Barriers to Inclusion and Successful Engagement of Parents in Mainstream Services

< Back to All Resources

Recent years have seen a huge growth in the provision of family support services.
The Green Papers Supporting Families (Home Offi ce, 1998) and Every Child Matters
(DfES, 2003) – preceding the 2004 Children Act – emphasised the Government’s
commitment to expanding these services. The policy shift towards parents has
been accompanied by a shift towards prevention and early intervention. Engaging
parents in preventive mainstream services (such as schools, family centres and
children’s centres) has become a key issue for policy makers and service providers.
Engagement and inclusion are particularly important for preventive services
because, unlike more intensive ‘crisis’ services where there is often a degree of
compulsion, preventive services usually rely on parents actively seeking help or
voluntarily accepting help offered to them. In addition, engaging parents in services
can benefi t the quality of the service (Barnes and Freude-Lagevardi, 2002) and make
it more likely that the service will actually address the real problems within families
(Moran et al., 2004).

https://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/default/files/jrf/migrated/files/barriers-inclusion-parents.pdf

Related Topics

  • Behavioral Health
  • Child Welfare
  • Fathers/Partners
  • Parenting
  • Treatment Models
  • Clinical Tools