More frontline staff to be trained to reduce parental conflict in national, evidence-based programme
The Reducing Parental Conflict Programme, which draws on the work of Professor Gordon Harold at the Faculty of Education, is being expanded with £33 million of Government funding.
The Government is investing £33million in a programme which improves children’s life chances by reducing conflict between parents, and draws on research led by Professor Gordon Harold at the Faculty of Education.
The funding is being committed to the Reducing Parental Conflict (RPC) programme, which has already helped thousands of families since its initiation in 2018. It enables local authorities to train staff and support interventions which help to address conflict between parents that is “frequent, intense and poorly-resolved”. The underlying evidence, which was conducted and expansively compiled by Professor Harold, shows how conflict of this type between couples has damaging impacts on children’s mental health and long-term life chances.
Government data suggests that around in 10 children living with both parents have at least one parent who is reporting relationship distress; a risk which is far greater in workless couple-parent families. The new funding, which will be released over three years up to 2025, means that local authorities will be able to train and support more frontline staff who regularly come into contact with these families and can play a part in resolving parental conflict – for example, staff working in education, in health and social care, or in the voluntary sector.
It builds on the success of an initial phase of the RPC programme, during which a number of flagship local authorities embedded this approach within their services. Workers in the flagship areas were trained to understand the detrimental effects of parental conflict on children, provide initial support, and signpost parents and families to longer-term support services. The programme has focused in particular on disadvantaged families – including those in which both parents are out of work.
This early phase of the programme has provided substantial evidence of the effectiveness of the approach on improving the lives of young people and children. The achievements of the flagship authorities involved were celebrated at an event in the House of Lords on Wednesday (18 March), where Professor Harold also spoke about the research context and the evidence base for RPC.
"Having been part of the process which provided the evidential basis for the programme in the first place, it is truly encouraging to observe the difference it is making to young people, parents and families"
Gordon Harold is Professor of the Psychology of Education and Mental Health at the University of Cambridge, and Director of the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Research and Professional Practice Centre: a research-intensive initiative that aims to inform knowledge of how family, school and community processes influence children’s development, mental health and life chances.
He also led the research which underpins the RPC initiative; in particular that compiled in a 2017 report, What works to enhance interparental relationships and improve outcomes for children?
Among other findings, this showed that the quality of parents’ relationships with one another – specifically, how they communicate and relate to one another – is a primary, rather than indirect, influence on children’s life chances and mental health outcomes. It affects, for instance, their academic progress at school, early emotional, behavioural and social development, future interpersonal relationships, and employment.
These findings led to a dramatic shift in how inter-parental conflict is understood and addressed in relation to young people. As recently as the mid-2010s, young people were only considered ‘at risk’ if their parents were separated or divorced, if conflict levels were high, or domestic violence was a common part of their family life. It was not unusual for domestic abuse itself to be the main bar authorities set when determining whether an intervention was necessary on behalf of a child.
Contrastingly, Harold and his colleagues showed that frequent, intense and poorly-resolved conflict between parents that ranges across a “silence to violence continuum” directly and negatively affects children and young people of all ages, from infancy through to young adulthood. As a result, their work provided clear evidence that relationships between couples need to be targeted to give young people the very best possible opportunities in life – and that just focusing on parent-child relationship support may not be enough.
This research directly informed the RPC initiative, and the way in which it supports parents to de-escalate conflict, put aside their differences, and communicate better; resulting in positive effects not just for them, but for their children as well.
The event on Wednesday was also attended by Thérèse Coffey (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) and Baroness Deborah Stedman-Scott (Minister for Work and Pensions in the Lords).
Professor Harold said: “The RPC programme aims to reduce the adverse impacts that parental conflict causes to children through the provision of new support for parents, training for family practitioners and better awareness, understanding and co-ordination of parental conflict-related services delivered by local authorities and their partners; all with one core aim – to promote improved mental health and life chances outcomes for at-risk children and adolescents.”
“Having been part of the process which provided the evidential basis for the programme in the first place, it is truly encouraging to see it going from strength to strength, and to observe the difference it is making to young people’s lives, parents and families.”
Image in this story: Priscilla Du Preez via Unsplash.
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