Research and analysis

Summary: Reducing Parental Conflict Programme – Local Grant Evaluation

Published 7 October 2024

Key Findings

Given below are key findings from the interim report from the evaluation of the Department for Work and Pension’s (DWP) Reducing Parental Conflict (RPC) programme Local Grant. To understand the process, experience and outcomes of the Local Grant, DWP commissioned IFF Research to conduct an evaluation to contribute to the wider evidence base on what works for families to reduce parental conflict.

The RPC Local Grant began in April 2022 and was designed to encourage local authorities (LAs) to continue to: integrate RPC focused practice and organisation into local services for children and families; build the capability of frontline practitioners who support parents and families, and improve the overall RPC support offer for parents. By 2023, 152 English LAs had bid for and were receiving RPC Local Grant funding. The evaluation findings in this report are based on 6 workshops with 43 LAs conducted in March and April 2023 and case studies with 9 LAs conducted in late 2023.

RPC vision and strategy

• The LAs involved in this research were positive about the continuation of the RPC Programme. They noted that the programme had supported LAs to embed support for parental conflict, as well as increase practitioner awareness of parental conflict and confidence to identify it. The programme had also raised awareness among parents about the harmful impacts of parental conflict on them and their children.
• LAs saw the Local Grant as a way to further embed the RPC agenda within their LA, and to raise awareness and provide additional support to parents and practitioners around parental conflict.
• The LAs involved in the case studies and focus groups reported that their partnership engagement with other organisations had been a key focus of their RPC activity to date and had largely been going well. Though challenges remained in engaging some partner organisations, including the police.
• Generally, LAs reported positive effects from the integration of RPC with other national children’s services programmes (including Family Hubs and the Supporting Families Programme). Strategic leads reported working to build strong partnerships with Family Hub leads, with the ambition of RPC benefitting from being incorporated into the Family Hubs structure and agenda.
• The role of the RPC coordinator was seen as an important driver of change both in terms of strategy and delivery. It was also seen as providing resource for LAs to create in-house resources and training that can be used to ensure the sustainability of the programme moving forwards.

Use of RPC Local Grant funding

• The flexibility of the Local Grant funding was valued by LAs in allowing them to adapt RPC activity to the needs of their local area. Reflecting the predominant activity across all local authorities in Year 1 of the programme, the main area of spend amongst the nine LAs included in the case study research was training and workforce development. This signalled the importance strategic leads placed on the need to upskill professionals to identify parental conflict.
• Almost all nine LAs took the decision to fund an RPC lead/coordinator via the Local Grant, a decision all strategic leads interviewed described as a key enabler of delivering their RPC activity. This pattern is also reflected more widely across LAs, with DWP data showing that over 120 out of 152 LAs had a RPC coordinator in place by mid-2023, compared to around 80 LAs in 2022.
• In the first year of the programme across the nine case study LAs, there was less focus on using Local Grant funding to deliver or purchase interventions for parents in conflict. This was primarily because LAs instead prioritised workforce development to promote sustainability of RPC. Where interventions were provided, they typically involved one-to-one support, group support, digital apps, webpages, and toolkits, with limited availability of higher cost intensive specialist support.

Experience of RPC activity

• The majority of the local authorities involved in the case studies highlighted a lack of resource and staff time to attend RPC training as a challenge. For many LAs, having capacity to deliver RPC training was also difficult, especially for frontline practitioners who already had a high workload.
• Although a key enabler of RPC delivery for some, other LAs said they were still in the early stages of developing partner relationships. Some LAs had struggled to encourage partner organisations to buy into RPC, mainly due to lack of time and high staff turnover. Those with more advanced partnership collaboration also cited these relationships as a way of progressing and embedding their RPC activity.

Monitoring and outcomes

• Monitoring and evaluation were seen as an area of difficulty by staff at nearly all case study LAs and those who contributed to the early-stage workshops. Efforts towards monitoring progress had been made since the early-stage workshops, but LAs faced difficulties relating to resourcing and expertise in conducting, monitoring and evaluation activity.
• Progress towards outcomes outlined in the Theories of Change (ToC) varied across LAs, mainly because of the differences in the activities undertaken and maturity of delivery. Where LAs cited achieving intended outcomes, it is important to emphasise that most LAs had limited robust evidence to indicate achievement of these outcomes.
• Generally, more evidence was available for outcomes relating to integration than to parents and children, which were primarily evidenced through anecdotal feedback.
• Key integration outcomes described by LAs included the training of staff, embedding RPC learning, and the creation of resources to disseminate RPC best practice and lessons learnt.

Evaluation next steps

Remaining evaluation activity will involve:

• Research with parents who completed an RPC intervention and others who failed to attend or complete an intervention.
• Interviews with LA staff to understand how identification and referral of parents to RPC interventions works, what works well and what could be improved to smooth the customer journey and maintain engagement.