Aberdeenshire C Change

C-Change is a structured, evidence based approach to assessing parental capacity to change in situations where the parenting is likely to be causing harm to their children.  It was developed at the University if Bristol and Interface are the national training provider for the C-Change approach.

Aberdeenshire were interested in further improving quality of assessments and particularly to enable practitioners to move ‘stuck’ cases forwards and provide practitioners with greater confidence to intervene in families who could make initial changes but struggled to sustain parenting at a good enough level.  C-Change needed to work smoothly with the GIRFEC model and the resilience/vulnerability matrix.

We very much enjoyed delivering the 2-day C-Change training and 1 follow up day focussed on embedding to 24 senior practitioners, social workers and deputy team or team managers from across the locality teams in Aberdeenshire.  By the end of the 3 days, leaners felt that using the C-Change approach would enhance the evidence presented in assessments, increase parental understanding of expectations.  They found it easy to use and incorporate into existing assessment processes and felt confident that they would be able to take it back into their daily working lives.

Aberdeenshire have put together a working group to embed C-Change within the borough and are evaluating the impact of using the C-Change approach.

Feedback from learners included:

• C-Change will greatly help to focus on particular areas of change and how best to approach these with parents. It gives a clearer framework to use in reports to analyse a parents’ capacity to change
• Gives very clear examples of shared goals that can be measured. Will help particularly in cases where parents do well in assessment period but still have long term concerns about sustainability and ability to change
• The approach appears to help balance giving parents opportunities but remaining child focused throughout. Ensures goals are related to how these will benefit child
• It will help focus on the actual ability of a parent to achieve and sustain change within the child’s timescales and therefore inform timely decision making

• 100% of responses said they would recommend the training to a colleague.
• 100% said they intended to use the approach within the 3 months after the training.