"At the heart of what needs to change is a new attitude to the importance of parents and parenting, particularly in the period before birth and the very early years of life. Parents themselves must understand the importance of that role for their children’s well-being and development." Early Years Framework |
Information on this element of the Framework highlights issues in supporting and encouraging ‘hard-to-reach’ parents and families. Tackling the issues involves working with parents, carer grandparents, and other kinship carers who are experiencing difficulties in the home or community and in engaging with services.
Positive examples of support exist and can be replicated in other areas using practical approaches with families, parents and their children. At an early stage, health visitors are able to establish links with families in their own home and, through this, to identify priority areas to support. This may involve, for example, nursery staff helping the parent and child to access care and education. This joint approach provides families with the opportunity to establish relationships with key workers in their own surroundings where they feel most comfortable.
It also enables the visiting agencies to see family/child relationships within the home. Support services need to work together in innovative ways to engage ‘hard to reach’ families and source necessary funding to deliver appropriate services.
Parents’ services initiatives in health promotion, speech therapy and parenting skills are being introduced in many councils. Parents are offered and provided with a range of materials, ideas and parenting workshops to encourage early involvement in support services and help them to support their children’s learning at home. Early years/family centres can also offer a non-threatening location for parents to access services from other agencies such as police, health visitors, dieticians, and oral hygienists.
Positive relationships and trust between pre-school staff and parents have proved beneficial in working with individual families on strategies to support play and deal with children’s challenging behaviour.
Staff have been able to help families and carers in using the strategies by visiting at home, discussing, modelling playing with their children and providing encouragement. Parents and families become more confident in dealing with their responsibilities for child care and more aware of child development. Parents have a better understanding of the role of different agencies and are less anxious when interacting with a range of professionals.
Continuing the involvement and support can be difficult to sustain as children and families move through the ‘system’. Joined-up practice between early years provisions and schools is not consistent and the good practice started in pre-school may not be in place to maintain the benefits of support into the school years. Sustainable funding is also an issue for employing family support workers in early years centres and in nursery classes. Private and voluntary providers find it more difficult to organise their own family link worker, or access council family support workers.
Quote from member of staff in centre "Families experience difficulty in engaging with multiple agencies for the same issue. They have to ‘tell the same story’ to a number of agencies such as housing, benefits, social work. This causes frustration and can lead to disengagement. It increases the workload of staff as they are often the link between the agencies." |
To be successful, such approaches have to be flexible to meet the needs of individuals and families as they change over time. Ongoing training in multi-agency approaches, in line with GIRFEC, is essential for all agency workers if they are to provide:
Points for reflection
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Whitdale Family Centre CASE STUDY 5 |
Whitdale Family Centre is in an area of deprivation. It caters for children birth to five years and also offers an out-of-school care service for children up to eight years of age. Over a period of time, there had been a significant number of families with social problems. The experienced headteacher had built up strong partnership working with a range of other professionals and services.
The headteacher realised that many families with very young children would benefit from support to ensure that they had the best possible start in life, including help to take full advantage of opportunities such as pre-school education.
She also recognised the importance of joint working between education, social work, health and relevant voluntary organisations. She wanted to ensure that the specific needs of families with children aged birth to three were met within a more cohesive service for all parents and children. A further target was to improve the health, wellbeing, development and education opportunities of children and families by creating a flexible, needs-led service accessible to all families and adopting a multi-agency approach in the community. The centre wanted to ensure high quality education experiences for young children and also to improve their life chances and achieve social inclusion.
The range of services in the centre was planned to meet, in a single location, the needs of the targeted and vulnerable as well as the universal population. Parents and families were identified in a variety of ways, including by professionals in consultation with parents, health visitors or midwives, and by parents self-referring. Through advertising, all parents in and outside the catchment area were made aware of groups on offer within and beyond the centre. Partnership working provided the opportunity to plan and implement a wide range of activities at all levels which led to effective outcomes for all parents and families. Importantly, a multi-agency steering group, comprising the headteacher, social policy managers, health staff and senior managers from education, monitored progress towards effective joint working to ensure the building of parenting and family capacity.
Impact on parents and families Delivering care services and family support (targeted at the under threes) in the same building as pre-school provision for three and four years olds blurred the distinction between targeted and universal provision and helped to remove any perceived stigma from using services. This resulted in improved parental confidence and self-esteem leading to parents feeling more empowered. Parents became less anxious about interacting with professionals and saw them as there to help. The centre is able to ‘signpost’ parents to any other service they might require to support their child.
Mellow
Parenting CASE STUDY 6 |
One of the key priorities of the Integrated Children’s Services Project in Inverclyde was the development of integrated family support services. Initial discussions between services highlighted the need for an expanded range of parenting programmes for highly vulnerable families. After examining several options, Mellow Parenting was chosen as an appropriately intensive programme. Social services commissioned the delivery of Mellow Parenting training, resulting in a pool of 24 facilitators from psychological services, health visiting, the voluntary sector and family support workers from early years and social work services. Three intensive 12 to 14 week programmes were developed; Mellow Babies, Mellow Mothers and Mellow Fathers. Each group involved three cross-agency facilitators.
Impact on parents and families All parents taking part in the programme were very positive about its benefits. They said that it had helped them understand the influence of their own childhood experiences and significantly improved their parenting abilities. They felt calmer. In turn, their children were calmer. Parents were confident they had a wider range of strategies to manage their children’s behaviour and could interact with their children in a more positive way. In particular, fathers were helped to realise the contribution they could make and gained new confidence and skills to build positive relationships with their children. Parents spoke highly of the supportive and positive relationships they had built with staff in the groups.