Children Need Adults Who Believe in Their Possibilities
Patricia Sheridan’s journey in transforming children’s services in Scotland is nothing short of remarkable. As founder of the Moore House Group, her story begins with a simple yet powerful observation: that children in residential care were not having their potential recognized or nurtured. This realization came when, as a social worker, she was tasked with evaluating residential services across Scotland. What she found was deeply troubling – establishments where staff had little belief in the children’s capabilities, with no drive to measure outcomes or create compensatory curricula for young people struggling with trauma and disadvantage.
Rather than simply filing her report, Patricia took up her director’s challenge to “do something about it” and founded Moore House School in 1988. Her vision was revolutionary for its time: to create an environment where children experienced love, acceptance, and a genuine belief in their potential. This language of care was so uncommon in Scotland at that time that Patricia describes feeling like “a lone voice in the wilderness.” She had to build a network of like-minded professionals who shared her values to support her through the initial challenges.
The growth of the Moore House Group over 38 years reflects Patricia’s commitment to meeting children’s needs in comprehensive ways. From the original residential school serving children with trauma histories and attachment challenges, the organization expanded to include a foster care service (recognizing that institutional care shouldn’t be the only option for children) and later the Jane Moore Trust Trust, a school dedicated to supporting neurodiverse children. Throughout this expansion, Patricia maintained a consistent philosophy: every child has potential that can be unlocked through the right relationships and environment.
What makes Patricia’s approach particularly noteworthy is her emphasis on organizational culture and shared learning. She describes how the entire Moore House “family” – from teachers to care staff to foster carers – receives the same training in attachment theory and trauma-informed approaches. This creates a common language and understanding across all parts of the organization. Patricia herself models lifelong learning, having pursued advanced degrees in education and forensic psychology while leading the organization, demonstrating to staff and children alike the value of continuous growth and development.
Patricia’s approach to neurodiverse children further illustrates her belief that while specific needs may vary, the foundational principles remain the same. Children with neurodiversity, like those with trauma histories, benefit from environments where they feel understood, valued, and supported. The trauma these children experience may come from different sources – educational establishments failing to recognize their needs rather than socioeconomic disadvantage – but the healing process still centers on relationships and belief in potential.
Perhaps most poignant is Patricia’s reflection on how Scotland’s approach to childcare has evolved over her career. The language she once felt isolated for using – speaking of love, relationships, and children’s potential – is now embraced across Scotland’s childcare landscape. The “Promise” initiative she mentions represents a national focus on children’s voices in decision-making and supporting families to nurture their children effectively. While challenges remain, particularly in shifting focus from damage control to prevention, Patricia expresses optimism about the direction of children’s services in Scotland.
The conversation concludes with a profound insight that applies across all educational and care settings: relationships are the vehicle for all healing. Despite the perception that children who have experienced trauma are defensive and difficult to connect with, Patricia emphasizes that establishing meaningful relationships with these children is both possible and essential. By helping children feel worthy, capable, and adequate just as they are, we create the conditions for them to flourish – transforming “impossible” into “I’m possible,” as Patricia so eloquently puts it.
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About Patricia:
Mrs Sheridan established Moore House School in 1988. Her drive was to create a service with her personal mantras “Determined to Deliver Excellence” and “I’m Possible” for young people.
Mrs Sheridan leads the Board of Directors and continues to have a hands-on approach using a range of experiences and techniques to engage with young people to elicit their views on the service they are receiving. Her passion is for young people to be supported by adults who believe in their potential and adults who share the organisational values of respect, integrity and dignity for all.
Mrs Sheridan reminds us that we are responsible for creating trusting relationships and happy memories for our young people. She strives to ensure that our young people experience as many creative, happy, nurturing memories as possible.
Mrs Sheridan continues to strive for excellence and ensures that her passion for high quality services is cascaded throughout the organisation to encourage each and every team member to recognise the important part they play in the wellbeing and progress that our young people experience.
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Transcript:
Colby: 0:00
Welcome to the Secure Start podcast.
Mrs Sheridan: 0:04
And I think for me it was important that I created something that I hadn’t found in Scotland, but I’m delighted to say it’s a language that we use now, a language of love and acceptance and belief in the potential of children, and that we don’t need to be embarrassed about using that language, which 30, 40 years ago, you were shunned for using that language.
Colby: 0:32
Welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I’m Colby Pearce, and joining me for this episode is a British Care Awards winner and inspirational leader and founder in the field of children’s services. Before I introduce my guest, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I’m meeting on, the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, and the continuing connection the living Kaurna people feel to land, waters, culture and community. I’d also like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. My guest this episode is Patricia Sheridan.
Colby: 1:20
Mrs Sheridan established Moore House in 1988.
