CATS training: CPD training courses for legal professionals | CPD training for Social Workers | Psychologists and Psychiatrists

CATS Training - general information
The CATS centre offers workshops and short weekly training courses on a wide range of issues around abuse and trauma. The range covers abuse in different age groups and settings, and covers victims, perpetrators and legal issues. The centre is supported by Kingston University London for the development of knowledge exchange between research and practice. Our innovative approach takes high level of expertise from both academic research background, as well as from a range of expert practice partners nationally and internationally, to generate courses of high quality, which are amenable to frequent updating as research knowledge, policy and law change. Our approach is multi-disciplinary and academically rigorous, but with a view to practical application and to the needs and constraints of practitioners to increase their professional development.

Practice Applications
Our courses cover issues of Assessment around abuse, trauma and risk issues; Research updates on abuse and trauma issues, including understanding conceptual and causal models of risk and resilience; Implications for practice and knowledge exchange; Basic principles of research and how to evaluate services in relation to assessment and evidence-based practice.

Who are CATS courses suitable for?
Our courses and workshops are directed towards criminal justice workers (solicitors, paralegals, police, probation, youth offending), social workers (child protection; ‘looked after’ services; family support services) and psychologists (clinicians in child and adolescent mental health and adult services) and workers in the legal professions.

Individualised provision of courses
Coherent ‘menu’ of courses can be provided singly or in any combination to services on site, or held at Central London university premises. For further information please contact Prof Julia Davidson j.davidson@kingston.ac.uk or Prof Antonia Bifulco antonia.bifulco@kingston.ac.uk.

Professional Legal Studies at CATS
In addition to the wide portfolio of CPD generic specialist courses offered by the Centre, CATS also provides discrete legal training - visit our Legal Research and Studies page for more information or contact c.hamerton@kingston.ac.uk.

Solicitor Regulation Authority-accredited courses covering a wide range of issues concerning perpetrators and victims of abuse, and their legal implications. These courses are open to all professionals working within the child protection arena, but have been specifically designed for law professionals such as Barristers, Solicitors and Legal Executives.

In addition to our fully accredited CPD training courses (below) CATS also offers discreet legal training in key practice areas, including: • Charity Law • Child Law • Civil Liberties and Human Rights • Criminal Litigation • Data-Protection and IT Law • Elderly Client • Evidence (including best evidence and witness handling) • Family Law • Fraud and Money-Laundering • Mental Health Law • Vulnerable Client • Welfare Law. This training is tailor-made on request and ranges from short courses on legislative change to refresher workshops on court skills. For further information on tailor-made Legal Training or Legal Research at CATS please contact Christopher Hamerton, Director of Legal Studies at: c.hamerton@kingston.ac.uk.

CPD Social training
Child Safeguarding and Adoption & Fostering
assessment measures
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CATS offers training in several measures that offer invaluable assessment tools to workers in social practice, such as Adoption and Fostering and Child Care services and clinical practice

The Attachment Style Interview (ASI) is an interview which assesses characteristics of current adult attachment style in relation to a person's ability to access and utilise social support. As such it belongs to the ‘social psychology' strand of investigation of attachment style. It was developed by Professor Antonia Bifulco and her team at the Lifespan Research Group.The ASI provides a categorisation of attachment style for individuals, as well as assesses their specific support context and quality of close relationships. The resulting attachment profile not only determines which style best characterises them (e.g. Secure, Enmeshed, Fearful, Angry-dismissive or Withdrawn), but also the extent to which the insecure styles are dysfunctional in terms of whether the person is ‘Markedly', ‘Moderately' or ‘Mildly' Insecure.2.

This interview and rating scheme is designed to gather information on the parent or carer’s views of their parenting role, their interaction with their children and their felt and estimated competence with care and control to help understand further the nature of the parenting they may provide for their children. Whilst it does not assess neglect or abuse, it enables the parent to speak more freely about their view of themselves as a parent for social workers to begin direct work on improving their parenting skills.

Parenting Role Interview can act as a standalone assessment measure of parenting, or as a supplement to the Attachment style Interview (ASI) to help understand further the potential implications of their partner relationship and attachment style for the nature of the parenting they may provide for their children. For those trained on the Attachment Style Interview it provides a crucial additional section to harmonise with attachment ratings.

PRI training is suitable for social workers and psychologists involved in child safeguarding services. Whilst this is not a forensic investigative assessment of child maltreatment, it gives a highly informative assessment of the parent's or carer's self-perception of their parenting role and provides a summary of competence in parenting role. It also includes a summary of difficulties with children and positive and negative interaction.

