[Withdrawn] February 2020: Reducing Parental Conflict programme newsletter edition 7
Published 6 February 2020
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In this edition
Extending and improving Reducing Parental Conflict practitioner training
We are pleased to announce we have agreed a contract extension with our delivery partner Knowledgepool to offer practitioner training for a further 12 months.
Challenge Fund digital initiatives
Good Things Foundation and One Plus One have partnered to produce 4 short #SeeItDifferently videos to help parents manage conflict. Action for Children have just launched a free digital parental relationship service, Space For Us Too, to intervene in the early stages of conflict and help strengthen relationships.
Building early help practitioners’ capacity in Hartlepool
How local partnership building in Hartlepool is increasing early help practitioners’ capacity to attend to the quality of parental relationships.
Family assessment intervention in Bristol
How tools in the practitioner training helped increase a senior practitioner’s confidence to start parental relationship conversations with families and how this supported one family in particular.
Hounslow share their Train the Trainer experience
How Hounslow secured early buy-in across a wide range of organisations for their partnership’s Train the Trainer course.
Newsletter review
Help us assess what value the newsletter is adding to you and your work.
Editor’s welcome
In this edition of the RPC newsletter it’s great to see the Challenge Fund digital initiatives have launched live testing materials and to share local experiences about partnership building and practitioner training.
As always, we are keen to hear what everyone is up to, what’s working, what’s not and really importantly, why. Please do share your experiences, learning and best practice with us. We are especially interested in your good news stories where interventions or initiatives have made a positive difference to parents’ and families’ lives. If you’d like to submit an article for inclusion in this newsletter, please let us know. You can contact us at rpc.programme@dwp.gov.uk.
Extending and improving Reducing Parental Conflict practitioner training
We know many of you will be eager to understand what happens at the end of the March 2020 for practitioner training.
We are pleased to announce we have agreed a contract extension with our delivery partner Knowledgepool to offer practitioner training for a further 12 months. The extended contract will run from 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2021.
We will write out to you in the next few weeks to explain more and clarify the next steps.
Challenge Fund digital initiatives
We’re pleased to announce that 2 RPC Challenge Fund digital projects have now launched live testing materials aimed at helping parents to reduce conflict. Both projects worked with disadvantaged parents to co-design and test their products, in order to maximise reach and impact with their target audience. Both products are free for anyone to access and links to the resources are provided below. They will now undertake further testing and evaluation of the live products. Projects would welcome your feedback on these products, to help understand what works well, how they may be developed further and to gather any ideas you have on how they might be used.
Social change charity Good Things Foundation, have partnered with relationship experts One Plus One to produce 4 short videos to help parents manage conflict. The #SeeItDifferently videos show new ways of managing everyday conflict to produce more positive outcomes for everyone in the family.
Discover the sharing guide where you can find the videos and learn more about supporting the #SeeItDifferently campaign.
Action for Children have just launched a free digital service, Space For Us Too, to intervene in the early stages of conflict before it escalates. Space For Us Too prompts couples to reflect on their relationship (especially after they’ve become parents), decide on what they would like to change or restore and then put that into place. The service texts parents tips/advice on how to handle and take care of their relationship in a format that helps them to make gradual steps towards strengthening their relationship and build positive habits for their lifestyles.
Visit Action For Children’s new free digital parental relationship service.
Building early help practitioners’ capacity in Hartlepool
The Early Intervention Foundation have published an interesting and helpful case study about the ambition of local partnerships in Hartlepool to change the early help culture so that addressing parental conflict was seen as a routine part of the job.
Family assessment intervention in Bristol
A senior practitioner from Bristol, in the South West region, shares her experience of how practitioner training has increased her confidence to start routinely having conversations with families about the parental relationship and how this supported one family in particular to start making some small but meaningful changes.
As a senior parenting practitioner with 25 years’ experience of working with families, I wanted to write a short piece about the impact completing the RPC practitioner training has had on my practice, and subsequently on the families I support.