Colby: 1:25
Her drive was to create a service with her personal mantras, determined to deliver excellence and I’m possible for young people.
Colby: 1:42
Mrs Sheridan leads the board of directors and continues to have a hands-on approach, using a range of experiences and techniques to engage with young people to elicit their views on the service they are receiving. Her passion is for young people to be supported by adults who believe in their potential and adults who share the organisational values of respect, integrity and dignity for all. Mrs Sheridan reminds us that we are responsible for creating trusting relationships and happy memories for our young people. She strives to ensure that our young people experience as many creative, happy, nurturing memories as possible In terms of her career journey, mrs Sheridan has gathered a range of qualifications she was a registered general and mental health nurse, a qualified social worker and, at a later date, completed an MA in Education and an MSc in Forensic Psychology. Mrs Sheridan continues to strive for excellence and ensures that her passion for high-quality services is cascaded throughout the organisation to encourage each and every team member to recognise the important part they play in the wellbeing and progress that our young people experience. Welcome, patricia.
Mrs Sheridan: 3:14
Good morning. It’s lovely to speak to you again, Colby.
Colby: 3:19
Thank you. So was there anything in that bio that you’d like to expand a little bit upon or add to?
Mrs Sheridan: 3:30
Not really. I think that when I hear it from someone else it sounds a bit pretentious and I can’t believe the journey that I’ve been on. It made sense while I was doing it, but I think it reflects that I’m a lady of age. So, no, I have to accept that’s my journey.
Colby: 3:53
Yeah, and it’s a common reflection when I ask people after I’ve read their bio, particularly when they’ve read it. They’ve been working in the field for such a long time and I think and I was discussing this with another podcast guest only last week reflecting on my own long journey of practice and thinking that perhaps, as we’re doing it, our mind and our focus is on what we’re doing, you know, right now, as it should be, and it’s only when we have these opportunities to pause and reflect that we have a chance to consider the journey in its entirety and how yeah, how long a journey, or how much we’ve achieved across that journey. Indeed. So, patricia, you started Moore House in 1988, Moore House School in 1988. And since then, your operations have expanded into the Moore House Group. I wonder if you don’t mind just to start off with telling us a little bit about each of the areas of endeavour that come under the umbrella of the Moore House Group.
Mrs Sheridan: 5:14
Yes, as you said, colby, my first venture was Moore House School and it was intended to be a small residential and day service for children who had experienced trauma and who were showing attachment challenges. But over the 38 years it has become a school for 32 young people with 14 houses attached to the hub, and it ranges from primary education through to college. So that was my first attempt at trying to show what I believed was the right approach in working with children. I then decided that, because I didn’t believe that children should necessarily be an institutional experience for all of their residential education, I decided to create a foster care service, and my foster care service has become known as permanency and short term, as permanency and short-term, and again, it was intended to work with children with trauma histories. But, like I’m sure you and other people will experience, it takes on a life of its own and it’s become quite a varied group of foster carers.
Mrs Sheridan: 7:05
We have up to 50 foster carers who work with babies up to a young gentleman who is 33, with very complex needs and a special group of conditions that we had never experienced before. So for me, establishing the foster care service seemed to make sense at the time. But it’s grown into a unique organisation on its own and I’m very proud that we in fact are the only organisation in Scotland who has the highest grades of the care inspectorate, and we’ve managed to hold that for two years. So I don’t often allow myself to be very proud, but in that instance I certainly am.
Mrs Sheridan: 8:02
The third organisation that I created was the Jane Moore Trust, and it’s a charity, and it came about because there was a school in Scotland that had closed and it was a school that was working with children with neurodiverse challenges, and so it’s my nature when I get a challenge to try and do something about it. So five years ago we decided that we would open the school again. So we now have a school that works with children who have experience of neurodiverse issues. It’s a small school and we have both primary and secondary children. It has taken quite a time to get established, but we’re beginning to show evidence of our reputation, beginning to expand the pupil numbers. We are registered with the National Association for Autism and again, that for me is a reflection of the quality of what the team’s doing. So, yes, three organisations that keep me busy, but organisations that I’m very proud of and organisations that seem to have made sense to me each time that we established and added on the next organisation. It’s been an interesting journey.
Colby: 9:39
Yeah, it certainly has. What set you on this path, would you say? How did you come to be involved in?
Mrs Sheridan: 9:48
Yeah, I started I was in social work and my director in the local authority asked me to do a report on the residential services that the local authority was using, and so I visited about 12 residential services in Scotland and then I did my report and what I found was really quite sad and disappointing, and I found that the pupils that were in these residential establishments clearly came from a socioeconomic group where families were struggling with poverty and difficulty was that the staff in some of these organisations did not have a belief in the potential of these children and there seemed to be an acceptance that these children couldn’t achieve and there was no drive to measure outcomes or to create a curriculum that would compensate for the difficulties that the young people were bringing into the education field.
