Young People in Focus

Introduction

I talk more to my mum now, before all we used to do was argue! ¹

The Involving Young People in Parenting Programmes (IYPP) project provided an exciting opportunity to extend parenting support work to involve young people. Whilst all Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) should be linking work with young people and their parents (for example through planning and reviews), the key difference between this project and much of the support work currently offered to parents is that the IYPP project sites delivered services directly to young people as well as to parents. This work was structured so that young people and their parents addressed key themes such as communication, conflict resolution and relationship building either together or in parallel programmes. The project was funded by the Youth Justice Board and the Treasury’s Invest to Save programme, with day-to-day management provided by the Trust for the Study of Adolescence (TSA). The Policy Research Bureau (PRB) carried out an evaluation of the project.

This report is designed to provide a wide audience with the learning from the project – from the project evaluation, from project sites and from their practice.  It has been developed by TSA with staff from the 5 project delivery sites and includes material from the PRB’s evaluation.

The 5 project sites involved were:

• Parallel groups - Centre for Fun and Families, Leicester
• Family Group Conferencing - West Berkshire Family Group Conferences Project
• Family Therapy - Luton Youth Offending Team
• Parallel Individual work - East Berkshire Youth Offending Teams
• Family Skills Training - Kinara Family Resource Centre, Greenwich, London

One of the key objectives of the IYPP project was to learn from the experiences of implementing these five models of intervention and to make that learning accessible to managers and practitioners who are considering developing their work with parents to involve young people.  We hope in the report that follows to provide some useful guidance about setting up and implementing these models of service delivery and about key issues of practice, as well as about the experiences of parents and young people involved in the project.

Please note: throughout the report names and other details have been changed to make sure the identities of people involved are not revealed.

Acknowledgements:

The TSA authors of this report, Cris Hoskin IYPP Project Co-ordinator and Sarah Lindfield Project Leader, would like to thank the parents, young people and families involved in the project for sharing their experiences with us, as well as to the staff from the five project sites for their hard work and commitment to developing this work. We also wish to thank the project Advisory Group members for their valuable input.

Thanks also to the Policy Research Bureau for their work evaluating the project and for the written material included here in Sections 1 and 3, in particular to Aikta-Reena Solanki and Emily Hill and also to Ilan Katz and Sokratis Dinos.

Also thanks to the Youth Justice Board and Treasury Invest to Save programme for the project funding and to the Home Office Juvenile Offenders Unit for sponsoring the project.

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