Agenda item

(Report by Mrs J Wainwright, Director of Commissioning and Partnerships Group and Ms H Davies, Director of Specialist Children’s Services Group)

(Ms J Hook, Lead Manager for Supporting Parents was present for this Item)

(1)   The Committee considered a progress report on the work of the Parenting Team and some of the issues facing the agenda. It also illustrated the nature and funding of the Team and risks associated with a focus on the “parenting programmes and practitioner development” work strand of the Team.  The report had also been considered by Children, Families and Education SMT and the Commissioning and Partnerships DMT.

(2)   The Chairman asked Ms Hook to introduce the report.  Ms Hook highlighted key issues within the report which included the following; the delivery of parenting sat in the Priority 3 of the Kent Children 2008-11 and Young People’s Plan to ensure that good quality parenting programmes were available to help parents in their role.  This laid out a vision with 3 key components:

·        Availability of programmes for families, when they needed them and where they could access them;

·        Quality,a key issue to ensure that that families in Kent get  good intervention in what really helps them support their children and move their family to a place of harmony and most critically where we are reducing safeguarding concerns; and

·        Need, ensuring that the programmes were in place with the right levels of need, including behaviour, attachment, mental health, domestic violence or postnatal depression ensuring that the right configuration of programmes available with the best quality of staff delivering them.

(3)   Ms Hook said that her Team had been; facilitating the access of free places for up to 90 Practitioners, which had given them the capacity to reach an additional 1350 parents, troubleshooting delivery issues as they had been uncoordinated in the past by working out new and innovative ways to pull the structure together; setting up Parenting Practitioner Fora across the Districts so that local Practitioners could plan who they needed and work on who they needed to train, pooling together their resources and deliver the programmes, and responding to the national agenda ensuring that they had trained facilitators and were piloting ‘Working with Parents” level 3 qualification, there were currently 30 people studying for this qualification through Adult Education funded by the KCC.  The Children’s Workforce Development Council had approached the Team to offer places for Children Centres outreach Workers to train for the qualification.

(4)   The Team also offered parenting programmes for parents with children aged 8 to 13 years at risk of antisocial behaviour, a government funded initiative which would end in April 2011.

(5)   Ms Hook explained that she had commissioned a cost benefit analysis on Parenting Programmes. A similar piece of work has been carried out by the London School of Economics nationally. This had given a clearer idea of the balance of effectiveness against the cost waiting in Kent and that challenges and appropriate support were being made especially where programmes were being funded but were not as effective as they were costly.

(6)   Ms Hook advised that in terms of base budget funding, there was Ms Hook and her team consisted of a Supporting Parents Officer and 6 other members of staff, 4 of whom were funded directly by the ‘Think Family’ grant. One of them played the role of a Senior Parenting Coordinator [DCSF called a Parenting Expert]. This role was used as a coordinator building up knowledge of programmes and supporting the local structures.  There were also 3 Parenting Early Intervention Coordinators in place, who had been solely delivering role on role off programmes in their areas since April 2009 working with 95 parents between them and 124 children.  There was also a Respect Senior Parenting Practitioner funding through the Respect agenda generally with the same role working directly through Thanet District Council.

(7)   Members were given the opportunity to ask questions and make comments which included the following:

(8)   In response to questions by Mr Smith, Ms Hook advised that there had been research undertaken on the programmes that were used by being put through a series of random controlled trials and at the same time the National Institute for Clinical Excellence had conducted a study and found that 11 out of 15 case studies of parents who had been on Parenting Course had made successful long term changes. Because in the past there had been a less coordinated approach the next task was to agree a common set of evaluation in that way the agreed data set was collected and would be able to link back parents back to children for a much clearer family focused assessment to ensure that those were the right programmes for those families.  She gave examples of programmes; ‘Incredible Years’ for conduct disorder and attachment issues and ‘Mellow Parenting’ used by Social Workers and CAHMS, that had been highly tested and were proven programmes that worked.  In terms of sustainability there had been discussions on commissioning arrangements about parenting. She would like to see an agreement on a virtual service coordinated which meant that there would need to be clarity on job descriptions and clear agreements from managers and expectations set out and agreed about staff roles/tasks and how that would be carried out.

(9)   In response to a question by Mr Manion, Ms Hook explained that needs analysis had been undertaken on development and where the services needed to be enhanced locally.  The Department of Education had released the grant conditions around the existing early intervention and parenting services, which meant that the service could be widened and there was more flexibility on how the service could be delivered.  Needs analysis would be undertaken in the near future to look at how best to use the resource we had now in the interim period.  If resource continues there would be thought given to whether the focus was on delivery or focus on coordination across areas.  Ms Davies added that the new post of Preventative Services Managers would be involved in ensuring that every district had a range of Parenting Programmes and ensure that there were sufficient staff and parent helpers as appropriate trained in each district of the County. 

(10)    Mr Ridings stated some concerns that he had with the programmes saying that he felt that 8-13years old was very late in terms of age in intervening with parents as parents would have had 8 years to cause trouble and suggested that the children’s Centres be used more and the unpaid parents within those Centre’s too with training.  He advised that he had visited 2 Children’s Centres were he observed young parents who were very keen to learn what parenting was about to look after their children’s needs and a group of parents who were having left their work in their early thirties to have a family were equally ignorant in their parenting skills as the young parents and he was impressed how the they were learning from the 17-18 year old parents.  He felt that there was an untapped resource which needed to be looked into with the aid of the Preventative Services Managers.

(11)    Mr Smith stated that there was an immerging collection of grants that may stop in April 2011 and requested that officer bring a report back to this committee at an appropriate meeting.  The Chairman agreed and said that she had noted this as a concern to be considered by the CFE IMG Budget.

(12)    RESOLVED that:

         (a) the responses to Members questions and comments be noted;

(b) a report be submitted to this Committee at a future meeting on the effect of the grant funding reductions and any subsequent review of existing services be noted; and

   (c) the good progress that had been made by the parenting team be noted.