Mrs Sheridan: 11:13
And so I had a conversation about the report with my director and, of course, knowing me, he said well, if that’s your findings, I challenge you to do something about it. So I took the challenge on, and my first organisation that I created was Moore House School, and I think for me it was important that I created something that I hadn’t found in Scotland and I wanted to start speaking a language that wasn’t used at that time in Scotland, but I’m delighted to see it’s a language that we use now, a language of love and acceptance and belief in the potential of children. So that was my starting point in working in the residential education sector.
Colby: 12:07
And he lost an employee as well. I’m thinking, pardon, I’m thinking that he lost an employee as well. Your supervisor at the time, who challenged him yes, was he anticipating that he would lose you from the organisation? Yes yes, he was yeah.
Mrs Sheridan: 12:28
Yes, he was a wonderful gentleman and he knew his team, so he knew me obviously.
Colby: 12:39
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Moore House School was a residential school. You brought together both a desire to house the young people in a more positive and encouraging way and also to deliver to them education opportunities that focused on unlocking their potential.
Mrs Sheridan: 13:15
Yes, very much so.
Colby: 13:17
And it reminds me very much of an earlier podcast that I had with John Whitwell and I’m not sure if you’ve heard it, but, um, he was talking about the uh, the cotswold community and, um, and he was talking at this point of the podcast particularly about donald winnicott, I think, and and winnicott seeing children as being like bulbs, the growth is within them. You just need to create an environment around them that unlocks that, that allows for that and facilitates that.
Mrs Sheridan: 13:57
Yeah, Very much so yes.
Colby: 14:00
And were there any particular challenges that you’d had along the way in terms of setting up the Moore House School?
Mrs Sheridan: 14:10
Yes, I think the first challenge that I struggled with was there wasn’t a landscape of talking about children in terms of trauma and attachment, and at that time the landscape was very much about control of children, and so I found it difficult a peer group of people, of like-minded people, and so it was a struggle but I thankfully managed to draw together consultants who had the respectability in the field in general, and it was about building a network of people that could share and did share my values and supported me when the going got tough, because sometimes when you’re a lone voice in the wilderness, it can be difficult. So I think the first thing was drawing a peer group together to give me sustenance. That was the first point. The second point, inevitably, was the challenge of being a new entity and not being known and having to establish a reputation. So that threw up financial challenges.
Mrs Sheridan: 15:47
I tell the story of when I first started. We didn’t have a lot of money and I had to go to the bank manager and ask to borrow money to buy a car, which I didn’t buy. The car I had to use the money to pay the wages. So there were early challenges, financial challenges but through time we became established and I think that I was very fortunate that as our reputation grew, so we got the confidence of local authorities and our numbers increased to a place where we became a viable organisation. So it was yes, I wouldn’t say it was a challenge, but it certainly.
Colby: 16:38
It took some courage and energy, but we got there yeah, it’s interesting because you’re not you’re not the first um founder that I’ve spoken to and that who has, um, almost uh, intimated that um, the first priority is to go in the direction that you you wish to go in terms of setting up a service, and you’ve almost got to.
Colby: 17:06
Well, you can hope and pray, I guess, but you’ve got to believe that, as long as you provide and deliver a professional service, a needed service, the money will take care of itself, or the money will follow, and yes, I’ve heard that experience from others, and certainly that’s the way I have practiced for a very long time in my independent practices, the focus being on just the delivery of a professional service and the money will, will, take care of itself. It doesn’t always, though, does it? Yeah, but in the end, perhaps inevitably, yeah, it does, and I really like what you were saying about needing a group of peers, bringing together a group of peers, and the logical implication of that being that even founders and directors of services need to have a reflective group to talk to, to reflect on the work that they do and offer feedback and be offered feedback and guidance.
Colby: 18:31
Yeah heads of organisations I think it’s been the consensus view of other people I’ve spoken to as well should be getting that kind of reflective mentoring, peer mentoring and, if not, full supervision. Yeah, definitely yes.
Mrs Sheridan: 18:53
I think that you can become isolated and I think it’s important that you have the humility to recognise that you may have a passion and you may have a belief, but you need to be open and available for positive criticism if we’re going to grow. If I needed to grow as an individual and the organisations to grow, so we had to have an open and transparent approach to our practice and a willingness to listen to people who had a lot more experience and that had a valuable contribution to make.
Colby: 19:41
And you mentioned that you gathered them from around the place. I’m wondering where did you find them and how do you think what were some of? I guess a bit of a question without notice, but what do you think were some of the more important things that they shared with you that informed your approach to the Moore House school?
