The Parenting Fund

A NIACE Response to HM Treasury and the Department for Education and Skills’ Consultation on the Parenting Fund

Published: November 2003

1. The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) works to encourage more and different adults to engage in learning of all kinds. Its functions include research, development and consultancy; advocacy to inform and influence public policy; information services and dissemination; campaigning for, and celebrating the achievements of, adult learners. Established in 1921, NIACE is an independent non-governmental organisation, a registered charity (No. 1002775) and company limited by guarantee (No. 2603322). Its corporate and individual members come from all sectors concerned with adult learning: colleges; local authorities; universities; voluntary and community organisations; churches; broadcasters and unions.

2. Since 1998, NIACE has managed the Adult and Community Learning Fund (ACLF) on behalf of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). The ACLF is a £25 million fund set up to support community-based organisations developing new learning opportunities for adults. ACLF aims to draw more people into learning, especially those who may have been wary of education in the past. It supports activities that take learning into sectors of the community not reached by traditional educational organisations, providing opportunities that will interest and attract those who are hardest to reach. Entailed in this is a high degree of support for small VCS organisations with little experience of Government funding.

3. NIACE’s interest in the Parenting Fund relates to the relationship between parenting support and family learning. NIACE has a strong interest in family learning given its ability to attract parents back into learning and to engage parents in their child’s development. Family learning also engages families in learning new activities together and improves family relationships. It also acts as a powerful stimulus to developing a true culture of lifelong learning amongst adults and children.

4. NIACE uses the term family learning to encompass a wide range of informal and formal learning activities that involve families developing an understanding of, and the skills involved in, family roles, relationships and responsibilities. NIACE therefore includes parenting education as part of family learning. Furthermore, the provision of parenting support often involves a strong element of parents and carers learning how to deal with and cope with a variety of issues related to parenting and bringing up children. NIACE therefore thinks that it is important to recognise the learning dimension to parenting support and to acknowledge and make the links between parenting support and education and family learning.

5. NIACE welcomes the introduction of the Parenting Fund as a valuable source of funding for parenting support. We particularly like that this money is being targeted at the voluntary and community sector (VCS) and that the proposals for the Parenting Fund have been developed in conjunction with the VCS. This is welcome recognition of the uniqueness of the VCS in terms of its perspective and its ability to reach some of the most disadvantaged groups in society. NIACE also appreciates the commitment to build capacity in parenting support through increasing workforce skills and developing infrastructure. This is essential to developing VCS services that are sustainable in the medium to long term.

6. However, there are a few areas in which NIACE feels that the proposals for the Parenting Fund fall short. The consultation on the Parenting Fund was published a few months before Every Child Matters, the Green Paper that sets out the Government’s proposals for protecting children and maximising their potential. Even before publication of this document, there was a need for the Parenting Fund proposals to be clearer about the links between funded VCS and statutory sector provision. However, it is now essential that the Parenting Fund proposals link with the contents of Every Child Matters. For example, the Green Paper proposes focusing education and social services around children by creating a new Director of Children’s Services within Local Education Authorities (LEAs). It also states that family learning programmes (mostly provided by LEAs at present) could be developed as a universal service, “open to all families as and when they need them”. Therefore, the Parenting Fund proposals need to give some consideration to how funded VCS provision should link with LEA strategies for children, young people and families and existing LEA parenting support and education.

7. NIACE also feels strongly that the Parenting Fund proposals should consider how VCS parenting support and education services should link with the Extended Schools initiative. For example, extended schools could be partners with the VCS in providing parenting support services.

Yes, we agree with the four priorities of: increasing some elements of universal provision; increasing provision for some groups of parents in difficult circumstances who have less access to services at present; adopting a more concentrated approach in some geographical areas; and, increasing the capacity of parenting organisations.

Developing and supporting effective provision of a high quality should be another priority. Increasing the capacity of parenting organisations should help achieve this aim, as should a good system of monitoring and evaluation. (See related responses to questions 10 and 12.)

In the short term, NIACE thinks that increasing some elements of universal provision and increasing the capacity of parenting organisations are the two most important priorities. This should enable more parents to access support when they need it, whilst building sustainable capacity within parenting organisations to reach the parents who most need support.

Helpline services appear to be the most cost-effective way of ensuring a national improvement to parenting support. However, NIACE thinks that in the medium term it is important that helpline services are backed up by more locally based parenting support and parenting education provision, together with other forms of family learning. It is worth noting that both a national helpline and family learning programmes are proposed as ‘universal’ parenting services in Every Child Matters.

NIACE believes that a 24 hour helpline is probably the most cost-effective way to improve services that are accessible to all parents. However, the Fund may wish to consider piggybacking on to other existing universal services in order to make the helpline known to parents. This includes health visitors and Registry Offices which all new parents come into contact with. The helpline could also be marketed to parents of school age children by linking with LEAs and FE colleges in order to promote it through family learning programmes and also through school newsletters.

NIACE also thinks that it would be a good idea for any helpline service to be able to refer callers onto LearnDirect where existing information on parenting education classes and other family learning provision could be provided. In order to ensure comprehensive coverage of all family learning opportunities, closer links between LearnDirect and LEAs, FE colleges and more established mainstream voluntary sector providers who provide these types of courses might need to be developed. The Learning and Skills Council (LSC) which funds family learning and other adult education courses may also have a role to play in enabling links between parenting support and parenting education and other forms of family learning.

NIACE agrees that these groups are the right groups to be targeted. Families with older children, BME families and fathers are also under-represented within all types of family learning programmes.

