has helped KSL and partner R-ART to develop our Partyarts concept further.

KSL: What’s new…

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On 8th June 2010, KSL converted to a fully-fledged social enterprise, a 'Community Interest Company'- see Our Purpose page. We are just in the process of updating all of our communications and documentation, so please bear with us!

We are working with Resli Costabell, our expert Trainer and Coach, to develop something different to assist local authorities struggling to recruit and retain social workers in statutory children and families work, especially since the Baby Peter reporting. We designed this after consulting councils, BASW and CWDC. The title for these support seminars was chosen from the results of a survey on this site: Take care of yourself so you can take care of others: A session to build and maintain social worker resilience. This builds on our work with Felicity Collier and Newham Council to design a tailored induction top-up programme for qualified children and families social workers recruited from overseas. We are now able to deliver more training pilots for local authorities and their recruitment agencies.

MHFA England has been supported by DH to establish itself as an independent social enterprise, like we are, and has developed its own new website - please note that this is the only official English site! After obtaining the licence from MHFA Australia, they have adapted and implemented for England, the Youth version of the highly successful Mental Health First Aid programme. Their National Training Team, and KSL as a first recognised training provider, are now ready for its July 2010 launch.

Following our recent research and design work with Steve Onyett and Mark McKergow for an Appreciative Leadership event with a difference, we are now keen to hear from potential host organisations to commission us to co-produce and manage innovative "unconferences". Appreciative leadership, self-directed support, child poverty, age equalities and youth crime are just some of the suggested topic headings under which such an event could deliver knowledge sharing and development in a highly recession-friendly and participatory way.