Mrs Sheridan: 20:04
Yes, I think the very important relationship for me was that it may come with age, colby, but I was very much into the John Bobies, the John Ashcroft, all these theories of attachment that were not around and being spoken about and used in the early days, and I knew that I wanted my team to be trained and to have a real understanding of what I was trying to convey to them about how we should work with children. And I came across Dan Hughes in America and it sounds a bit pretentious, but I did go over to America to do his DDP attachment course and I just felt at home. For me it was the answer, it was the way that I wanted my staff to understand the work that I was trying to do. So I did the course with Dan in New York, actually came back to Scotland and then I met several of his team who worked both in England and Scotland, and the first person that I established contact with was Edwina Grant, who in fact was the Scottish director for Dan’s DDP organisation.
Mrs Sheridan: 21:49
And Edwina came into our organisation and started to help to introduce the DDP approach and she stayed with us for a number of years and has only recently retired, and so we became an organisation, with Edwina’s support, to start and roll out DDP in Scotland, and we still now offer DDP training to any of the organisations in Scotland that feel that that’s the theoretical approach that they want to use.
Mrs Sheridan: 22:29
So Edwina and Dan’s model theoretical model for me was a really helpful training module that I could use for the team to understand my approach. And so from working with Edwina it’s really been about me going out probably more often doing courses myself, and I came across a course in Ireland with Patrick Tomlinson, so I couldn’t miss that opportunity. So I did a course of which Patrick was a contributor, and then again I established links with Patrick and he now again works with the organisation, and so I’ve been really fortunate in that I’ve been able to be introduced to some really important, impressive, impressionable people impressive people, rather, that for me speak the same language and have the same values and the same passion for getting it right for children. So I’ve been really lucky, and our organisation’s been lucky in the people that have come alongside us and support us to make sure that we get it right for children.
Colby: 23:59
And I chuckled a little bit there, because Patrick is a mutual colleague and something of a silent partner for this podcast, in that he puts me together with some of our guests, including with you, patricia. One of the things that I think is really significant about what you were saying there is that you go and you yourself go and get trained. You attend the trainings, you, and then you. You have a strong desire for those trainings that you think speak to you and how you want your organisation to operate and run and the care and service delivery you want staff to deliver to children. You have them all trained in the same models and theories theories, um, but.
Colby: 25:08
But the interesting thing is that, by the sound of it, it’s from the top to I hate saying from the top to the bottom. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it really? Everyone in the organization is gets the same training so everyone can speak the same language and, importantly from the point of view of the children and young people that you deliver a service to, notwithstanding that everyone’s got their own unique traits and characteristics, there’s a foundation of commonality across your staff group, which I think is really important and can be. It doesn’t always exist, for example, in statutory child protection organisations, where you know large organisations but where you wouldn’t. We wouldn’t commonly see everyone, all the staff group, singing from the same hymn sheet, so to speak. But I agree, I think that’s a really valuable thing. And it’s not just I think. Another previous podcast guest, simon Benjamin, who ran the Lighthouse Foundation here in Victoria and also had worked in the Mulberry Bush School in the UK, spoke really authoritatively about the importance of everyone being on the same page. Yes, yeah, so that’s great.
Mrs Sheridan: 26:48
I think you’re right, colby.
Mrs Sheridan: 26:49
I think the importance is that everyone needs to be invested in, and everyone, if you’re saying we all have a part to play they have to understand what that part is and they have to feel valued and they have to have the confidence to contribute to the care of the children.
Mrs Sheridan: 27:13
And so for me, it’s important that we do all have the same training, and I think that was my drive. When I started, I realized that I did not have all of the skills and theoretical knowledge that I needed, and so that’s why I did my master’s in education and then went on to do my master’s in forensic psychology, for two reasons One I wanted the staff to recognise that we all need to be in a learning environment and that we don’t always have the answers, but to encourage staff to believe and to convey to children that lifelong learning is something that we should all aspire to and that it’s so valuable for both the children and for staff. And so for me, I thought, by showing an example, although it was hard sometimes finding the time, but it was about setting, you know, setting the scene and having staff understand that we’re all on this journey together, journey of learning together that you started from a place of I’m not quite sure if I know what I need to know and have the skills that I need to have.
Colby: 28:37
So you started from a reflective position.
Mrs Sheridan: 28:41
Yes.
Colby: 28:45
A reflective and self-awareness, self-evaluation, self-awareness and, I would imagine, as part of life, lifelong learning. Encouraging that, embodying that in ourselves, encouraging it in others, has as part of it an ongoing reflection of what about what? What do I know and what do I need to know? Next, and I think that that’s been again another theme of this podcast and something that I’ve said previously and stand by, is that we need to think about what we’re doing. In this area of work.
