Children and Young People Committee

Inquiry into Parenting Action Plan

Response From Carmarthenshire Family and Community Team on behalf of Carmarthenshire Parenting Strategy and Children and Young People’s Partnership.

The Parenting Team is located within the Carmarthenshire Family and Community Team which is a partnership between NCH Cymru and Carmarthenshire County Council.

The team is responsible for co-ordinating and delivering parenting education and support across the County of Carmarthenshire, organising the Parenting Strategy group, attending the Steering group of Fforwm Magu Plant, identifying and delivering training to a range of professionals.

Delivery of the Parenting Action Plan

The Parenting Action Plan has helped to raise the profile of parenting education and support. The Cymorth fund has allowed a range of providers to develop innovative services to meet the needs of parents/carers and now the Flying Start programme is recognising the need to support parents via parenting programmes as an early intervention tool.

Support to parents in Carmarthenshire has undoubtedly increased as staff have been trained to deliver a selection of parenting courses aimed at addressing a variety of needs. The support is available to all parents via numerous referral routes or self-referral. However support cannot be accessed by all parents at anyone time because of limited resources, location, access, childcare etc.

Is support getting through to parents who need it the most? Some services are targeted and some universal. Some parents 'who need it the most’ are the least motivated to take up a service and staff may need to engage in esteem building prior to their attendance on a course. Health visitors are key professionals in signposting parents / carers for parenting support.

Positive parenting is promoted via Carmarthenshire’s network of Family Centres, Surestart projects, Early Years childcare providers, the Inclusion Strategy and Behaviour Support plan. A rolling programme of multi agency training ensures that the positive parenting ethos is disseminated to a wide range of practitioners.

Barriers experienced by parents in accessing support? We are always working to capacity and have a waiting list for groups and 1 to 1 support so parents do not always get support as quickly as they’d like. We aim to take groups out to more rural areas of the County but have to do this on a timetabled basis. Families living in peripheral areas of the County do not have equal access to services.

Examples of innovative practice in ensuring that services and information is accessible:

In Carmarthenshire we have highly skilled and trained dedicated parenting practitioners who are able to deliver a range of parenting programmes. These include Handling Children’s Behaviour, Stepping Stones, Living with Teenagers, Parenting Wisely, The Solihull Approach Parenting Programme and The Incredible Years
The Handling Children’s behaviour and Living with Teenagers courses have been accredited by the Open College Network and parents completing the course can receive level1, 3 credits. This is a great motivator to keep parents on board with the programme and our certificate presentation events are so empowering for people who may have never achieved a formal qualification.
We deliver training locally. Lesley hill and Sue Marsden train 40 plus people annually to deliver the Stepping Stones Behaviour management programme - this has proved to be a highly cost effective means of rolling out the positive parenting ethos and skilling up staff. All health visitors and school health nurses have accessed this training alongside a wealth of people from the voluntary sector.
The NCH Cymru FACT parenting team has a dedicated Dads worker who runs Dads groups, co-facilitates parenting groups and does individual work with fathers. The team also has a dedicated worker to take parenting to rural areas of Carmarthenshire and to offer a service through the medium of Welsh. We have had our resources translated into Welsh and a number of families have now benefited from this service.
The NCH Cymru FACT team has a mobile family centre which is funded through the Cymorth scheme which offers an open access service to families with young children in areas of the County with few other services. The bus is also able to act as a crèche for parenting programmes when a crèche room is not available.
The surestart health development team runs the Stepping stones parenting programme and offers one to one support via its trained Behaviour support staff and has a group of trained volunteers who are mentors to families with young children. This is a very valuable and non-stigmatising service.
Carmarthenshire Flying Start programme is working in 8 areas of the County. The team have appointed 2 parenting officers who are implementing the Incredible Years programme in these areas
NCH Cymru commissioned a DVD of the work of the FACT team which showcases its parenting work and is now used as a tool to engage families in the service.
The NCH FACT Team runs a project called Living and Learning Together that takes parenting into 3 secondary schools in Llanelli. Staff run a parenting course for parents and a parallel course for the young people. Evaluations show improved relationships between parents and children and school.
Services developed and delivered by voluntary organisations are used by statutory services (social work teams, fostering, Youth Offending Service, CAMHS) as clients / hard to reach families are more willing to engage.
Recognition of the value of early intervention - staff in Carmarthenshire were trained in The Solihull Approach and now cascade this training to larger groups of health and social care staff.

Continued work on parenting

Issues that still need to be addressed -
More resources targeted pre-natally, promoting positive early attachments and understanding of baby brain development.
Targeted resources for parents of children with a diagnosis of ADHD, providing an alternative / compliment to the medical model
More resources for parents of teenagers
Strengthening social networks to alleviate parental stress - funding for parent networks
Focus on supporting parents with borderline learning difficulties to keep their children safely at home as a multi agency project.

What has worked and what hasn’t

What has worked - see points above. In addition, Carmarthenshire was the first County in Wales to develop a Parenting Strategy in 2003. A multi - agency operational group has been responsible for taking forward the above initiatives. The Parenting Strategy group organises an annual event to celebrate National Parents week and raise the profile of parenting in Carmarthenshire. Last October the event was held in the National Botanic Garden of Wales and attracted over 1500 visitors.

Work has been done to develop a model for setting up a Parent network. However no money has been earmarked by WAG to fund this initiative.

WAG funding of Incredible Years training and resources has allowed us to take forward this programme as part of the Flying Start project. However the information produced on evidence based programmes didn’t take sufficient account of locally used tried and tested resources. Evaluations using RCT’s seem to be prohibitively costly to all but larger programmes. In Carmarthenshire HCB and Stepping Stones are available in Welsh and used with great success. Internal audits demonstrate effectiveness of the programmes but they are not deemed as evidence based by WAG.

Dedicated funding for parenting initiatives? Projects are concerned about the sustainability of current provision as Cymorth funding ends in 2009.

More consideration is needed of the other resources required to deliver an effective parenting service - childcare, crèche, accessible venues, language and culture.

Bi-lingual helpline for Wales - not up and running.
Parental participation - resources needed to train and support parents to take an active role in planning services.
Sue Marsden

Senior Practitioner

NCH Cymru FACT TEAM.