Maintaining relationships can be hard work with our nearest and dearest, let alone between schools and parents*. A DSL’s toughest conversations tend to be with parents, where positive engagement has a key influence on children’s outcomes. So, it is surprising that we don’t dedicate more time, training and support to this area.
Working Together to Safeguard Children added a helpful new section on effective principles for working with parents. In this series of blog articles, we will explore what they are and how they relate to school safeguarding practice.
PRINCIPLE 3: Practitioners enable parents and carers to participate in decision-making.
If we have concerns about parenting, we cannot make a parent change. As DSLs, we usually have an altruistic drive to resolve situations, sometimes by telling people what to do or doing things for them. However, this approach is rarely successful, and can de-skill people, creating dependency. Instead, we should focus on both support and challenge, helping parents to better understand the situation and empowering them to protect their child.
Using Laurent Daloz’s (1986) model, aim to offer high support alongside high challenge. This means helping parents problem solve and find solutions that work best for them and their family. This involves challenging the parent through open ended questions to explore their understanding and behaviour, and both practical and emotional support (within our professional boundaries) to achieve specific outcomes.
Acknowledge the autonomy and power that parents have and shift power back to them to help build their capacity, self-awareness and motivation. It is important that when discussing any safeguarding concerns, we help parents to understand why we are concerned and what the impact (or potential impact) is of the concerns on their child. The parent’s knowledge may be limited (for a variety of reasons) and so it is important we do not make assumptions about what they already know but instead utilise our professional curiosity skills to explore and further this.
Our role is that of an enabler. By using the fundamental skills of relational practice (empathy, authenticity, unconditional positive regard and curiosity) we acknowledge that the solutions parents come up with themselves, will nearly always be more effective and sustainable than any that are put upon them by professionals. Therefore, when we engage with parents about safeguarding concerns, it is critical that we support them to feel in control of any actions that are agreed, so that they have ownership of these. Without engaged parents, change is unlikely to ever occur.
Take a moment to reflect on the following and the evidence you have for each:
- How do you perceive the involvement of parents in discussions of safeguarding concerns? What role do you see them having? Is this participatory and collaborative?
- How do you action plan with parents as a result of a safeguarding concern? Is this empowering, supportive and challenging?
- Do you provide a summary of any agreed actions to support parents to be aware of and responsible for these?
- How do you follow up with parents on agreed actions to support them, to reflect on progress and to celebrate successes?
- How do you keep parents informed of support services in your area, to help them self-refer and access these independently as required?
These are ways in which we can help parents to engage more effectively in safeguarding decision making processes at school, but the impact of doing so can cause much wider ripples in school life.
To find out more about relational practice with parents, please visit relationalpractice.lgfl.net. In particular, we have a template for planning courageous conversations about safeguarding. We also offer a FREE 1-day training course for LGfL schools on “Courageous conversations and relational approaches to safeguard children”, please book here: safetraining.lgfl.net.
Revisit our previous blog articles on the power of language that we use with and about parents, and about the key components of relational practice.
*In this blog, for conciseness we refer to anyone who cares for someone under the age of 18, as a parent. However, in doing so we recognise that those who look after children are extremely diverse with regards to their relationship to children (e.g. family member, foster carer, family friend etc) and their own individual characteristics.
