Parental Advocacy in Wales: A mixed methods evaluation of its effectiveness in supporting parents

Background

Many parents find it hard to trust child protection social workers, and often feel marginalised and disempowered when there are concerns about their children’s safety (Featherstone et al. 2018, Diaz 2020). Parental Advocacy (PA) is an independent service that aims to support parents to have better relationships with social workers. PA services also try to to enable parents to participate more meaningfully in decision-making about their children.

In the USA, PA services have helped to reduce the need for children to be in care, living away from their families. In Wales, there are lots of children living in care, more than in any other part of the UK (BBC 2021). If PA services have been effective in the USA, then they might also be effective in Wales in helping more children to live at home safely with their own families.

There are three types of PA service:

(1) Case advocacy: PA services offer support, guidance and information to help parents navigate and participate in the child protection system.

(2) Program advocacy: PAs design and deliver programmes to support parents to care more effectively for their children. This can help keep children at home or help them return home when the child is already in care.

(3) Policy advocacy: PAs engage in political activism through participation in governmental and NGO advisory boards, by attending conferences or teaching on social work courses. It aims to advocate for reform in policy, legislation, and provisions of family support. (Tobis et al. 2020)

PA services are already being used in Wales, but we do not know very much about how they are working, and if they are helping parents as much as similar services did in the USA.

Aims and objectives

In this project, we will look at three different PA services in Wales, explore how they are working, what support they give to parents, and what difference they are making. We want to learn more about how these services operate, as well as use the research to help design a larger study for Wales. In this exploratory study, we will use the data we gather to examine how PA might influence the need for children to be in care. We will use a mixture of types and sources of data, including interviews with parents, young people, parental advocates, social workers, their managers and other stakeholders.

Public Involvement

This research pays particular attention to the benefits of public involvement. As a research team, we benefit from having a co-investigator who has lived experience of the child protection system. This research proposal was developed with the CASCADE Parents Research Advisory Group and through involvement from parents supported by NYAS in Caerphilly. CASCADE Parents research group are playing a major role in this study and they will be involved in drafting questions for interviews/focus groups, carrying out interviews, data analysis, report writing and dissemination.

Dissemination

We will disseminate our findings via a range of outputs, including a national and an international academic conference, practitioner workshops, a final report, academic publications, a film for families, blogs and a podcast. These outputs will be tailored towards parents and professionals including policymakers, service commissioners, managers, practitioners and researchers in addition to being accessible for children and families who receive social care services.