Colby: 29:25
Thinking about it can be hard I had Nicola O’Sullivan on and she was talking about how the work can be so confronting, so challenging in some ways, that it can impact our capacity to think but we need to be thinking about what we’re doing. If we stop thinking about it, we become procedural, yes, and when we become procedural, we apply a one-size-fits-all, regardless of who’s in front of us. And procedural practice can be hard, can lack heart, can, in fact, be heartless practice. Yes, yeah, and I just wanted to make the point, in case people missed it, that the Moore House School is a residential school. The children I’m not sure if you have day students as well.
Mrs Sheridan: 30:22
I think you do, don’t you?
Colby: 30:23
Yes, but you also have children who live in those homes that you mentioned, with staff, and I’m imagining that there is also the word I’m looking for. It’s getting late in the day for me, so the words don’t come as easy. Here it is, I’ve got it. We’re going to cut that bit out. So I imagine that there’s alignment between home and school, there’s concordance, there’s congruence between home and school.
Mrs Sheridan: 31:01
Yes, the team in the homes do go into the school and work alongside children, and I have a psychological service team and what they do is they work both with the house, families and the teaching team and together they work out what we call a children’s plan, and so there’s the multidisciplinary focus on the needs of the children and we also ensure teachers, care staff and our psychological services team do the same training.
Mrs Sheridan: 31:50
So there’s relationships that build up through these opportunities and there is good communication between the multidisciplinary aspects of our team. And I think the biggest challenge for the teams in the houses is that you assume that there’s confidence in terms of education for care staff, but some of our care staff struggle because they themselves had difficulties when they were in school, and so what we encourage is some of our care staff, if there’s a subject that they’re not confident in, that they will get alongside a child and the two of them will do the learning together, and it’s quite refreshing when you see the adult and the child trying to learn something that the care staff member may not necessarily be confident about. It’s nice to watch that experience.
Colby: 32:53
That’s wonderful. Yeah, as you were talking about that, I could just imagine the emotional congruence between the staff member and the child. You know the emotional connection from having that shared learning experience, which is really important for our children in need. And yeah, it sounds like just a wonderful therapeutic way of delivering aligned care across both the home and the school. And I’m wondering if your psychology service provide a therapeutic service to some of the children as well.
Mrs Sheridan: 33:41
Yes, Children can have one-to-one interventions, working with things like grief and attachment, and that’s usually alongside, when it’s appropriate, alongside the key care staff member. We attach a key staff member for each young person in a therapeutic pathway and it’s interesting to see how relationships are established and how passionate the key workers can become if a meeting’s cancelled or, you know, if there’s something important for the child. It’s interesting when you watch the two disciplines working together when there’s a need for the child that the other discipline doesn’t recognise. So yes, there’s a passion on both sides. It’s lovely.
Colby: 34:46
Yeah, it’s wonderful when you were talking at the beginning about the Moore House group, I was also thinking about the allied health team that you across the three organisations.
Mrs Sheridan: 35:18
And we normally use as much as possible community-based services in terms of health, and I think that’s important for the young people when they go back into their own community, that it builds up confidence to allow them to use community services. So we don’t cover all of the requirements in terms of health and we try to use any community-based services and it’s about the dentist, the doctor, the optician trying to help children to grow in confidence to use those services as and when they go back home.
Colby: 35:55
Right, fantastic and not being contented. Contented is probably not the right word, but moving, not finding the challenges of having a residential school enough. You then set up a foster care service. You said that you did that because you believe that children shouldn’t grow up in all of their years in a. You said the word institutional or residential care environment is what I understood you to be referring to. So were there any unique challenges, I guess, or different challenges involved in setting up a foster care service?
Mrs Sheridan: 36:43
I think it’s the same challenges as you find in terms of recruiting staff challenges as you find in terms of recruiting staff and it’s about finding foster carers who are resilient and who are open to training and are able to recognise that the challenge that they face could be quite complex.
Mrs Sheridan: 37:10
And so it was about working in partnership and we encouraged our foster carers to come to any training that’s available within any of the three organisations and we trained our foster carers in the attachment model. And it’s about, for me, stickability making sure that our foster carers have access to social work. Our social work team, our social work team carries small numbers of carers so that they can be available to carers more often than probably the local authority foster carers are able to get support. So it’s about consistency and it’s about encouraging carers to understand the very challenging role that they’re taking on. So in our organisation, we have had foster carers and still have foster carers that have been with us for over 25 years, so some of them have got stickability, but I think that the landscape in terms of the needs of children haven’t changed. I think the language has changed, but I still think the needs of children and the challenge that they bring, I think is the same as when I started nearly 40 years ago.
