The Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships
Key Facts
Location
Project Criteria
Contact
Sara Breinlinger
Email
Project funding
£127,449
Funding round
The Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships (TCCR) aims to provide services that support couples, strengthen families and safeguard children. Its work is geared to improving the quality of adult couple relationships, preventing family breakdown, supporting positive parenting and thereby promoting healthy development in children. Its main objectives are: -
- To supply specialist therapeutic services to couples and individuals experiencing difficulties in their relationships
- To provide training and consultancy on delivering, developing and managing services for parents and families
- To undertake research that contributes to the understanding of couple and family relationships and how best they might be improved
- To develop therapeutic practice, training and research as interdependent and interlinked activities.
The TCCR 'Partners as Parents' Project aims to help parenting services in Hackney to include a focus on the parental couple relationship in their work. This is a crucial but under-developed area of parenting work.
Although the evidence is now clear that unresolved conflict in the parental relationship is linked to poor outcomes for children, support workers for parents can often feel unskilled and ill equipped to work with parents in conflict, and yet inevitably this often surfaces in any such work with parents, whether they are living together or apart.
We are adopting a three-tiered approach, which includes: -
- a counselling service for parents in conflict
- training and supervision for parenting workers, so that they can feel better equipped to work themselves with these issues
- working with managers and supervisors in regular monthly meetings for clinical consultation and case discussion.
The project will be evaluated using a combination of feedback questionnaires, and established psychometric measures. We shall evaluate the impact on parenting and parental conflict, and the relevance of the trainings and their impact upon the work of staff, and the delivery of services.
One of the key objectives of this project is collaboration with local organisations to develop a sustainable strategy for continuing this work once the project has come to an end.