RCC career standards – a workforce review, curriculum, and standards is where we start from

Whatever comes out of the residential workforce review it will need to recognise that a curriculum is where we start from, creative adaptation and implementation being essential. personal and professional capacities.

Constructing a curriculum as compliance to ‘know-what’ leads to vocational competence applying formulaic ‘evidence-led’ programmes, not to confident professional ‘know-how’ skills expertise creatively care planning where needs in context  direct attentiveness. It is up to us to adapt not the child in order to make a relationship where the child takes what it is we make.

This is an important statement as one reading of the Rapid Evidence Review is that it is making a foundation for the roll out of something like Teach First or Frontline.

This would be a disastrous diversion away from creativity to compliance. 

Teach First is designed to meet the curriculum of facts. It has its place but not for children with multiple, interacting, co-occurring needs where planning, caring and delivering is complex. Recent requests to NCERCC from social workers is for advice on meeting these interweaving needs as they are finding their managers, consultant advisers, even CAMHS, being inexperienced with such needs as current in RCC.

Teaching is introducing the human flourishing curriculum adding 5 additional  areas of study

1. Adaptive problem-solving
2. Ethics
3. Understanding the world
4. Aesthetic appreciation
5. Developing human agency or a sense of purpose. This is the work of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and based on the highest performing learning systems.

These things RCC is good at handling and they must be foregrounded in whatever is concluded in the review. Any curriculum in itself even when expertly delivered is not enough, its a platform but potential awaits.

For Donald Winnicott, compliance is the absolute opposite of creativity. In his seminal book Playing and Reality, he argued that creative living is what makes an individual feel that life is worth living, while a life built on compliance brings a profound sense of futility.

Winnicott intricately linked compliance, play, and creativity through the following core concepts:

1. Creativity is an Internal State, Not an Art Form

Winnicott did not define creativity as possessing artistic talent or painting a masterpiece. Instead, he saw creativity as a way of experiencing the world.

The RCC career standards are a place to start from creatively. Ofsted needs to be assessing creativity not compliance

• Creative Apperception: This is the ability to look at the world and feel that things are fresh, meaningful, and alive because you are projecting your own unique essence onto them.
• The Compliant Alternative: When a person is trapped in compliance, they experience the world through compliance apperception. They do not truly see or feel things for themselves; instead, they adapt to how they think they are supposed to perceive them. They become a mirror to others, mimicking life rather than living it.

2. Play as the Testing Ground for the True Self

Winnicott famously wrote that “it is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality.” Play is the bridge between a person’s inner reality and the external world.

The RCC profession needs to be enabled to ‘play with’ the new career standards to create them as meaningful to their task.

• The Freedom to Mess Up: Healthy play requires a safe space where there are no rigid rules, no right or wrong answers, and no pressure to please an authority figure. In this uninhibited state, the True Self can safely emerge.
• Why Compliance Kills Play: A compliant child or adult cannot truly play. Because they are hyper-focused on scanning the environment for expectations, their “play” becomes rigid, performative, or rule-obsessed. They are too afraid of making a mistake or displeasing someone to surrender to the spontaneous, messy chaos that genuine play requires.

3. The “Potential Space” and Transitional Phenomena

Winnicott introduced the idea of the potential space, an intermediate area of experiencing between the internal world (fantasies) and the external world (shared reality). It is the psychological zone where a child creates a “transitional object” (like a beloved teddy bear or blanket) that is both created by the child and found in the outside world. Transitional objects are not given to another they are created.

The RCC profession must be enabled to create its own transition object in relation to it task.

• Nurturing Creativity: In a healthy development, this potential space expands into adult culture, art, religion, and creative thinking. It thrives because the caregiver allowed the child the illusion that they created the object, accepting the child’s reality without forcing strict facts too soon.

• The Intrusion of Compliance: If a caregiver demands too early that the child face “objective reality” or conform to rigid rules, this potential space collapses. The child is forced out of their creative illusion and straight into compliance, separating their inner life from their outer behaviour.

4. Destruction, Survival, and Real Creativity

In one of his most profound and paradoxical theories (The Use of an Object), Winnicott stated that for an individual to use external objects creatively, they must first “destroy” them in their mind.

The RCC sector must test the career standards for them to be creative and authentic. It is only if they are tested out that they will be of use. The DfE must enable this testing out. (not the same as testing or consulting).

• The Test of Survival: A child will aggressively test, bite, or emotionally “destroy” their caregiver or play object. If the caregiver survives without retaliating, collapsing, or changing their behaviour, the child learns that the world is durable and exists outside of their omnipotent control. They can now relate to the world creatively and authentically.
• The Compliant Trap: If the caregiver reacts with anger, withdrawal, or fragile distress, the child panics. To protect the caregiver, the child suppresses their aggressive, spontaneous impulses and retreats into compliance. They become afraid to impact the world, rendering them unable to play or create freely because they fear their own impact is inherently destructive.

The road ahead for the career standards

Ultimately, Winnicott believed that therapy itself was a form of playing. If a patient was too compliant, the therapist’s primary job was not to interpret their behaviour, but to guide them into a state where they were capable of playing, because only through play could the compliant False Self dissolve, allowing the creative True Self to finally speak.

More on this understanding of the career standards to follow