Gloriously Ordinary Sundays - 14th September 2025

So this is week two, stumbling along the stony path of unregulated versus regulated care and support. Last week, we established the legal right and the precedence in policy for nearly 30 years for us to use public money to organise our own support in ways that work for us. I might have been a tad defensive while exploring why we really shouldn’t be worried about the ability of personal assistants and micro enterprises to keep people safe.

This week I’ll maybe be a bit more on the offensive, because there are some things that I think seem to work significantly better when we are supported by personal assistants or micro providers. Things that need to happen, whether my support is regulated or unregulated, but for some reason, PAs and micros seem to get it right and do it so much better.

Just to remind you, over a 15-year period, I employed nearly 30 people. I also worked with two women who were self-employed micro providers. None had any background in social care, and these are the things that stood out about how they worked.

The standard of their recordkeeping. My teams and the micro providers I worked with were wonderfully curious about what was going on for my kids and for Mum, in getting to know who they were and what made them tick, and in sharing that learning. That meant we had notes that always kept a really helpful (and often critically important) record of what life was looking like - what was working and what was not working. I was always clear about the need for notes to be written in a human way (as per Test Two, using language you would use in your kitchen with your family or down the pub or café with your mates), so I would read things like,

‘When I was helping Margaret get washed this morning, she told me that she much prefers hard soap to the liquid shower gel. She hadn’t wanted to bother Tricia with this, but I’ll make sure she knows.’

‘I went with Margaret to the garden centre today, and she told me that her husband had helped set it up back in the late 1980s when Pauline and Bob Patterson were just starting out. I helped her tell this story to the woman on the checkout, who was thrilled and had known the Pattersons. She promised to circle back to Bob and Pauline’s kids, who (now in their 50s) are the Directors, that she had seen Margaret.’

‘I noticed that when I was helping Lucy cook this evening, she was able to measure things on the scales without any help – I didn’t know this, and I’d been doing it for her! Did everyone else?’

‘I was with Lucy when she was hurting herself this afternoon. She had been distressed for over 30 mins, and I could feel that I was getting a bit anxious myself as none of our usual things were working. I sat at the end of her bed and took a few deep breaths myself to help calm down, and after a couple of minutes, I noticed that Lucy was matching my long, slow breaths, and her crying was stopping.’

One of the toughest things when I work with care and support organisations, even the great ones, is to keep records human and useful and move beyond, ‘Staff supported Jane to have breakfast and assisted with personal care. No issues.’

A strong sense of Team. We always had weekly team meetings (no more than 40 minutes) where everybody was together in a room, and we took the time to reflect on the week past and what was going on. We followed a routine where everyone would share a highlight from the week - something that had made their heart sing, and then the team would decide how to spend the bulk of the meeting, typically either working together to get to grips with a knotty problem, or celebrating and building on something that was working well. This helped give such a strong sense of team and shared responsibility, and for more than 50% of the time, I wasn’t there at these meetings. They shared responsibility for keeping the meeting going, taking notes, and sharing information with me.

Their creativity. It never failed to astound me just how creative as a team my personal assistants could be. They genuinely embodied the ‘what would it take’ question that is my mantra, and I can honestly say that I can’t remember many occasions where anybody came to me with a problem that they hadn’t already figured out a solution for. They were also demons around Tests Four and Five, thinking about connections and purpose;

Katie connected Ciaran to Paul at the Foodbank so they could go walking together.

Carol’s partner helped Ciaran get his first paid job at Decathlon.

Mandy noticed the woman in the Tesco Express who always said hello to The Girl and introduced them, so they knew each other’s names, and we could move towards The Girl going into Tesco on her own.

Sickness rates were very low (apart from the time when Katie broke her ankle, and that pandemic malarky). We had a system whereby if you were not well, before calling me to let me know, you had to call someone else in the team and get cover sorted. You then had to call me and let me know that you were sick and who was covering. In 15 years of employing PAs this never failed to work, but the number of times the people actually called in sick was rare. There was something about people looking out for each other, and really importantly, feeling a sense of responsibility directly to us as a family. They knew the impact of someone not showing up on my life, and on the lives of my mum and the kids.

Staff turnover. I’ve always been very sanguine about people moving on. I love employing young people who want to have a go at being a personal assistant for a few years while they find their feet in life. I also enjoy employing older people who want to end their careers doing something a little bit different. In the middle, there are people who come and stay and people who pass on through. One of the tasks I set people (I used to tell people it was in their contract, but they knew that I couldn’t enforce it!) was that when they knew they wanted to leave, move on, and do something different, they had to find me somebody to take their place. Someone they know, a friend of a friend, someone who comes with a good reference, someone who I think will be a really good fit. Again, this worked really well, and I had a low turnover of people. I can’t remember anyone staying less than 2 years.

Gloriously ordinary lives. The key thing I got from employing personal assistants was people who really did get what their job was all about. That their role was supporting the kids and my mum to live their Gloriously Ordinary Lives. They got it in their heart and in their soul.

My mum at 92, needing lots of support and encouragement to leave the house or even to get out of bed, significant medical stuff going on (thank you district nurses and MacMillan nurses), and significant memory loss for the last year of her life.

Ciaran planning to get his own place, to find work, to figure out how the world works, and find his place in it.

The Girl desperately unhappy when school finished when she was 19, living with the effects and impacts of childhood trauma, regularly hurting herself and needing physical support around this.

All three of them wouldn’t have been described as,

Complex

Vulnerable

Challenging

High support needs

Yada yada yada

…AND personal assistants and micro providers were a bloody fantastic fit.

I think all this points me to a question that I love to ask,

‘Are we solving the right problem?’.

In all this angst about whether to regulate or not to regulate, is the real question not this:

What is getting in the way of everyone getting the most amazing support to live their Gloriously Ordinary Lives?

My experience is that the things that regulated organisations (and I include the great ones who I know and love) find the hardest to get right are record-keeping, sickness, recruiting and keeping people…alongside that creative spark that means support is about wonderfully diverse humans, about friends and purpose (to quote Maff Potts).

My experience is that care and support organisations can get distracted by doing things right rather than doing the right thing (for regulatory purposes). This is often based on misconstrued notions of what it means to be ‘professional’ (see Bryony Shannon’s fab blog about this).

So maybe the answer is to look at what regulated organisations can learn from the world of personal assistants and micro enterprises so that good people don’t get caught up in processes that actually get in the way of people’s lives being gloriously ordinary?

PS. Did you see? The Gloriously Ordinary Sundays Podcast episode 13 is here. I I chat with Beverley Samways from Unique Connections.

I recently came across the work of Unique Connections online, when exploring how I could help and support The Girl to live a gloriously ordinary life. Beverley and I talk all about the importance and power of seeing the emotional person behind the behaviour, and how being truly present with someone can replace self-injury with connection and words.

* Trigger warning - we talk about self harm *