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Ealing Council wanted to answer the question: What does good help look and feel like where there is parental conflict and distress in relationships? The Council came together with a voluntary sector organisation to explore how best to engage diverse communities in their reducing parental conflict programme. As well as gathering feedback on the current offer, Ealing sought to explore how they could offer better help attuned to Ealing communities.
Ealing’s project had two distinct elements:
The Council recruited two community outreach workers to conduct focus groups and consult members of the community. Key learnings highlighted the need for tailored support for families with diverse needs, improved communication about reducing parental conflict, and recognition of community participation. Ealing are committed to refining their reducing parental conflict offer based on community insights and in alignment with their Family Hubs development.
Ealing Council commissioned Family Lives, a voluntary sector organisation which provides targeted early intervention support to families, to undertake a project that would gather feedback from professionals and community members in Ealing on reducing parental conflict support. Family Lives is a trusted brand across Ealing communities, they have been fundamental to ensuring good engagement in previous reducing parental conflict work, and are part of an integrated approach to parental and family support. The project has also been a part of Ealing’s Family Hub development, where there has been a year of discovery and consensus building to understand what makes a ‘good’ support offer for families.
Ealing had an established Reducing Parental Conflict offer but did not know whether support was effective for different families and communities. The focus of the project was to develop a rich understanding of how a diverse community feels about relationships and what good help looks like.
The project was focused on Southall, a diverse area of the Borough where over 80 languages are spoken, including Punjabi, Urdu, Somali, Arabic and Polish. Around 58 per cent of Southall residents were born outside the UK, compared with 37 per cent of people in London overall, and 14 per cent across the whole of the UK.
Ealing developed a practitioner survey to explore reducing parental conflict support services. The aim was to understand practitioners’ knowledge and confidence in responding to parental conflict amongst community services, as well as to gain insight into areas for future development, what was working well, and what the barriers were.
The core team, practitioners, and community outreach workers developed the survey to ensure it gathered essential information. The project lead promoted the survey at key meetings, including the Children and Young People’s Board Away Day, and engaged with various voluntary and community organisations. The survey remained open until after Ealing’s ‘Relationship Matters Week’ in March 2024.
To expand on the knowledge collated from the practitioner survey, Ealing conducted further community engagement research alongside their commissioned partner, Family Lives. As part of this, two outreach workers developed a plan to approach local organisations and community groups to gather more information about knowledge and confidence in responding to reducing parental conflict. The outreach workers collaborated with community leaders and other voluntary sector organisations including Southall Community Alliance and Golden Opportunities, Skills and Development (GOSAD). to identify established community groups they could engage with. For example, smaller grassroots organisations such as Holistic Special Eduction Needs Alliance (HSENA) helped to set up a focus group and to reach parents directly. With the support of these community organisations, Ealing explored and collected the views of 115 individuals through the survey and via interactive in-person focus groups. Individuals included parents (both mothers and fathers), grandparents, and other family members involved in raising children to reflect household and family arrangements in the local community.
Following completion of the surveys and the focus groups a community event was arranged to playback the research findings and to hear directly from community members about their reflections.
Ealing’s community engagement work highlighted the importance of language and visual representations of parental relationships in the community. Posters were developed which showed different ethnic groups and portrayed images of positive and negative relationships. This engagement also revealed a lack of clarity for some organisations around the identifying features of parental conflict, highlighting the benefits of shared dialogue between professionals and community outreach workers.
To encourage paticipants to speak freely, Ealing use the River of Life tool to explore points in family life where relationships where most under strain and to think through how participants might ask for help if needed. This tool allowed conversation to flow.
The survey did not just focus on reducing parental conflict and asked respondents to consider wider support for children and families. The outcome of the survey has highlighted a need for further support for families where children have special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND). It was also outlined that shorter courses may be more effective for families with work commitments.
The survey found that respondents who were most confident in their knowledge of reducing parental conflict services had experience of facilitating programmes or had been involved in pilots. Those who were the least confident outlined a lack of knowledge of what is on offer and how to signpost families to the right services.
More training can be done to introduce all the services as well as recognise the different types of conflict – this will help to make the right referrals and have the right types of discussions with families.” Survey respondent.
The survey did not yield as many responses as anticipated, perhaps due to survey fatigue amongst local services. However from those that did respond there was a good spread of roles and professions, from frontline social workers, teachers and youth workers, to directors of voluntary organisations and early help.
The majority of parents participating in the study were immigrant parents who voiced that they had experienced stigma or shame within their own culture, associated with seeking external relationship support outside the family or place of worship. Parents also expressed that parenting in the UK is hugely different from parenting in their home countries. Talking about relationship difficulties is a sensitive subject for parents and most of them were not ready to share the struggles they were experiencing in their relationship. Parents told us that, they would access a family support service that was culturally competent and sensitive to their needs and experiences, one which was non-judgemental, provides culturally appropriate materials, has diverse staff, and fosters a welcoming and inclusive environment. The service should also incorporate helping parents get acquainted into the system.
“A lot of us are ashamed to talk about our relationships because they will say this is not what we do where we come from.”
The project raised the question of how best to reward and recognise individuals who contributed and to ensure that contributors understand how they have impacted services. Ealing is working on a council-wide policy outlining how participation and co-production work should be recognised, and this has prompted conversations about future direction for participation in the delivery of parenting and reducing parental conflict interventions.
Ealing reflected that it has been helpful to complete this project alongside their family hub discovery phase and other work on relationships. In March 2024, Ealing ran a weeklong focus on relationships, called “Relationship Matters Week”, this looked at relationships throughout the life course. The council and partners were invited to a range of talks and sessions about relationships, and this helped to embed the work around reducing parental conflict.
Ealing are keen to prototype two further projects, one in a different locality with different demographics and local community offer and a further project based in a school with a particular focus on families with children with additional needs.
Ealing are also reviewing the delivery of parenting programmes and other interventions with a view to creating more opportunities to co-produce and co-facilitate with the community. This includes looking at models like EPEC as a potential way to grow understanding of relationships and how families can be supported in a more bespoke way.
Further work is happening across the council to develop a Community of Practice for co-production and community engagement so there is opportunity to share learning, best practice and prevent duplication or over-engagement of certain communities.
