Leicestershire C Change
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.
We are very pleased to have been commissioned by Leicestershire to provide 2 sessions of the two-day C-Change training and 2 follow up days. Approximately 50 practitioners have been trained in the C-Change approach including social workers, support workers, intervention workers and the Principal Social Worker. We will be returning shortly to provide follow up days targeted to the needs of the teams to further embed their learning.
Leicestershire has adopted the Signs of Safety approach to case management and therefore C-Change needed to work with the existing SoS processes and formats. The emphasis in C-Change of working openly alongside parents and of clarity of focus and goal setting ensures that this is a smooth fit and practitioners commented that C-Change would complement the Signs of Safety model but would significantly help to target goals with a family and then observe change. Discussions during the days suggested that the C-Change approach and tools will support practitioners to remain focused on the timescale within which the child needs change to happen, whilst being realistic about how long change may take. Practitioners felt that the C-Change approach would be particularly useful to provide greater depth and structure to parenting assessments.
Feedback from learners:
- I think the Goal Attainment Scaling will be amazing to do with families as they can review [progress towards change] themselves
- The C-Change approach makes you focus on the child and not lose sight of this in your work or analysis
- I will use C-Change to help me analyse for court reports after developing plans with families to target change
- 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.