News Insight: Joint Working - Help for those who support parents

The National Academy for Parenting Practitioners is a government-funded charity set up in October 2007 to "transform the quality and size of the parenting workforce".

The academy aims to train parenting practitioners, provide evidence on the effectiveness of parenting programmes and get information to frontline workers on the strategies that work best. After a slow start, it is now beginning to deliver services.

Who is classed as a parenting practitioner?

The academy has a broad definition covering anyone who works directly with parents to offer support and information about bringing up children. That includes paid workers and volunteers and encompasses a wide range of occupations, such as health visitors, family therapists, childcare providers and social workers.

Chief executive Angela Sibson has signalled an intention to offer help to police and housing officers, but for now the academy is targeting support to practitioners within local authority parenting strategies.

What kind of support is on offer?

Last October, the academy began rolling out a free training programme for 6,000 local authority parenting practitioners, including workers in children's centres, extended schools and youth offending teams. The programme, which runs until 2010, aims to help parenting strategies through strong evidence-based practice. And last week the academy launched its Commissioning Toolkit.

What is the Commissioning Toolkit?

It's a free website - www.commissioningtoolkit.org - that provides comprehensive information on parenting programmes available in England. More than 100 programmes are currently listed. They range from those aiming to raise the self-esteem of children to support for parents whose children have mental health or behaviour problems.

The site aims to help commissioners of parenting services choose the best programmes. All the courses have been self-rated by their developers and 20 have been rated by the academy so far. By autumn, all listed programmes will have a rating. Programme developers attended focus groups to help develop the toolkit and the academy says they are already working on ways to improve programmes as a result.

What else is the academy doing?

One of the academy's founding members was the academic parenting unit of King's College London and it has begun a large programme of research. One strand will examine the characteristics of parenting and how the parent-child relationship can be used to improve services. The programme will also develop an evidence-based tool to measure parenting skills, survey existing services, conduct trials of promising interventions and establish the cost-effectiveness of parenting programmes.

A website will also be launched in April, boasting a "knowledge centre" for parenting practitioners.

Who's behind the academy?

Of the three founding organisations, only King's College remains. The Family and Parenting Institute and Parenting UK both withdrew in October to concentrate on their own work, taking six trustees with them.

How much funding does it have?

The Department for Children, Schools and Families gave the academy a three-year grant of £30m, which runs out in 2010. But most of the research won't be complete by then so further backing is likely.

How can I contact the academy?

The website address is www. parentingacademy.org. Each region has its own network, which can be reached via the head office. The telephone number is 020 7848 7500.

AIMS OF THE ACADEMY

Angela Sibson, chief executive, National Academy for Parenting Practitioners

"There is an increasing understanding that parents play a crucial role in outcomes for their children. People understand that very well. There is less understanding of exactly how they can best be supported. What evidence is there that particular ways of parenting and working with parents are more effective than others?

People who work with parents have for a long time felt that they needed more information and more support. They needed resources such as the Commissioning Toolkit to help with their work with parents. The academy is the mechanism for drawing that evidence base together from the research and then transmitting it into practice on the frontline with families and parents.

We want to be making a difference where parenting practitioners are engaging with parents. We want to make them feel there is a strong evidence base for what they do, and ensure they are confident in working with parents and feel that they have a resource they can draw on.

We are working with people that parents trust and value - practitioners working in Sure Start centres and extended schools, for example. Parents turn to those people for advice and trust them. Our role is to strengthen the people that parents turn to so they feel more confident about giving that advice in local settings that are very familiar to parents.

We want to work alongside parenting practitioners in those settings where they help parents. That's why we have a strong regional network of people who work with local authorities on their service design and planning so we are helping on the frontline.

We are not a sort of central, ivory tower organisation. We want to make a difference where the work is actually being done with parents and their children."