I completed one-day classroom based training for modules 2 and 3 of the RPC training. Prior to completing the training, I had already been interested in the potential of incorporating more of a focus on the parental relationship with the families I support, having attended the Early Intervention Foundation conference and having contributed to Bristol’s parental conflict needs analysis and planning tool event.
Despite my growing interest in the area I had some reservations about whether the training would simply increase my awareness of the impact of parental conflict without giving me new skills to support families. Thankfully, I found the tools included in module 3 gave me real confidence to start routinely having conversations with families I support about the parental relationship, and to work through exercises with them to both increase their awareness and to support them to start making some small but meaningful changes.
One such family were referred to our Early Help Team due to the eldest son James (7) displaying complex behaviour and threatening to self-harm and to kill himself. The referral focused exclusively on James but as work with the family progressed and attention was given to the parental relationship, it emerged that the couple were experiencing on-going relationship difficulties. The primary source of conflict was identified as being their differing parenting styles and a tendency of both to be critical and negative about the other’s approach.
The couple were referred to an Incredible Years intervention and were supported to reflect on their differing parenting styles and consider the impact of this on their children, particularly James. They were also supported to improve their listening skills, to move away from blaming language and to use ‘I’ messaging to more effectively communicate.
After the intervention, improvements in James’s emotional well-being were evidenced by an improved SDQ score. Both parents reported they felt more able to stay calm and discuss things without resorting to shouting and blaming and felt more united in their parenting.
Hounslow share their Train the Trainer experience
A Families First Co-ordinator from Hounslow in London shares her experience of how she secured early buy-in across a wide range of organisations for their partnership’s Train the Trainer course.
As an authority that has completed one Train the Trainer (TTT) course I was invited by the London Regional Team to share our experience. Soon after the RPC programme was launched I ran a multi-agency workshop and extended the invite to a wide range of agencies across the partnership including employment services, early years, schools, domestic violence commissioner, children’s centres, family support, youth offending service, adult substance misuse services, senior commissioner for health and police. Our intention was to have a wide reach across the partnership and the aim of the workshop was to set the scene and secure early buy-in from the partnership and secure delegates for the Train the Trainer session.
I had a broad reach of attendees on the course from the agencies listed above and this allowed for some constructive exchanges during the training. Prior to the course I had several email exchanges with the trainer and telephone conversations. I obtained her biography and shared that with the participants. I also provided her with a summary context of my borough in relation to population, children receiving services etc. and I provided her with the background of each of the participants.
Almost all participants completed the online training prior to the course and this, although repetitive in parts due to the blended training approach between the modules, provides a good introduction to the subject matter.
In keeping with all training opportunities there is no doubt the quality of the trainer is a significant contributor as to how well the training is received, coupled with willing and receptive participants. The trainer, in consultation with the group made helpful suggestions about the best use of the 2 days, repetition was removed and it was suggested to us that module 4 was not taught as supervision templates and processes are already embedded in our local authority. We did not feel short changed at this suggestion, rather we used the time to agree as a group what slides/materials we would use if we were delivering the training for example to a module 2 and 3 training day.
Everybody who attended agreed the course was very good and there was recognition that the tools and subject matter can be used in a variety of ways, for example doing direct intervention work with young people linked to constructive and destructive conversation. The police officer who attended said it was the ‘best training they had done in 13 years’ police service.’
Having completed the TTT I have come to the view that there is some good learning and challenge in the classroom based learning that cannot be replicated through the online training alone. I will be setting up a practice forum for this first cohort of TTT and in the initial stages we will deliver in pairs until we are more familiar with the materials.
Newsletter review
February is the 7th edition of the RPC newsletter and it’s a year since the launch. So it feels that the time is right to assess the value the newsletter is adding to you and your work so we can continue to include information that’s useful and of interest to you. We’ll be doing the review by having a telephone call with some of you that will take no more than 30 minutes. If you would like to volunteer to take part please contact us at rpc.programme@dwp.gov.uk.
Thank you in advance.