Just to put the record straight, find below the response I made at short notice to an approach from Shafik.
Where to start? I got your message a couple of hours ago. One problem is that the CAF cards site is basically a marketing exercise, touting for trade. It is full of generalisation and cliches, dressed up to suit today's climate. In this sense I could only give you a measured response if I went on one of the training days. Of course, this is not much use to you.
But I would ask the following of the 30 authorities involved. The CAF cards claim to be based on NLP 'principles', one of which is that people have built-in programmes that drive them. Evidently if you the NLP expert understand this, you can help young people understand themselves. Have managers and workers accepted this unsubstantiated assertion and, indeed, are they now also disciples of accelerated learning principles? My advice is that a lot of money is being wasted here on simplistic, flavour of the month banalities. I don't think authorities need to shell out money on materials, training and consultancy, which suggest that the question, 'what do you like about your family?' or the idea of road signs and route maps is mind-blowingly innovative and worthy of copyrighting! Treat with great caution people who suggest they can help young people reach 'desired states'. Honest Youth Work is an unpredictable, self-critical process with no guarantees about where it might lead.
For anybody, who is interested further I'm putting a written version on our site of a workshop I did at the Youth and Policy, 'Taking Youth Work Seriously' conference on 'The Unhappy Marriage Of Youth Work and Psychology', which looks critically at NLP's claims - probably in about 3 weeks.
Tony Taylor at http://www.critically-chatting.0catch.com
[ a former youth worker, who's never played cards, but still managed many a mutual, open, questioning conversation with young people, within which we both hopefully learnt from one another. Of course I also blew it sometimes!]