In practice papers

A guide for practitioners on identifying families affected by imprisonment in a non-stigmatising way and the type of support they might need. This paper was written by Action for Prisoners' Families and Safe Ground.

Parenting UK held a roundtable on 16 March to discuss the opportunities and challenges that the emphasis on evidence-based practice and programme delivery for parenting presents to providers. The roundtable was designed to be collaborative and solution focused, bringing together a range of valid perspectives, approaches and resources to make the most of all promising practice across the continuum of family support interventions and programmes. We have produced a report based on the speeches and discussions on the day which offers a comprehensive set of areas which need to be addressed by all working in this sector.

This paper aims to highlight the importance of engaging young parents and some of the methods that can be used to promote successful support. It looks at the reasons young parents have traditionally been seen as ‘hard to reach’ and what can be done to change that, as well as why it can be helpful to stop seeing young parenthood as a problem to be solved, and start engaging with young parents to increase and develop the range of support available for them.

Children should be taught ‘core lifeskills’ as part of the curriculum to ensure they have the key skills to be good parents in the future. A compulsory GCSE in core lifeskills should be introduced to cover areas such as relationship skills, parenting education, financial management, emotional resilience and conflict resolution. These recommendations are the result of a roundtable discussion held with experts in the field to discuss the possibilities of a GCSE in parenting.