BCP Council - C-Change: Capacity to Change Training
BCP Council’s Children’s Services were looking to strengthen their assessment practice around parental change, especially families involved with early help support, reunification or potential court proceedings. They identified the need to:
- Improve practitioners’ confidence in assessing parental capacity to change
- Help “stuck” cases move forward more effectively
- Provide a structured, transparent approach to embedding change planning
- Better equip staff to articulate in reports how parents might succeed or fail in sustaining change over time
The C-Change approach (developed with the University of Bristol) was selected because it complements existing assessment frameworks, particularly its focus on the child’s/young person’s voice.
The training was delivered to 3 separate cohorts over two days in a face-to-face workshop format. Participants included social workers, Early Help practitioners, team managers, and specialist staff across BCP’s children and family services.
The training followed the core C-Change curriculum, covering:
- Theoretical (behaviour change) foundations of capacity to change
- A structured, evidence based framework for assessing change trajectories
- Decision points: when to intensify, when to step down or escalate
- How to integrate capacity to change into wider planning and review
- Practice exercises, case scenarios, group discussions
- Use of tools for structured assessment, tracking progress, and presenting evidence
A key component was providing space for participants to apply the framework to real BCP cases (confidentially within the room) using co-consulting and practising how they would articulate capacity-to-change assessments in reports, plans or supervision.
Participants felt that the assessment framework and co-produced goal setting offer a genuine opportunity for families to demonstrate whether they have capacity to change. They felt this would help to avoid situations where families can be set unrealistic goals which can lead to missed opportunities for support, escalation and re-referrals. The 3 courses delivered an excellent average Net Promoter Score of +88 and feedback from the three cohorts included:-
“I feel really confident about establishing more achievable goals for families and working with families to target what goals they would like to achieve.”
· "I will use C Change as I feel it is an excellent and easy to use tools that help understand and measure capacity to change".
· "I will use it as it’s straightforward and very relevant to our work especially as a manager when workers may feel stuck."