The Fund may wish to consider targeting services at grandparents and other carers who play an important role in looking after and helping to bring up children when both parents are working. It is important not to neglect the role of grandparents and other carers in ‘parenting’ children, especially as demographic changes mean that this trend is likely to continue as more women will be needed in the labour market. Families with a family member who has learning difficulties and/or disabilities should also be borne in mind.

Working with specific umbrella groups such as Fathers Direct, Trust for the Study of Adolescence (TSA) and the Race Equality Unit (REU) will enable the Fundholder to reach these groups.

In marketing the ACLF, NIACE found that it was effective to target promotional activities at new providers in order to reach new learners. Similarly, the Parenting Fund may wish to consider working with the more established VCS groups to market the Fund to new and different organisations. LEAs may also have a role to play in promoting the Fund.

NIACE agrees that a concentrated approach, as outlined in the consultation document, is the correct approach given that funding is limited. It makes sense initially to target deprived areas which already have some infrastructure in place yet have unmet need for parenting support. Given this scenario, we think it is important that organisations that receive support from the Fund are strongly encouraged to work in partnership with existing VCS and statutory sector providers so that the funding links well with existing provision and minimises duplication. NIACE is also encouraged to note that work in no or very low capacity areas will be expanded during the lifetime of the Fund, given that some of these areas may contain families who have a need for parenting support.

In relation to referring parents to support services, NIACE recognises the importance of building a comprehensive network of referral routes as outlined in the consultation document and in Every Child Matters. However, it is just as important that a positive model of parenting support is promoted, otherwise parents may resist being referred or may engage with the parenting support being offered in a very limited way, which will impact on its effectiveness. Indeed, NIACE thinks that it may be worth linking with existing outreach and home-school liaison workers who often go into communities to encourage parents to attend family learning provision. There is much anecdotal evidence of the effectiveness of such approaches in reaching people in a positive way and of other people coming forward themselves once they receive encouraging feedback from friends and family. There are also likely to be other outreach workers dealing with different issues that should be included within such thinking, such as information, advice and educational guidance.

Yes, focussing on increasing workforce skills and developing infrastructure is the right approach to increasing the capacity of the VCS to deliver sustainable parenting support.

NIACE agrees with the Parenting Education and Support Forum (PESF) that the development of workforce skills and capacity should be achieved by developing transferable modules of training. This is because workers from related sectors can have their previous experience and learning recognised whilst gaining the additional skills that are most relevant to the specific sector that they wish to work in. An important first stage of this is the development of national occupational standards for parenting education and family learning. NIACE and the PESF are working in partnership with PAULO, the National Training Organisation for community based learning (which will be subsumed within the new Lifelong Learning Sector Skills Council next year), to take this work forward. Once national occupational standards have been developed, NIACE advocates the development of coherent training routes and funding for training for people working in the family learning, parenting, childcare and early years sectors.

NIACE believes that the Parenting Fund should recommend that VCS organisations providing parenting support should make links with other local organisations, including LEAs, that provide parenting education and other forms of family learning. This would enable the sharing of resources, training and experiences and enable co-ordinated provision and cross-referrals. It would also help meet one of the central aims of Every Child Matters which is to provide fully linked-up child centred education and social services.

There are two evaluation issues to be considered. One relates to the evaluation of the Parenting Fund as whole, while the second issue relates to the evaluation of individual projects and quality and accountability issues.

In relation to the first evaluation issue, it will be important to select an evaluator who is independent and who has sufficient knowledge and expertise of the sector. NIACE strongly supports the idea of building an evaluation strategy into the design of the Fund and appointing an evaluator at the outset so that opportunities for learning lessons and minimising the burden of data collection are not missed.

On the second evaluation issue, NIACE feels that it is particularly important to consider how individual projects are to be evaluated and supported. This point links closely to the issue of the criteria to be used to select providers who would receive support from the Fund and also to increasing the capacity of the sector. For example, as part of the monitoring and evaluation of the ACLF, each funded project completed a quarterly monitoring report and received at least one annual visit from NIACE. As well as ensuring quality and accountability, written feedback from these quarterly reports and visits was a valuable way of building capacity within smaller, inexperienced community organisations. NIACE would be happy to discuss in further detail the operation of the ACLF.

Working with and funding organisations who are able to reach the most excluded and marginalized people within society is likely to carry a greater amount of risk than working with more established mainstream organisations. Obviously it is sensible for the Fundholder to minimise the risk. However, NIACE believes that the suggested criteria for selection of providers seem unduly onerous and are likely to seriously hamper the ability of the Parenting Fund to meet its goals. This is because the criteria, as they stand at present, will exclude some of the smaller VCS organisations that are likely to be most effective in reaching particular groups of parents.

There is, however, a way round this. The consultation document suggests small local organisations will be able to partner larger organisations across the range of services. A similar model, whereby VCS organisations take the lead in partnerships with more established providers that can offer support in areas such as quality assurance and financial management, was used in ACLF. This was shown to work well when combined with NIACE monitoring reports and visits. Therefore NIACE advocates developing a slimmer, less onerous list of criteria for smaller organisations that are working in partnership with larger, more established organisations.

NIACE would be pleased to discuss any aspect of this response with HM Treasury or DfES officials. Please contact Jeanne Haggart, Development Officer for Family Learning (e-mail jeanne.haggart@niace.org.uk , telephone 0116 204 4271 or Jackie Horne, Project Co-ordinator (e-mail jackie.horne@niace.org.uk , telephone 0116 204 2851.

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