Funding boost for council-run parental conflict schemes
Fiona Simpson
Tuesday, February 8, 2022
Local authorities are set to receive a funding boost for initiatives aimed at reducing parental conflict in the home, the government has announced.
The Department for Work and Pensions' (DWP) Reducing Parental Conflict programme, which first launched in 2018, has been granted a further £11m in funding to support councils to create “bespoke relationship support” for disadvantaged families in their local area.
According to DWP documents the new funding “can be used by councils to train frontline staff working closely with families in sectors such as policing, schooling, health and social care, so they know how to spot parental conflict and can step in to support parents and ensure children do not suffer as a consequence”.
Local authorities will be able to bid for a share of the funding from April in order to develop new projects or extend existing ones.
Baroness Stedman-Scott, DWP Lords minister said: “Arguments and occasional bickering might seem harmless but when this kind of conflict is continually aggressive and left unaddressed, it can cause real unhappiness and harm children’s life chances.”
The scheme was developed following a pilot scheme run across 12 local authorities between 2015 and 2017. It was launched in 2018 as part of the government's Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families plan.
The announcement comes alongside the release of DfE’s third annual State of the Nation report which focuses on the wellbeing of children aged five to 24.
It finds that while the majority of young people had a good relationship with their family on average, children who indicated they had a poorer relationship with their parents were more likely to have a mental health problem.
It also notes that in general children’s wellbeing has been steadily improving since schools reopened in March last year.
“Evidence suggests that drops in wellbeing occurred most clearly for primary and secondary pupils in February 2021, when schools were closed to the majority of pupils,” the report states.
It adds that mental health support teams will be rolled-out in 400 schools by 2023 while an extra £3m will be provided to extend senior mental health lead training to more schools and colleges after 3,000 applications were received for a training grant last year.
However, critics have said that the roll-out will support just 35 per cent of children and young people to recover from the pandemic.
“If this was available for all schools and we also had community-based early support hubs that children could go to without waiting, we could be helping children before their issues hit crisis point,” said Mark Russell, chief executive of The Children’s Society.
