Rochdale: Starting a ‘relationship revolution’ to improve the quality of relationships for everyone

We wanted to develop a whole system approach to talk about parental conflict and a practice change agenda to address the population’s needs. To do this, we put in place the following activities:

• We felt we needed to develop a clear vision about what we wanted to achieve and why in relation to parental conflict. In order to kickstart this work, we wrote a ‘Relationships Manifesto’, which was our call to action for partners and residents. This helped us to communicate the vision clearly. The manifesto has received widespread recognition across the UK, as we are the first ever local authority to declare and commit to our intentions in this way.
• We organised a conference to launch this agenda along with a strong brand and to involve stakeholders and partners. At the conference we invited keynote speakers to share the overwhelming compelling evidence, including Professor Gordon Harold and other significant leads in their field, from CAFCASS and family mediation. Attendees signed a pledge that they would develop a relational response within their own organisations and commit to a strategy and action plan, which they had to write themselves. These signatories were named ‘system change leaders’.
• We developed a relationship webpage, relationship champion badges for those trained to support couples/families, a poster campaign and a Twitter hashtag, so that the work would be visible. The poster campaign was public-facing, and included personalised messages for different services. For instance, the poster used in children centres asked parents if they were worried about their arguments affecting their children, while the poster used in adult mental health settings asked if mental health was affected by arguments at home.
• We re-wrote the domestic abuse strategy to include references to parental conflict and to clarify the difference between domestic abuse and parental conflict.
• To start collecting data on parental conflict in a consistent way, we changed the early help assessment so that anyone assessing a family for early help support was able to tick an indicator for ‘family conflict’. The data showed that, on average, 66% of all families that engaged in early help support were in need of relationship support. This percentage has remained consistent over the last couple of years.
• We held ‘citizens hearings’ to listen to Rochdale’s community and discuss what matters to local members. Relationships between the community and the system, within the community and within the family, came out very strongly as a central theme. To meet this need, we trained relationship champions in the community.
• Through our work we focused on various types of family relationships. For instance, we also influenced work across the region to tackle child to parent violence and abuse (CPVA), with positive television and radio broadcasts by ITV Granada news and BBC radio.
• In October 2019 Rochdale hosted a follow-up ‘Strengthening family relationships conference’ where we invited our Greater Manchester neighbours to share good practice around supporting family relationships.
• We established a regional group of leads with responsibility for the RPC agenda in their local area, supported by DWP’s Regional Integration Lead. In the same month, Gail Hopper, director of children’s services, and Emily Nickson Williams, strategic lead for relational practice, hosted a Greater Manchester roundtable event with Lord Farmer and his team to talk about how we drive this agenda across the region.

What we achieved

• The Rochdale Relationships Revolution has received national recognition and has inspired many other local authorities to use some of the strategies, concepts and ideas we had back in 2018 and have developed since. For instance, in 2019 we were invited to Parliament twice to talk about our manifesto and associated relational work. Moreover, inspired by Rochdale, some local authorities are developing their own ‘brand’ around the parental conflict agenda often using the ‘Relationships matter’ wording. Thanks to this work, Rochdale had been named as a finalist in the Children and Young People Now Awards.
• Together with other regional leads, we created the Greater Manchester Relationship Practitioner Toolkit, which was launched in October 2020 and has already been adopted by other areas in the country including Rotherham, North Yorkshire and North East Lincolnshire. The tools and strategies used in the toolkit were first tested by a small group of Rochdale practitioners to ensure that they made a difference to the couple relationship. Couples have described the support of the toolkit, coupled with a skilled and trained practitioner using it with them, as ‘life-changing’. The aim of the toolkit is to support thousands of multi-agency practitioners across an entire region, using the same language and tools to ensure that anyone working on the frontline can support individuals and couples confidently. For further information about the toolkit, please contact Dee Alletson or Kate Nicolle.
• To ensure our relationship support was effective, we designed pre- and post-programme evaluations for some of the relational programmes we developed. To assess the impact of our support, we used both system data and self-reported data from families. A recent pre/post evaluation, for instance, showed that 75% of the participants of the pilot CPVA programme no longer required a support plan (CIN/CP/early help,) 12 months from the start of the programme.
• Thanks to the relationship champion training, there are now over 700 relationship champions with the skills and confidence required to support families effectively.