Parental Advocacy in England: a realist evaluation of implementation

Overview

Parents involved with children’s social care often describe feeling frightened, confused or powerless, particularly during child protection processes. This can make it harder for parents and professionals to work together and for parents to take part meaningfully in decisions about their children.

Parental advocacy provides parents with support, advice or representation as they navigate the child protection system. Advocates may have personal experience of children’s services themselves, although this is not always the case. Their work can involve supporting individual parents, bringing parents together in groups, or working with local authorities to change wider policies and practice.

This study was the first multi-site realist evaluation of parental advocacy in England. It explored how different approaches operate, how parents and professionals experience them, and the conditions that help or hinder their work. It also considered what future evaluations should measure.

Activities and Methods

The research was carried out in four local authorities with different approaches to parental advocacy:

• Southwark and Bath and North East Somerset, where advocates mainly supported individual parents before, during and after child protection meetings;
• Stockport, where the New Beginnings programme combined group-based support with representation at key meetings; and
• Telford & Wrekin, where the Dandelions group worked with the local authority to influence services, processes and organisational culture, alongside some support for individual parents.

The study involved 92 parents, advocates and professionals. The research team conducted interviews and focus groups, observed child protection conferences and group sessions, and held workshops in which parents, advocates and professionals helped to test and refine the findings.

The study used a realist approach. This meant looking not only at whether parental advocacy appeared to help, but how it worked, for whom and in what circumstances. Parents with experience of children’s services and an international advisory group contributed throughout the project.

Findings

Across the four sites, parents described advocacy as helping them to understand child protection processes, prepare for meetings and communicate their views. Advocates explained unfamiliar language, worked through reports with parents and helped them organise what they wanted to say.

Emotional support was also important. Child protection involvement can be frightening and overwhelming. Having someone who listened without judgement helped some parents manage these feelings and remain involved, even when relationships with professionals were difficult. Parents often found advocates with lived experience particularly credible because they understood the system from a parent’s perspective.

The study found three main ways in which advocacy supported parents’ participation:

• providing clear and accessible information;
• helping parents prepare and express their views; and
• providing emotional support so that parents felt better able to take part in discussions and decisions.

Advocacy appeared to work best when it was offered early, before relationships between parents and professionals had broken down. Support from senior leaders and frontline staff was also important. Advocates were more able to help when professionals understood their role and regarded parents as legitimate participants in decision-making. The way meetings were chaired could make a substantial difference to whether parents felt heard.

The different models worked at different levels. Individual advocacy provided direct support to parents. Group-based approaches could reduce isolation and create longer-term networks of support. System advocacy brought parents’ experiences into service design, staff recruitment, training and the development of documents and processes.

Parents, advocates and professionals described cases in which they believed advocacy had improved relationships or contributed to better outcomes. However, the study was not designed to establish how often this happened or whether advocacy directly caused these changes. Participants were also generally supportive of advocacy, so more critical experiences may be under-represented.

Advocacy cannot resolve wider pressures within children’s social care, including high caseloads, staff turnover and limited continuity for families. In some cases, advocates were compensating for gaps that would be better addressed through wider improvements to services.

The findings suggest that local authorities should:

• offer advocacy as early as possible;
• make information and written documents easier for parents to understand;
• give parents time and practical support to prepare for meetings;
• strengthen the chairing and culture of child protection meetings;
• provide advocates with appropriate training, supervision and payment; and
• involve parents with lived experience in the design of services, policies and practice.

Further research is needed to examine longer-term outcomes for children and families and to understand how parental advocacy works for groups who were not well represented in this study.