Supervision helps to maintain high-quality peer support for vulnerable parents, and importantly, it supports and nurtures your volunteers. The richness of supervision comes from the knowledge, skills and experience of the supervisor and the volunteer, and the relationship they form.
Why is supervision important?
Supervision is crucial for enabling volunteers to provide safe and effective ongoing support for families, including maintaining quality and monitoring safeguarding issues. But it also allows ongoing learning and reflection, which helps volunteers to develop, grow and become more confident. In this way, we give back to volunteers, making it a reciprocal process.
Supervision is:
- Nominative: reinforcing ground rules, boundaries and responsibilities
- Formative: offering educational support for volunteers to gain confidence, knowledge and skills
- Restorative: supporting volunteers, exploring their feelings and celebrating their work.
What's the purpose of supervision?
Supervision is vital for maintaining a high-quality service. It:
- Provides volunteers with space to reflect on their work, air any issues and identify any additional support needed
- Allows peers to discuss and learn from each other’s volunteering experiences
- Explores different ways of approaching new and challenging situations
- Celebrates achievements and nurtures new goals
- Monitors effective delivery of peer support including safeguarding children and vulnerable adults
- Checks if volunteers are avoiding dependency or being tempted to jump in and fix issues
- Is an opportunity to reinforce relationship boundaries with families - maintaining a balance between having boundaries but not professionalising.
When planning your volunteer supervision strategy you will need to think about:
- How often?
- By who?
- What you will do if a volunteer doesn’t attend regular supervision.
A range of volunteer supervision documents and guidance about how to use them can be found in our Delivery Guide.
The Manual Guide: Volunteer Supervison has more information.
Manual Guide: Volunteer Supervision
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