Colby: 38:47
So yeah, I’m very proud very proud, very proud yes, indeed you should be. And and so the fossil again, we, the, the organization as it’s grown, um continues to be aligned, uh, across all its component parts, that they have a shared values, their shared values, their shared knowledge. There’s a shared language, everyone can speak to each other and um and you, you’ve, you’ve deliberately gone about choosing um interested parties to become foster carers, who themselves are also, I guess, interested in being lifelong learners and continuing to unlock their own potential. That just reminds me again of the idea that what we do with our children we need to do across the organisation. So when we highlighted before in the bio, I first mentioned that what you wanted was an organisation that saw the potential in children and supported advancing that potential or creating the right growing conditions for that potential.
Colby: 40:15
It’s important that we do that for our staff, our volunteers, our foster carers. We do that for everything, everyone, because they get to feel it’s a bit like going to training and being inspired by training. If you’re the managing director and founder, you get inspired, and everyone else, you see the value in everyone else being inspired Very much so, yeah, so having your potential acknowledged and developed feels great and flows perhaps quite naturally into supporting the potential of the children as well, so that’s a very important and key value of your organisation.
Mrs Sheridan: 41:08
Yes.
Colby: 41:09
Yeah.
Mrs Sheridan: 41:09
And I think we’ve needed to use the language like families and again, throughout the years, we know when we speak to each other, I hear staff talking about the Moore House family, which I smile at, and the other kind of way that I describe foster carers is and care staff and teachers. I talk about them being professional, and so that implies a professional responsibility and implies the standards and values that we all need to share and the importance of each person within the family, because you just can’t attach someone onto the organisation. They have to be living and feel that they’re part of this living organisation, and so they have to grow as we grow, and so I think when I started, I really it’s over time that I’ve understood the importance of language, but it’s beginning to reap rewards so many years later.Colby: 42:28
Yeah, and I love the fact that I imagine that everyone feels like they’re on the same level across the family, and I think that’s also really important. And then, as if the challenges of running a residential school and a foster care agency were not enough, you’ve established the Jane Moore Trust and taken on the role of the school for children, neurodiverse children and young people, and I guess I mean I could ask you were the challenges or what are the influences there for the service that you’re providing for that part of the organisation?
Mrs Sheridan: 43:39
I think, to be honest, it was a steep learning curve for me. I hadn’t really had a lot of experience in working with children with neurodiverse challenges. I knew that I wanted to establish the same culture, and so I think that there were elements of our culture that were easily put into place in the new school easily put into place in the new school. One of the challenges that we faced was that the previous school had to close with very short notice, and so the first real challenge was to establish relationships with families and to build their confidence, and what I found was that we were actually dealing with trauma in the families that came back to us, and so there was a lot of work there in trying to establish that we were staying and that we would be reliable, and once we got that platform established, it was slow growth. I mean, we’ve been doing this for five years, and my first important step was to get accreditation and make sure that the team had all the knowledge and expertise that these children would need us to have, and, as I say, I did not have a lot of experience. I had to pull in experts.
Mrs Sheridan: 45:27
I was very fortunate in that two of the consultants from the school that had been there prior to us opening, stayed with us and again were very passionate and appeared to recognize where our drive was coming from, and so they stood alongside us and are still standing with us.
Mrs Sheridan: 45:52
And we tried to get accreditation through the National Association for Autism, and for me that was the kind of checklist of professional growth and expertise, and when we achieved that, it was the tick box. Yes, we’re doing it the way that we should and we’re still small numbers, but our reputation has become national rather than Scottish, and so we have referrals from England and Scotland, and most of our referrals are coming from word of mouth, from local authorities that are telling other local authorities the success that we’re having with with some of their children. But it’s still a learning curve for me. There’s still something different, um, different. I think children’s needs are the same, but I do think that, yes, they’re a unique, wonderful group of different behaviours that I’ve not come across prior to opening the school, but they challenge us in a different way. But it’s refreshing.
Colby: 47:10
Perhaps they come to the school in different circumstances. You might say Very much so. And there are, yeah, and that there are. They have their differences, but there’s a lot of. There’s still children and young people with needs, and there’s a lot of similarity as well as diversity. And the thought that was going through my mind, Patricia, was those consultants that stayed on the teaching staff that you have at the school. On what basis do they also stand in the Moore House family, so to speak?
Mrs Sheridan: 47:58
The training that we do is across the three organisations, so it offers the opportunity for establishing professional and personal relationships. So that’s the foundation of the relationship. The teaching team have some elements of training that inevitably are different, but we all train in terms of understanding trauma and attachment, because for me, trauma does not necessarily come from socio-economical challenges. It comes from experiences and for these children, their trauma came from their educational establishments not recognising their needs and not meeting their needs. So there are threads that go throughout our language and our training.
