Trust for the Study of Adolescence

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The ‘map’ of parenting support practice

What can the ‘map’ be used for?
The ‘map’ is designed to provide examples of the ways that parenting support can be provided to young parents in custody, as well as to their parents. We hope it will be useful for practitioners and managers as it can be used to:

• Find out what’s going on in your area and elsewhere and make contact with the staff involved
• Learn about the range of interventions that can be offered
• Read more detailed descriptions of some of the services provided
• Access example forms, leaflets and other material used by some organisations
• Find out about other programme resources and useful organisations

Where did the information come from?
In 2006 we provided questionnaires to staff working in the secure estate, in Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) and in the voluntary sector and asked them to tell us about their work with young parents in custody and their families.

We had nearly 100 responses from these organisations:

• the 16 Youth Offending Institutions in England
• two out of four Secure Training Centres
• five out of 14 Secure Children’s Homes
• 68 out of 157 Youth Offending Teams
• 8 voluntary sector agencies out of the 34 we sent the questionnaire to

Please note the project is funded to work across England, although we are keen to hear about work in Wales, in other areas of the UK and internationally. We sent the questionnaire to services in Wales, but have not yet learnt about work to include on the ‘map’. So if you are involved in this work or think your experience could be useful to others, please do contact us to tell us about your work.

Why have the services shown on the ‘map’ been chosen?
The focus of the Parenting – Inside and Out project is very specifically on developing practice in providing intergenerational parenting support, that is, parenting support to young parents in custody (under 18 year old young fathers and young mothers) linked to, or provided jointly with, parenting support for their parents/carers. So the services we have included in the ‘map’ are limited to those that we have been told about in relation to this work and that we think could broadly fit within the definition of delivering:

• parenting support that is designed to address parenting needs, risks and protective factors

This support for parents could be achieved through a range of intervention models: working with parents individually, in a group with their peers, with other family members, in parallel or together at the same time. Interventions will usually include the aim of strengthening parenting skills, knowledge and confidence.

What information is provided about the different services?
All organisations on the ‘map’ have some basic information included to tell you about their services and which you can then follow up if you want to know more. In addition, some organisations have more in-depth information about their services included. These have been selected on the basis that we wanted to provide more information about each of the different types of services we have learnt about eg parenting groups, individual work, dads days, family days, video/audio methods or other services.

We intend to build the ‘map’ further and we want to add:

• services that we didn’t hear about from sending out the questionnaire
• in-depth information to each service description.

So please contact us to tell us about your work if you think it should be included in the ‘map’, or to give us more up to date or in-depth information for a service that is already featured on the ‘map’.

Why have some services not been included?
Because of the specific focus of the project we have not included services in the ‘map’ where the learning gained from them would be unlikely to fit our area of interest eg parenting support for young parents in custody linked with support for their parents/carers.

So we have not included services that told us about:

• work they could potentially do - rather than are currently doing, or have done
• services for all parents - a parent of a young parent in custody, or a young parent in custody may happen to participate, but nothing is tailor-made to these groups or context
• family link or family ties work unless this focuses specifically on the parenting role
• adoption support

“Parents should always be informed about and involved in supporting interventions with young people, but this does not constitute a parenting intervention. A specific parenting intervention is defined as comprising a formal assessment of parenting need, carried out with a parent(s)/carer(s) and designed to reduce parenting risk factors and increase parenting protective factors, followed by at least one structured meeting to deliver the intervention, and a follow up session.”

YJB Counting Rules April 2007 – March 2008,
(Jan 2007), Page 45, www. yjb.gov.uk