National Childrens Bureau
Key Facts
Location
Project Criteria
Project funding
£102,500
Funding round
The National Children's Bureau (NCB) is the national recognised authority on policy, research and best practice relating to children and young people. We are a charity set up in 1963.
Our Parenting Fund project will help child and family services to support the family relationships of parents and carers who have mental health problems or who misuse drugs or alcohol.
We will do this by:
- providing two Action Learning programmes for practitioners and first line managers from child and family services. Each will last 9-12 months
- identifying and testing promising practice for supporting families in these circumstances. We are particularly interested in holistic methods
- encouraging the development of inclusive interagency approaches that support the parents and carers and deliver safety and good outcomes for children
- disseminating learning from the project through a major conference in year two and workshops/seminars throughout the project. We will also publish a handbook for practitioners and managers that captures learning from the project
- introducing the PESF's 'Evaluation Toolkit' to help participating agencies with the evaluation of their service
- identifying and addressing factors that contribute to some groups (e.g. Fathers, Black and Minority Ethnic families) being excluded from services
- using what parents and carers say to help us develop and monitor the project
- supporting participating agencies in increasing family involvement in shaping services.
Among the services we work with we expect the outcomes to be:
- child and family services will get better at meeting the support needs of parents where mental health and substance misuse are significant factors
- improved inter-agency working with better co-operation between children and adult services
- stronger family relationships
- services are better at self-evaluation.