Sanctions & Rewards

reducing evictions and abandonment session guide – good practice: positive reinforcement and supportive sanctions

March 2012

CONTENTS
ABOUT THIS GUIDE ...................................................................................................................... 2 Purpose of the guide ................................................................................................................... 2 Development process .................................................................................................................. 2 Learning from good practice ........................................................................................................ 2 Using the guide ........................................................................................................................... 2 Further information ...................................................................................................................... 2 BEFORE THE SESSION ................................................................................................................ 3 SESSION – GOOD PRACTICE: POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT & SUPPORTIVE SANCTIONS ... 4

ABOUT THIS GUIDE
PURPOSE OF THE GUIDE This session guide is part of a larger guide that has been developed to enable managers of supported accommodation projects to reduce evictions and abandonment through learning from good practice across England. The full guide can be used if you want to do any of the following: Identify ideas for reducing your unplanned moves. Introduce a more effective and supportive approach to problematic behaviour such as nonengagement, non-payment of rent, and aggression. Review your current warnings policy and procedure. Involve your whole staff team in finding creative solutions to keep people in. DEVELOPMENT PROCESS This guide has been developed by Homeless Link’s Innovation and Good Practice Team as part of a project delivered between 2009 and 2011 to reduce evictions and abandonment from supported accommodation across England, funded by the Oak Foundation. This involved researching the problems faced by services and what worked, testing solutions and monitoring the results with a variety of services and in numerous areas, and sharing the learning as widely as possible. The sessions that form the guide have been trialled with managers and frontline staff to ensure they are useful in identifying actions for their own services. LEARNING FROM GOOD PRACTICE It is very helpful to consider good practice when deciding how to reduce evictions and abandonment at your own service. Considering existing good practice does not mean that your own practice is poor, but that you can get ideas from things others have tried in order to make your own work even better. It is also important to remember that good practice can rarely be taken as a whole and incorporated into a different service – you have to think about how it could work for your unique service, building on the ideas you have been given. USING THE GUIDE This session guide is one of a series of sessions looking at good practice in different aspects of reducing evictions and abandonment and enabling a discussion with your teams on what could work for you. It is important to involve your teams in doing this so that they have ownership of any new ideas, are able to share any concerns and fears that you will need to be aware of, and contribute their expertise to the new approach. It is also good practice to discuss new ideas with clients so that they are able to feed in their own ideas. The session is focussed around one of the key areas that contribute to or are part of preventing evictions and abandonment. The guide includes the following: guidance on how to run the session a good practice hand-out for participants a PowerPoint presentation – this includes notes pages to explain the points. FURTHER INFORMATION To access the full guide, or for additional information and resources on how others have successfully reduced their evictions and abandonment, and how you can do this at your own service, visit our website at: http://homeless.org.uk/evictions-project.

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BEFORE THE SESSION
It is important to prepare for how you will run the session. These notes are to help you ensure you are fully prepared. 1. Ensure you have the time and resources you will need 2. Prepare your presentation slides Decide how you will use the presentation – you can display it on a screen or simply use printed out for your own reference Print out the notes pages of the presentation to help you elaborate on the points. 3. Remember that the sessions are designed to generate staff discussion on what could work for you – it is not up to you to have all the ideas.

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SESSION – GOOD PRACTICE: POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT & SUPPORTIVE SANCTIONS
Objectives To discuss that effective changes can only be made by changing the power balance between staff and clients, and supporting clients at all stages To identify where there are gaps in support To consider where there are opportunities to reward positive behaviour. Time 30 minutes Resources needed Presentation slides Laptop and projector (if delivering formally) Flipchart and pens Action plan template Hand-out: Good practice: positive reinforcement and supportive sanctions. Exercise Good practice in positive reinforcement and supportive sanctions 1. Load presentation slide 3 Talk through the good practice in positive reinforcement and supportive sanctions (slides 3 & 4 - use notes pages in presentation to elaborate on the content of the slides.) Identifying changes needed to language and practice 2. Load presentation slide 5 In pairs or small groups, ask delegates to brainstorm ideas to try such as changes in language, possible rewards. Feed back to group and write these on a flipchart. Finishing the session 3. Run through all the ideas discussed and add to your action plan 4. Complete the session by giving a delegates a copy of Good practice: positive reinforcement and supportive sanctions.

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NO ONE SHOULD RETURN TO THE GOOD PRACTICE: POSITIVE STREETS REINFORCEMENT & SUPPORTIVE SANCTIONS
Why is positive reinforcement important?
The key underlying principle of making sanctions effective tools to change behaviour is ensuring they are balanced with support. A key worker is there to support change, not punish, and this requires changing the power balance from the key worker ‘telling off’ the client, to client and key worker addressing issues together. But in reality, the language used and practice within accommodation services can make this difficult. Sometimes subtle changes can make a big difference to the approach.

Practical steps

Refer to ‘move-on’, not eviction

Have a Support Intervention Process rather than Warnings Procedure
This reminds staff and emphasises to clients that policies and procedures aimed at responding to behaviour are there to support the client at every stage, even where sanctions are necessary.

This simple language change, while not removing the option of ‘emergency move-on’, leads to staff always thinking about move-on options, even in immediate situations.

Reward positive behaviour

Scrap rules and use expectations, or rights and responsibilities

Rules immediately create conflict. By talking about expectations that all residents and staff can have about the service, the implication is on how clients benefit as well as the responsibilities they have. This also enables a more constructive conversation when incidents occur, as it can be about how it is affecting the service, as opposed to ‘you broke a rule’.

Develop a customer charter

In addition to the above, a customer charter helps staff and clients to recognise they are customers of a service rather than passive recipients. It can also be a useful means of increasing client involvement and hearing what clients would like from the service.

Wherever possible, establish systems that reward positive behaviour, rather than sanction negative. Rewards that have been used successfully include the following: • Credit schemes – these are where clients receive credits or points for positive activities such as attending key work or being involved in meaningful activity, that add up and can be used either for one-off rewards such as trips, or larger opportunities such as move-on. • Extra choice – when clients engage well, they can be rewarded with additional choices such as over when and where their key-work sessions will take place. • Additional privileges – this is about allowing certain things for everyone who has positive behaviour, such as visitors for anyone who has not had a warning in the past month, and room moves (where available) for clients not in arrears.

Don’t say no

Trial periods of staff not saying no to residents forces them to consider the reasons why clients are not able to do certain things, and ensures they can explain these reasons fully to clients.

Force yourself to reflect on positives

At team meetings, always end by discussing positives for clients. This ensures that good behaviour is not lost through always responding to poor behaviour.

This sheet is designed as a basic introduction to good practice in the topic area, based on a three-year project undertaken by Homeless Link’s Innovation and Good Practice Team. For further information and rationale behind its content, along with templates to support the good practice identified, and other tools and resources please visit http://homeless.org.uk/evictions-project.

Change the language I use with clients.

REDUCING EVICTIONS AND ABANDONMENT ACTION PLAN
Service: Date:

Aim

Action

Date due

Lead

Other people needed

Progress

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