Child Maintenance… Building capacity in Fife and beyond…
November 2024 marked a significant milestone for the Child Maintenance project: one full year of delivering the Child Maintenance: Confident Conversations training designed to empower practitioners to better understand child maintenance to include this important subject in conversations with lone parent families.
Test & Demonstration:
As someone passionate about learning and development, I was determined to ensure the child maintenance training met the needs of practitioners and the families they support. To achieve this, I spent three months consulting with advice practitioners from various organisations, including Fife Women’s Aid, OPFS, and Fife Law Centre. These conversations highlighted the types of advice parents sought and the barriers practitioners faced when offering guidance around child maintenance which included:
Advice often focused on the parent’s perspective rather than a child’s right to fair financial support.
Child maintenance was rarely a topic of discussion in support settings including income maximisation conversations.
Unconscious bias influenced the delivery of advice connected to child maintenance.
The complexity of the child maintenance system left practitioners feeling unequipped to offer confident accurate advice.
During this time I was also gaining experience of my own supporting families to navigate the complex (and often frustrating!) child maintenance system.
After hearing all this the Confident Conversations training was designed with the aim to simply build practitioners’ confidence in addressing barriers, child’s rights framing and initiating conversations by asking, “Does your child receive child maintenance?”
The first session was delivered in November 2023 to our friends at One Parent Families Scotland, after some testing content on our own Fife Gingerbread team. Since then, an incredible 161 practitioners across Scotland have attended! Including Stirling Council, CHAI, Citizens Advice Scotland and Capital City Partnership projects.
Continuous Improvement:
The two-hour, in-person sessions are highly interactive, incorporating discussions, questions, and shared experiences to foster meaningful and practical learning. Participant feedback has played a crucial role in refining the training. Questionnaires completed before and after each session enable us to adapt the content over time.
To keep the sessions engaging (and fun!) we use a "Child Maintenance Jenga" activity, where each Jenga block represents a Child Maintenance buzzword which prompts a discussion. This game has been adjusted as we have learned what works well in each session to keep focused.
Additionally, domestic abuse is a huge challenge in the context of Child Maintenance, and when we first delivered sessions it was clear participants found this particularly challenging. Therefore, we enhanced the training with relevant examples to enhance the experience of how the training can be applied in the ‘real world’.
We are now on Version 5 of the training, and this has been delivered consistently for six months with excellent feedback.
“How to empower clients more. The confidence to discuss it more. I feel better about raising the subject (focusing on the child) rather than the parent.”
“I understand now about the child’s right to have CM. How this will/can impact on their future. I also understand more about the CM service and how it works.”
Looking Ahead:
The success of Confident Conversations so far has revealed a need to develop a tiered approach to training. It has been identified that for some practitioners who are dealing with more complex cases connected to Child Maintenance that advanced training around policy and legislation. We are collaborating with the Scottish Child Law Centre to develop this specialised training, with a pilot session of Child Maintenance: Complex Casework scheduled for February 2025.
Additionally, we are launching a new working group focused on creating a toolkit that will be universally available, focused on empowering families and practitioners. Too often families and practitioners are stuck with the very basics of the Child Maintenance system, and there is a real lack of easily accessible information. We hope to work with partner organisations and families to develop a toolkit to empower families to ensure children receive fair financial support from both parents, wherever possible.
Watch this space!
Kerry - Child Maintenance Coordinator