Mrs Sheridan: 48:58
Our consultants meet. One of our consultants meets in terms of therapeutic supervision and support once a week supervision and support once a week and our other consultant, her specialism is education and curriculum development. So both of our consultants work alongside developing the curriculum with the team. Because unfortunately, when we opened we needed to start almost from scratch with our teaching team and again, I think that was because the teaching team that had been in the previous school. They themselves had been traumatized by their experience and I felt that it was too big a challenge to support their healing whilst addressing the needs of children. So it felt as if we were having to start again with the teaching team. But five years later we have a cohesion and a language and a feeling that we are just an extension of the original organisation, although our approach is slightly different.
Colby: 50:16
And I guess you’ve confirmed what I was suspecting to be true and certainly suspect to be well think is true from my work is that it’s not that much different whether you’re dealing with children who have a history of relational trauma and socioeconomic disadvantage and you’re of diverse children. They’re all children. They all have needs. Relationships are important to them. So the language and the understanding that exists within trauma-informed theories and attachment-based knowledge is important across diverse endeavours, including, you know, as is represented in the Moore House group.
Mrs Sheridan: 51:16
Very much so.
Colby: 51:18
I was wondering if there is anything that you have learnt along the way that you really wished you knew when you were starting any of these endeavours.
Mrs Sheridan: 51:30
Yeah, yes, I wish that I had known at the beginning that, in terms of the development of trauma, and that services and local authorities would move away from the control of children, and I think if I had known that we would, as Scottish services, that we would get to a place where we would use language like love and understanding and relationships.
Mrs Sheridan: 52:23
I think if I had known back then that we would achieve this in terms of the Scottish approach and the Scottish landscape for children, it would have been a bit of a relief and I probably would not have struggled some of the times and cried some of the times that I did in the early days. But I think that within Scotland, childcare and education has come a long way and I’m relieved to know that my approach wasn’t wrong and that, yes, and that we are now there’s more of a camaraderie now in Scotland and an understanding about the needs of children, and for me I just I just find that exciting and a bit of a relief. So, yeah, I wish I’d known back there that we were going to be where we are today.
Colby: 53:27
Yeah, I do an activity when I’m delivering training Patricia, that I adapt for different scenarios, but from a parenting point of view, it’s an activity that’s based around this story, which is that I think of parenting as a bit like being a farmer a farmer who grows crops. Yeah, so, as the parent, you turn over the soil, you make sure you’ve got your paddocks fenced. Yeah, you turn over the soil, you add in extra nutrients that the soil may require, you choose the right time of the year to sow seeds, you plant your seeds and then you wait. You wait for the weather, you wait for you know whether you might have to manage any unwanted intrusions over those fences. But the most important thing is that we do is we wait, and we’re often in the dark about whether, yeah, whether all of those things that we’ve put into the growing environment, whether they’ll bear fruit. We have to wait for our crops to grow.
Colby: 55:00
Yeah, and it sounds very much like that in terms of your journey. You had the courage of your convictions to take service provision in a different direction in Scotland, service provision in a different direction in Scotland, and it turns out that you were right. Yeah, it turns out that you grew what you were hoping to grow. Yes, yeah, my last podcast guest was Richard Rowlandson of the Mulberry Bush School in the UK and his question was what are you feeling hopeful about in the work that you do? And the reason why I’m asking you now is I think you kind of was answering that already. Yeah, a moment ago.
Mrs Sheridan: 56:00
Yes, I’m very hopeful of the way forward In Scotland. We’re talking about the promise, which is a focus nationally, and it’s about recognising the need for children’s voice in decision-making, establishing support, genuine support for families to enable them to nurture and parent their children, so that we don’t end up with the damage and trauma that our children can end up having, and just a genuine awareness and honesty in that we didn’t get it right in the past, but that the future is brighter, there is hope for children. I still think there’s work to do for supporting families. I still think our focus is on the damage rather than preventative work being done, but I am very hopeful that, certainly in Scotland, that we are recognising and understanding the children’s behaviours and what the children are communicating by their behaviours in a way that we didn’t before. It was about control, Whereas now, and even the language.
Mrs Sheridan: 57:36
Now we’re talking about love, we’re talking about relationships and we’re taking risks in becoming attached and showing children that we can love them, that we do believe in them and that we don’t need to be embarrassed about using that language which 30, 40 years ago you were shunned for using that language. So I’m really optimistic and I’m optimistic that God gives me a lot more energy and a lot more years. We have a lot more to do.
Colby: 58:12
Yeah, well, I hope we both get that as well. Yes indeed so, Patricia. I always give my podcast guests an opportunity to ask me a question without notice. We’ve been going for about an hour now. We probably could talk for many more, but we should be thinking about winding this one up, but before we do, is there a question that you would like to ask me without notice?
