The Latest Bulletin

An essential resource for practice educators and study supervisors. Helping others to learn is a skilled job. This practical guide offers extensive advice and guidance on how to get the best results, whether in student supervision or any other process of helping colleagues to learn. Available from here or from Amazon.

There is a general expectation that professionals should keep a record of their work. Such records can often be assigned a secondary role and dismissed as relatively unimportant – just the ‘paperwork’. Although this is understandable, we also have to bear in mind that record keeping is a form of professional communication – the absence of which can at times be potentially disastrous. What can easily happen is that a vicious circle can develop: record keeping is put off so that, by the time the professional concerned gets round to getting records up to date, there is an annoying and energy-sapping backlog. Dealing with a backlog of ‘boring records’ can demotivate us and make it even harder to keep up.…

Gender stereotypes strike early. From the age of six, children associate traits like ‘intelligence’ with being a boy and ‘niceness’ with being a girl. Gender stereotypes continue to damage children everywhere – and affect their whole life. Young men and boys who hold rigid beliefs about gender stereotypes are more likely to be perpetrators of violence against women and girls. We hear from girls who have low self-esteem and feel insecure, with one in five 14-year-old girls self-harming. This is heart-breaking and it cannot continue. Click here to read more

There is a moment in Martin Luther King’s historic ‘I have a dream’ speech when he turns his attention to the White people who, realising their destiny and that of their Black fellow citizens was intertwined, joined the movement for equal rights. “They have come to realise that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom,” he said. “We cannot walk alone.” Life is tough for many of us right now, and the future feels very uncertain. Looking after ourselves, our families and communities takes time and energy. There is so much to do. The challenges of the past year have exposed the deep inequalities between us, including in housing, income and access to healthcare. But the crisis has also shown how interconnected…

Before the pandemic, psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s patients might come into his consulting room, lie down on the couch and talk about the traffic or the weather, or the rude person on the tube. Now they appear on his computer screen and tell him about brain fog. They talk with urgency of feeling unable to concentrate in meetings, to read, to follow intricately plotted television programmes. “There’s this sense of debilitation, of losing ordinary facility with everyday life; a forgetfulness and a kind of deskilling,” says Cohen, author of the self-help book How to Live. What to Do. Although restrictions are now easing across the UK, with greater freedom to circulate and socialise, he says lockdown for many of us has…

Facebook page Facebook Social Work Focus group LinkedIn Twitter YouTube channel Neil’s Academy The humansolutions website

Have you joined the Neil Thompson Academy yet?. There you will find information about Neil’s books, e-learning provision and his other services. Membership is free and gives access to a growing number of free learning resources. Don’t miss out, sign up today at www.NeilThompson.info.

If you are skilful at engaging with people and winning their trust, convincing them that you are a helpful and reliable person there is a danger that they will come to rely on you more and more and bring more and more of their problems and concerns to you. This can easily lead to you being overloaded, stretching yourself too thinly and potentially getting yourself into difficulties. So, it is important to be clear about what we can help with and what we can’t – to ‘set out our stall’, as it were. If we lose sight of the boundaries of our role and become a general helper, it can be confusing all round. It can also prove stressful, as…