On July 3rd almost 200 of us met for an online ISN conference.  It had been planned online from the beginning because it is a widely spread network, still emergent and small so this seemed the best way of going forward.  As it happened it turned out to be the only way. 

We had some excellent speakers, Keemar Keemar who looked at how we relate to supervision through our autobiographies and Juliet Grayson and William Ayot presented on their work with perpetrators – Compassion for Perpetrators.  William is also a poet and he wrote two poems for the conference.  We will post them later.

In the afternoon was peer group supervision. We continued with the peer
supervision groups that had met in the morning and from this several peer
groups began to form.

Purpose ISN (Interdependent Supervisors Network) is a peer network for supervision. It is for anyone involved in and with supervision; a space where one can have a place to reflect on oneself and one’s work whatever the work and whomever the person.

Joining is either as a co supervising dyad or as a peer group and involves filling
in a form on the website and posting it to
(www.independentsupervisorsnetwork.com).

History and Roots The idea of a body for supervision, supervisors and
supervisees has been around for a few years and about five years ago Robin
Shohet and Joan Wilmot of CSTDLondon began making it part of their annual
conference. About two years ago Joan set up the website. A blog page was
added later and also a page for people looking to join either a dyad or a group or
a group looking for new members.

This year John Wilson and Fabienne Chazeaux of onlinevents https://www.onlinevents.co.uk/ have set up a forum for this https://onlinevents.mn.co/groups/2431324/feed
As Robin said at the conference the roots of ISN go back to the early nineties
when he was consultant to the Norwich collective, a peer support group of
psychotherapists. They were discussing the new regulations coming in i.e.
accreditation and insurance. Robin suggested running two conferences on the
dynamics of accreditation and one of the initiatives that arose from that was the
Independent Practitioners Network http://ipnetwork.org.uk. Robin talked about
a peer group or dyad linking up with two other groups or dyads in ways similar to how it is described on the IPN website. We have begun to do that and four members of ISN Steve Page, Jim Holloway, Monica Suswin and Veronica Philips described their experiences of their co-supervision and meeting up with other dyads.

Next steps What emerged from the plenary session was to have more meetings
and so we are having a drop-in supervision session on July 14 th from 6 – 8 pm.
The purpose is two-fold. For people to meet other supervisors, and for groups
already formed to practice in their groups.

The next gathering was also proposed, in October.

Funding Joan Wilmot funded the building of the website and so far we have
covered the costs with the income from the conferences/gatherings so currently
there is no fee for membership.