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This case study summarises the work undertaken by Essex Council to evaluate their Reducing Parental Conflict training, including measuring its impact on practitioner skills and understanding reducing parental conflict within practice. Partnering with experts, they developed a comprehensive evaluation plan, this included a two hour consolidation session where a questionnaire was used to reflect on knowledge prior to the RPC training. Essex plan to use evaluation data to build and enhance training content, engage fathers, and refine their evaluation measures.
Essex is a large local authority with agencies all using different systems to record and evaluate the impact of different interventions. In 2020, Reducing Parental Conflict training was introduced to Essex and managed by Essex Safeguarding Children’s Board, and over 400 practitioners from partner organisations have been trained over the last four years using funding from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Despite high uptake of reducing parental conflict training, Essex did not have an evaluation process in place to measure how this training had been implemented in practice, what impact training had on workforce development, or the impact on outcomes for children and families. A key priority for Essex’s Healthy Relationships Team was to coordinate reducing parental conflict work and develop Action Learning Sets, which required a robust evaluation plan of the current training programme.
Essex undertook scoping exercises involving practitioner focus groups, consultations with DWP and commissioners, and parent reference groups to identify areas of focus for an evaluation of reducing parental conflict training. These results of these scoping exercises identified three areas, these included:
Essex partnered with evaluation experts at Anna Freud to develop a project plan to evaluate RPC training. This evaluation plan included:
In the first wave of implementing the evaluation plan, Essex administered the post-training questionnaire to 147 practitioners in receipt of reducing parental conflict training during consolidation sessions.
The initial findings from the questionnaires identified that providing the physical toolkit and access to ongoing training materials as the top two enablers to good practice. The top two barriers were identified as not having direct contact with eligible families, as well as not having enough time and resources.
Furthermore, the questionnaires found that practitioners confidence increased following training and consolidation sessions. Practitioners reported that they were more able to identify parental conflict with families that they were already working with. This also included an increase in knowledge and understanding of the difference between domestic abuse and parental conflict.
The evaluation identified a current gap in service provision in engagement with fathers, and so Essex plan to use additional DWP funding to deliver a ‘Working with fathers and male carers’ webinar to practitioners to address potential barriers to engagement.
Looking forward, Essex plan to collate the evaluation data to influence the content of future reducing parental conflict trainings, consolidation sessions and the development of Action Learning Sets. A report highlighting evaluation findings will be developed and shared with all partners, including Essex County Council commissioners. Essex have also committed to revisiting the evaluation plan and evaluation measures to ensure they remain relevant and fit for purpose.
