Newcastle City Council

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Everyone knows that parents are really important people in children's and young people's lives. One of the goals of those of us who work with and on behalf of families, either through Newcastle City Council or one of our partners, is to make sure that Newcastle is a great place not only to grow up, but also to be a parent and raise children and young people who may one day go on to be parents themselves.  When we talk about  'parents' in Children’s Services we are including mothers, fathers, carers, grandparents and other people who look after children, such as foster parents. We believe that it is through supporting parents that we will get the very best outcomes for children, families and communities.

We have developed a video to demonstrate how we are improving parental support in Newcastle, Click here to view the video

All parents need support from time to time – bringing up children is one of the most important roles anyone can undertake and it can be very challenging at times. Everyone needs somewhere to turn to for reassurance, information, and advice about their parenting, especially if they are trying to bring up a child or young person in a difficult situation.

Lots of aspects of a family’s circumstances can impact on the capacity individuals have to fulfil their parenting role and responsibilities. Money, housing, health, being alone and not having someone to talk through concerns and share the workload, can all impact on our behaviour and scope to enjoy parenting.  Family support describes those activities that take account of a family’s whole situation and that address some of those issues.

Parenting support means activities that allow anyone carrying out this role to develop the knowledge, skills and experience they need to do this to the best of their ability.  We put these elements together and describe this as a ‘Think Family’ approach and deliver a whole range of activities to enable these to be addressed. Think Family seeks to ensure that support provided by Children’s, Adults’ and other services is co-ordinated and focused on problems affecting the whole family.

Our approach in Newcastle is to try to:

• Secure timely support for families at risk – we want to head problems off before they get worse
• Work with families to find solutions to problems – we want to help families to find ways that work for them
• Increase knowledge, skills and experiences of parents – we want to reduce the amount of children that come into care because of inadequate or inappropriate parenting
• Secure positive outcomes for local communities – we view families and the choices we learn to make from our earliest years about how to behave as being at the heart of how people choose to live and work together
• Communicate what 'works' and why to partners locally, regionally and nationally – we know we have a lot of good practice we can share and we want to use this information to commission the sort of interventions that really make a difference
• Embed lessons learnt and evidence their impact – we know that where we have practitioners that can engage with families successfully and build relationships that are respectful and honest, we can challenge and support parents effectively.

More information on some of the ways we are seeking to do this can be found in the links below.

• Family Support in Newcastle
• Parenting support programmes in Newcastle
• Parenting and Family Support Workforce
• What impact has Parenting and Family Support had

Archive

In this section you will find information that is no longer being updated, but may still be useful.

• Parenting Conference 2010
• Parenting Support Strategy

• Updated Parenting Support Report (107KB, pdf)

Contact

Sue Miller
Lead Specialist for Family Support and Parenting
Phone: 0191 277 4686
Email: sue.miller@newcastle.gov.uk

Page last updated: 8 November, 2011