Working with the phase model in Coleg Elidyr, Wales 

By Bjarte Haugen

Coleg Elidyr is a Camphill Community and a residential college of further education for young people with special needs. It is situated in Wales, United Kingdom. As a college we have to comply with requirements that come from Ofsted and as a residential care home we need to meet the standards set by the new care act. Up until the early 90's we had been allowed to get on with what we were doing without much involvement from government agencies. That has changed dramatically.

Up until just a few years ago, most of the staff working in Coleg Elidyr were volunteers with few professional qualifications. I think our service was good, but it was not up to the professional expectations of our time.

Over the last few years we have embraced the professionalisation that had to be undertaken. Sometimes very reluctantly and at other times, gladly.

We now have mostly got employed staff, many of whom live in the community. In British Camphill places, that is fairly unusual.

We have been working with the phase model as a tool for understanding, embracing and directing change of our organisation/community since 1998.

Personally, having worked here since 1980, I had come to a realisation already in the early nineties that the way we were running and leading the community was not going to work into the future, and that something else needed to replace it. However, I was also very keen to make sure that we didn't loose the core values of this Camphill Community.

Working with the phase model helped us to understand the change that was taking place in the individuals who came to live and work here, and how we had to find new and different forms of organisation to meet their needs. It also helped us to better understand that we had to come towards their needs in order for them to come towards the needs of the organisation / community.

I think that without this work with the phase model, the changes that were taking place would have been seen by all simply as a massive threat to all that we stood for. Now, however, I think we have been able to embrace the change and use it positively to take the organisation / community forward into a place that has the possibility to meet the challenges that comes towards us from government legislation and continued expectations of achieving higher standards, while keeping our Camphill ideals. How those ideals express themselves in daily life has changed, and we have to become very creative to express our ideals in a modern framework and for people with a modern consciousness.

I admit that it has not been easy to work with the phase model. Sometimes we have had to turn our concepts inside-out, and this can be and has been frightening at times. You sometimes have to look at your most strongly held opinions and throw them out because they simply don't work.

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