Mrs Sheridan: 58:43
Yes, I’ve obviously looked into education in Australia and I’m aware of your national improvement framework and I was really wondering about you in terms of do you feel Australia’s education accepts, understands and is driven to meet the needs of the more vulnerable groups of young people? Are you optimistic about the way forward?
Colby: 59:18
That’s a really good question. I could speak primarily of my own jurisdiction, where there has been significant endeavour to roll out training across the jurisdiction to all the schools and personnel within schools in trauma-informed or trauma-responsive practice and what a trauma-sensitive school environment looks like. So there’s definitely been endeavour in that space here and in my neck of the woods In terms of what I think. What I would offer differently is a way of thinking about the work with the children that is tailored to the experience of each and every individual child who has experienced significant relational or other hardship. So capacity to think about and better understand what’s going on for each of those child and how they, how they each, each one of them expresses um that in their, in their outward behavior and and other aspects of their presentation, and I guess I would also a bit similar to what we were talking about before. I think it’s really important that when we deliver training about our most disadvantaged, we also acknowledge that they’re children like all the other children in the school and all the other children in the school are children just like our children who’ve experienced a lot of hardship, people that doesn’t discriminate in terms of the benefit that can flow from the way we approach the role. All that by way of. I encourage teachers and other staff within school that I have contact with to draw on conventional approaches to caregiving and relating that are helpful to all children, including those who’ve experienced significant hardship, because when we do that, that also communicates that all of the adults have within them the capacity to make a significant positive input into the lives the emotional, the relational, the psychological lives of the children. So I’m a little bit hopeful that schools and education are more interested in being trauma sensitive and responsive and indeed trauma informed.
Colby: 1:02:46
I think the difference between being trauma sensitive and trauma responsive and trauma informed, trauma-responsive and trauma-informed so trauma-aware, trauma-sensitive, trauma-responsive and trauma-informed, trauma-informed involves relationship. That’s, I think, the difference. So individual relationships. I really want to get to know you, to get to understand you. I really want to know what needs you have that I can assist with or respond to therapeutically to, in order to ensure that you feel loved, worthy, adequate, capable. I want to ensure those things and I think that, um, um, that that would be the difference from what I, what I understand to be what, what is being rolled out and what I would roll out is that I would encourage for teachers and other educational staff to have that capacity to think about, to reflect on, to understand the needs of each individual child and to deliver ways of of of relating to them and caring for them in school that help them to feel, yeah, worthy, capable, adequate, good enough.
Mrs Sheridan: 1:04:25
Yes, I think that’s why I use the term I’m possible for staff and children. Relationships are the vehicle to all healing, in my view.
Colby: 1:04:41
That’s right.
Mrs Sheridan: 1:04:44
So easy and yet so hard. I said so easy and yet so hard.
Colby: 1:04:51
Yeah, well, yes, I think, yeah, I think. Our children. The perception of many is that our children are defensive and difficult to establish and maintain relationships with. I mean our children who have been hurt and let down, and I’ve never found that.
Mrs Sheridan: 1:05:23
Yeah.
Colby: 1:05:23
I rarely have a child with whom I can’t develop a relationship and I don’t and I do it through helping them feel like they’re a person of worth, helping them feel like that they’re good enough, that they’re capable, they’re adequate. Yeah, just as they are.
Mrs Sheridan: 1:05:44
Yeah, wonderful little beings.
Colby: 1:05:48
They are. Yeah, they keep us on our toes a little as well. They keep us on our toes a little as well. So, finally, I did flag this with my Richard Rowlandson question, but I would just wonder if you have a question that you would like me to ask.
Mrs Sheridan: 1:06:13
My next, guest on this podcast. I was looking. It’s the lighthouse, isn’t?
Colby: 1:06:20
it, it is.
Mrs Sheridan: 1:06:21
I was looking at the work that they were doing and I think for me it’s about how do they create a culture in foster carers that replicates the values of Lighthouse and maintains the values of Lighthouse.
Colby: 1:06:47
Yeah, that’s a really good question. It’s an extraordinary organisation.
Mrs Sheridan: 1:06:51
I was so impressed when I read the background. It was wonderful and I’d like to pass my compliments on to them.
Colby: 1:07:02
I’ll definitely do that. Thank you, Patricia, for what’s been, I think, a really inspirational podcast chat between us. I’ve really appreciated you making the time to appear and I wish you all the best in your ongoing endeavours. Long may they continue to happen.
Mrs Sheridan: 1:07:31
Thank you. I’ve enjoyed this morning with you and I’d just like to say thank you for the opportunity, and it’s with links with people like yourself and Patrick that keep people like myself feeling strong and carrying on the work, so thank you for that too.
Colby: 1:07:52
Lovely. Thank you, you’re welcome.
Mrs Sheridan: 1:07:55
Thank you, you’re welcome, thank you.