The one day Adolescent ASI (ASI-AD) workshop a supplement to the Attachment Style Interview and is currently available to those who have trained on the ASI. This will introduce the same measure but adapted for young people aged 14 or more. The ASI-AD assesses the young person’s support seeking behaviour and attitudes to relationships such as mistrust and fear of rejection to deduce the same overall styles as for adults. The support section covers parents and peers as well as other adults.

Please note that the training course originally scheduled for 6 October 2011 has now been cancelled. The next available Adolescent ASI course will take place on Tuesday 17 April 2012.

The CECA is a measure of childhood and adolescent experience of neglect and abuse, developed and used over a 20 year period. It original use was by researchers (e.g. the team at Lifespan) to investigate lifetime risk factors for psychological disorder. It has been used by a number of teams in the UK and internationally and is available in other languages ) It has 2 formats and training procedures:

As an interview it can establish retrospective accounts of childhood from young people and adults. It identifies etiological factors important in common mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety and encompasses both psychosocial risk and resilience factors. The CECA takes the form of a semi-structured interview, which aims to reflect objective features of early life experience with probing questions to ascertain details of context and time-sequence of experience. The CECA 2-day training is for psychologist, psychiatrists, psychotherapists and related professionals who need to assess childhood experience retrospectively in relation to practice. The method can also be used for summarising case material. Dates to be confirmed. For enquiries or to reserve a place contact lifespantraining@kingston.ac.uk

There is increasing need for standardised means of assessing abuse in families to help with Safeguarding services. This is particularly highlighted by the new Public Law Outline (PLO) which requires reduction in delays for applications for care or supervisions from ‘application to disposal’. Tools that can aid with assessing and analysing the range and severity of abuse or negative parenting experiences can therefore aid best practice in the interest of children and families. Such tools are also useful in the Integrated Children’s System to summarise or quantify characteristics of abuse for the Core Assessment. The CECA rating scales and definitions can be useful for such purposes as well as for aiding assessment in Parenting Support programmes.

CECA scoring and benchmarked rating system can be used in practice contexts to systematise case record material, and inform categorisation of information collected from varied sources (child, family, witnesses etc). The scales are scored according to a set of definitions, rating rules and precedent ‘benchmark’ examples. The training here is modularised into one day training courses. Each day will provide training in the reliable use of the topics covered.

The workshops will outline definitions, recent research, assessment of severity threshold and discuss practice implications and report writing.

CECA measure has recently been successfully introduced to the Safeguarding and ‘Looked After’ Services to help social workers in their assessments of children and families at risk. Workers received training in rating CECA experience in neglect, role reversal, physical, psychological abuse and related experience. CECA can then be used to inform ongoing cases in Child Protection, Child in Need and Looked After Services, enhancing the assessments of complex cases by providing benchmarked severity ratings and clarity of definitions. This can help the social workers and courts to decide on, or confirm, care planning.

The ‘Childhood Experience of Care and Abuse Interview’ for Child Safeguarding practitioners: An evaluation in RB Kingston Safeguarding Services
Professor Antonia Bifulco & Catherine Jacobs, 2010
Read project executive summary report (full report available on request)

A brief self-report version has been validated against the interview. This assesses loss of parents, neglect, antipathy from main carers and physical and sexual abuse. Support in childhood is also included. The measure shows acceptable sensitivity and specificity against the interview measure, and published cut-off scores are available. The CECA.Q has been translated into a number of languages (eg Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese) and has been used in Europe, USA, Canada, South America and the Far East. The measure is significantly associated with both the Parental Bonding Instrument and the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire3, but has wider coverage of maltreatment, shows a dose-response effect in relation to lifetime clinical depression and has improved improved prediction of disorder.

CPD training on Child Internet Safety
for professionals working with children
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CATS Child Internet Abuse and Safety courses are short training course for professionals working within the child protection arena, including legal professionals, children's services, counsellors and therapists, police and the courts, aimed at enabling them to discover how the internet and mobile phone technology are used by online sex offenders and how to best identify young victims' vulnerabilities for preventative messages and actions. The courses explore issues around internet and mobile phone abuse from both offenders and victims' perspective and will equip participants with a clear understanding of how new technologies are used by children and young people, including their online risk taking behaviour, and how paedophiles use the internet to source, groom and target children. The courses also covered the newly emerging issue of peer-to-peer cyber-bullying.

Please note that in addition to generic one-day open-booking courses, we also offer courses and workshops that are tailor-made to specific requirements of organisation or agency. All courses and workshops are run by experts with long experience in the field of Child Protection and Internet Policing. For more information or to talk to us about arranging in-house training contact CATS@kingston.ac.uk