Working with parental behaviours, contexts and vulnerabilities

Who should attend? Staff and volunteers who have specialist child protection responsibilities and/or involvement in multiagency safeguarding assessment, planning and responses.

Why should they attend? Parents and carers can play an essential and ongoing role in protecting children from harm, but can also cause harm to children. Learning from local reviews has demonstrated that the multiagency safeguarding system can improve how they understand and effectively respond to parental behaviours. The training will help participants to develop knowledge around how specific contexts can impact parenting capacity, and gain skills to effectively assess and respond to how to work with parents to help them meet their children’s needs.

What are the learning objectives?

By the end of the course, delegates will:

• Increase understanding of the role of parents, carers and wider families in safeguarding children and understand the principles for working with parents.
• Develop knowledge of specific contexts and how these can impact on parenting ability, including substance misuse, learning difficulties, mental health disorders, personality disorders and domestic abuse.
• Develop knowledge of the concepts of ‘disguised compliance’ and ‘resistance’ and improve skills to explore and respond to these behaviours.
• Develop skills to critically analyse parental contexts, vulnerabilities and behaviours in risk assessment and threshold decision making.
• Develop skills to consider parental contexts, vulnerabilities and behaviours in safety planning.
• Develop understanding of the role of bias and assumptions, including how racialised trauma can impact on parental engagement, and develop skills to recognise and remove barriers to engagement and accessing services.
• Improve understanding of the roles and responsibilities of adult services and improve effectiveness of multiagency working.
• Develop understanding of challenges and learning from local and national reviews, including skills to ensure the voice of the child is at the centre of safeguarding responses.

How is the course delivered? This free half-day course is delivered by an LSCP trainer and both online and in-person options are available.