Job title: Parenting worker

What do parenting workers do?
Parenting work covers a range of different roles and job titles, such as family intervention workers, family support workers, parent education workers and parent trainers. But they all involve working with a mother, father or carer to enhance their parenting role. Work may take place in classes for groups of parents, or one-on-one work. It can cover areas such as enhancing parents’ confidence; helping parents manage behaviour more effectively and be more responsive to children’s needs; giving an understanding of child development; developing closer bonds between parents and children and supporting parents’ relationship between themselves and management of their child.

Do parenting workers just work with parents?
It depends on the nature of the work or parenting course they deliver. Practitioners delivering the Families and Schools Together programme, for example, work with the entire family, including the extended family. Others work with just the parents, while some courses run simultaneous courses for the parents and the children, such as courses dealing with aggressive behaviour in teenagers.

Who employs parenting workers?
Parenting workers can work for local authorities, voluntary sector organisations, private sector companies or as self-employed workers. They may work in settings including schools, hospitals, children’s centres and youth justice teams, or may go into parents’ homes. The broad range of setting means that salaries and conditions vary widely as well.

What training and qualifications are needed?
Sector membership body Parenting UK recommends that parenting workers hold an award or certificate in working with parents. These include Levels 2, 3 and 4 awards in work with parents; Level 3 certificate in work with parents and Level 4 award work with parents (intense support for families with multiple and complex needs). These qualifications are based on the National Occupational Standards for Work with Parents.

There are also training courses that equip practitioners to deliver specific parenting programmes, such as The Incredible Years and Triple P. These training providers usually expect participants to have an existing foundation of parenting knowledge and experience, and not to be starting from scratch.

Parenting workers can also choose to take specialist courses in particular areas such as working with parents around sexual health, engaging with fathers, working with adolescents and working with parents with learning disabilities.

Rachel Tomkin, spokeswoman for Parenting UK, says some parenting practitioners come straight into the work while others come to it from other sectors. “Many do start off in social work,” she says.

What skills are needed by parenting workers?
According to Parenting UK, practitioners need a wide range of skills including the ability to work closely with parents, encouraging their active participation and involvement, and the ability to create mutual trust and respect, and agree aims and processes with parents.

Also important are openness and honesty, clear communication, flexibility and self-awareness.

Is the job market expanding?
It is very likely to do so, given this government’s stated intention of rolling out universal free parenting classes. The government is currently trialling the CANParent system in three areas, in which all parents of five-year-olds are eligible to receive vouchers for free parenting classes, and in four areas relationship support is being offered for first-time parents.

Parenting UK’s Tomkin says: “Some of the providers are recruiting specifically for this trial, and if there is a high uptake of vouchers then they would possibly need to employ more people to deliver the classes.”

Providers are both voluntary and statutory organisations.

Parenting work is also likely to feature as part of the government’s payment-by results-scheme to help troubled families, which all councils have signed up to. Local authorities will receive money for work that reduces youth crime, truancy and antisocial behaviour.

Find out more