TRAINING COURSE

Hastings & Rother Mediation Service run their own externally accredited training course for volunteer mediators.

• Venue - It is held locally at a convenient location.
• Duration - one full day per week over 4 weeks.

Main Topics

• Aggression
• Blocks to communication
• Building rapport
• Co-mediating
• Confidentiality
• Control/balancing power
• Cultural awareness
• Defusing strategies
• Developing listening skills
• Disputes and disputants
• Emotional reactions
• Empathy feelings
• Exploring conflict
• Exploring the issues
• Face to face mediation
• Facts/feelings/issues
• Generating/assessing options
• Good practice guidelines
• Hooks and triggers
• Mediation UK practice standards
• Positions and interests
• Practical process of mediation
• Prejudices
• Questioning techniques
• Shuttle mediation
• Skills and qualities of a mediator
• Stereotyping
• Understanding own biases
• Visits to clients
• Voices from the past
• When is mediation appropriate

The training course encourages participation, indeed the more you put into it the more you get out of it. There is plenty of group work, discussions and some role-play. Participants are also expected to complete some written work. If the course is completed successfully, a certificate from Mediation UK is awarded.

OTHER TRAINING

Mediation is now widely recognised in many organisations as a way to help resolve conflict, whether the conflict is within your workforce or in the work that you do. Hastings & Rother Mediation Service can tailor-make a training programme to suit your needs. If you would like further information please contact Sandra Dean, our training co-ordinator or Nicola Hawkins, Manager.

RESOURCES - Publications

Producing a Succesful Evidence File

We have produced a comprehensive guide to the compilation of a portfolio to demonstrate mediator competence. This is based on the experience of a number of members of the service who have been accredited by this means and is published with the encouragement of a number of those responsible for assessment. The requirements of the Assessment Pack have been distilled into a series of pages which make it possible for you to show your evidence; each page has a space to indicate where to look for it, together with a cross-referencing system and the initials of those doing the internal assessment.

Together with this there is an introductory section giving guidance to the formation of a portfolio. The final section of the booklet gives examples of how to write a Case Study with an example; it includes help in wilting up an assessment/observation of a round table meeting, guidance on Peer Assessment and other suggestions to help you to maximise the appearance and usefulness of your portfolio.

We believe that any service adopting this system will find that the Hastings method provides an efficient short-cut to the preparation and assembly of the necessary material. The publication was successfully launched at the recent Mediation UK conference, with a number of services purchasing the manual with a view to using it within their own service. The copyright for the scheme is owned by the Hastings and Rother Mediation Service. Purchase of the manual includes permission for the material to be photocopied for as many mediators as necessary within that service. The one-off payment for this facility is £99.

For more information or to order this publication, please contact us via the contacts & links page.

The Quality Mark - A Practical Guide

(Although the Legal Services Commission has withdrawn this category of Quality Mark, services may find this useful to use for good practice.)

A MEDIATION SERVICE “OFF THE SHELF” (endorsed by Mediation UK)

The Hastings and Rother Mediation Service was the first in the country to obtain the Community Legal Service’s Community Mediation Quality Mark. Mindful of the amount of work involved in getting this qualification, we have produced a comprehensive guide to the necessary procedures. The Legal Services Commission has published the Quality Mark Standards for Mediation which is the authoritative guide. We have found that the standards set out need a good deal of unpacking and interpreting if they are to be made accessible to services wanting to move forward to the Quality Mark; our guide has that aim.

The Guide contains:-

• an introduction to each of the seven sections under which services are assessed
• the relevant sections of our service’s manual, covering the way in which the Quality Mark requirements are met
• hand-outs and documents given to volunteers in training and in practice
• forms devised for measuring and checking the various procedures necessary to maintain the standards
• a specimen constitution, a form for giving feedback on your fellow mediators, a specimen Health and Safety policy and much, much more; it is all there in the guide saving you months of work devising your own material

The guide will not only help other services working towards the Quality Mark but also, since it covers most or all of the procedures necessary to the setting up and running of a service, it will provide a step-by-step plan for a new service. The guide takes the pain out of the process of applying for the Quality Mark; it protects against the temptation to re-invent the wheel and saves many working hours developing documents and procedures which can easily be adapted from Hastings and Rother to other community mediation services.

The guide consists of 205 pages of material. The cost covers permission to photocopy all forms and documents contained in the manual which has been built up over the ten years of the Hastings and Rother Service’s existence and is priced at £485.00 per copy including packing and postage.

For more information or to order this publication, please contact us via the contacts & links page.