Key Principles: Local system integration
Key principles help to ensure that accessible, acceptable parenting interventions can be effectively implemented. They are drawn from quantitative and qualitative research, evaluations of implementation, and common features of effective parenting interventions.
Why?
- Effective parenting support requires strong place-based systems that coordinate services across organisational boundaries.
- Parenting support can be delivered and funded by various agencies, including local authority children’s services, Integrated Care Boards, and the voluntary and community sector, drawing on both local and national funding streams.
- Costs can be impacted by local factors such as training costs, practitioner turnover, the available workforce, delivery sites, and size of groups. There may be additional costs to ensure interventions are inclusive for all, including transport costs and those associated with addressing low levels of literacy and digital exclusion.
How?
- Local leaders and commissioners should assess local population needs to inform decisions on the range and type of local evidence-based interventions. This process should consider parent preferences and schedules, community characteristics, the number of families requiring support, and the availability of and proximity to delivery sites.
- Leaders should leverage existing workforce skills and address gaps by upskilling staff in evidence-based practices that are shown to improve outcomes.
Why?
- Families are typically referred to parenting programmes from across local public and voluntary sector services; self-referral may also happen where programmes are advertised through flyers and newsletters. A coherent local offer for parents can help them to navigate complex systems of support. Accessing support can be challenging and confusing for parents; system complexity is a barrier to seeking help and/or receiving appropriate, timely support. Ongoing communication between practitioners and parents are important to help parents navigate services.
How?
- Leaders should work together to co-ordinate an effective multi-agency system and clearly communicate the local offer, and referral pathways.
- All agencies and their practitioners should be fully informed about the range, type and availability of local parenting interventions, eligibility criteria, and the means of referral and access for families.
Why?
- Integrated and place-based workforce strategies are critical to facilitate families’ access to the range of services they need, and to promote programmes and services to the families who could benefit most from them.
- Integrated working reduces inappropriate referrals and prevents families from needing to frequently retell their stories. It also helps commissioners, practice supervisors and practitioners to better understand families’ needs because it enables service and workforce mapping, which improves the efficiency and effectiveness of support.
How?
- Leaders and practice supervisors should model multi-disciplinary collaboration, prioritising the needs of families over agency differences.
- Local leaders should embed this ethos in workforce planning and foster a culture of shared responsibility across agencies. Leaders should bring together workforce plans in a single overarching approach, including local Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), health providers, Family Hubs, children’s services, and voluntary, community and faith sector (VCFS) organisations.
Why?
- Not all parents have access to resources which support parenting. Issues like poor mental health, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, poor housing conditions, and race and gender discrimination can all add to the burdens on parents.
- Parenting programmes can help to strengthen families’ response to and resilience in the face of challenges. Families also prefer holistic, systemic and material support, including early preventative community-based services, and specialist support for issues like mental health and substance abuse that can be accessed without stigma or shame.
How?
- Local leaders need to direct their efforts as best they can at tackling the wider contexts that multiply demands on parents, and which increase parents’ vulnerability to adverse outcomes, but it is recognised that the efforts of local leaders alone cannot resolve systemic issues such as poverty and racism.
- In addition to parenting interventions, families should have access to other services and forms of support. These may include access to psychological therapies, domestic abuse services, medication, harm reduction support for substance misuse, and well-integrated referral routes and signposting for other sources of support (e.g. housing, debt management, food banks, employment support, etc). Ideally, these need to be part of local service provision and supported by efforts to address the structural and material contexts of family adversity.
