ERCCI Empowering Residential Child Care through Interprofessional Training | ERCCI Empowering Residential Child Care through Interprofessional Training

BACKGROUND

Many children living in residential child care (RCC) settings have had difficult lives due to the absence of family, parental incapacity or emotional and behavioral problems. They require expert support to uphold their rights and receive stable guidance on their pathway into adulthood. Instead, the care in RCCs is often delivered by different professional groups, bearing different names according to the country and the type of service system they work in or the qualifications they have. It is also provided by paraprofessionals with limited training. Because of this situation there are internationally, across countries in different welfare systems, serious concerns about the capability of RCCs to help and support these children and youth. These concerns are directly linked to the (insufficient) training background and stability of the RCC workforce. While some countries have sought to expand alternative care options in the form of family foster care or kinship care, RCC remains a common form of care in many countries.

CONSORTIUM

The project brings together the collective expertise of an international partnership including Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS, Finland), University of Kassel (UNIKASSEL, Germany), University of Mykolas Romeris (MRU, Lithuania), University Milano-Bicocca (UNIMIB, Italy) and University of Oviedo (UNIOVI, Spain) who are all providing expert insights into practice innovations and the research on RCC in their respective countries and beyond.

BENEFICIARIES AND TARGET GROUPS

The beneficiaries of this new competence-based RCC MOOC are RCC practitioners aiming to strengthen their skills and competencies, RCC agencies providing foundation training for their staff, and university programs offering a training module, which may be missing in their curriculum, university students interested in working in child welfare and RCCs, and policymakers trying to set minimum standards for RCC competencies. Optimally, the ERCCI MOOC will be become an accredited foundation course for RCC staff with limited training in Europe and worldwide.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

ERCCI aims to support the building of a competent RCC work force that can promote inclusion and reduce inequality among the most vulnerable children and youth living in institutions. During the 3-year project to a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) will be developed as an innovative way of providing accessible training for RCC staff and to thus improve the quality of RCC work in institutions. With an innovative online pedagogy, the objective is to invite workers to explore and update their knowledge base and skills, improve their professional work performance and in this way achieve better outcomes for children and youth in RCC. Such a training is not available at this moment. We will develop the MOOC and have feedback with multiple stakeholders and are planning to launch the official ERCCI MOOC in August 2021.

The aims are divided into objectives:

to map the residential care practice community, RCC systems and RCC practices
to organize co-creation workshops to produce and test the material for the MOOC
to organize national seminars to design the content for the MOOC
to organize webinars to promote and reflect the MOOC with wider audience
to create the online competence based ERCCI MOOC

IMPLEMENTATION

During the implementation of ERCCI, the collaborative partners in the field of RCC will test the MOOC; create and reflect together the content of the competence based RCC e-training module.

March 2019 Mykolas Romeris (MRU, Lithuania), 1 week international co-creation workshop
May 2019 Local seminar to introduce ERCCI and define the RCC training needs
October 2019 Local webinar
January 2020 University Milano-Bicocca (UNIMIB, Italy) 1 week international co-creation workshop
October 2020 University of Kassel (UNIKASSEL, Germany) 1 week international co-creation workshop
March 2021 International webinar
August 2021 Local seminars to launch the ERCCI MOOC.

We are very keen to start building a network of critical friends and interested allies who want to help us make this a unique learning resource that inspires practitioners, managers, teachers, students, and policy-makers alike. Join with us!

ERCCI FACTS

Start date: 1.9.2018

End date: 31.12.2021

Duration: 36 months

Partners: 5

Countries: 5

Project funding: 321 103 €

Programme Type: Erasmus + Strategic Partnership

Programme Acronym: 2018-1-FI01-KA203-047242

More information about ERCCI:

Eeva Timonen-Kallio

Project Manager