NACCC’s CEO Elizabeth Coe is attending the APPG for Supporting Couple Relationships and Reducing Parental Conflict meeting this evening – working to raise awareness of child contact centres as part of the solution to reduce parental conflict and improve family support. Contact centres enable #parenting to continue after a relationship ends, ensuring children feel supported and safe.
The government is currently investing in ‘family hubs’ which should provide good quality ‘triage’ for couples facing difficulties and seeking to separate. A recent report from the Family Solutions Group, established by President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, provided a detailed outline of what good quality ‘triage’ services would look like. This report set out how Family Hubs could be used as a local source of information and to signpost appropriately to reliable providers of services in the area for separating and separated families.
Providing good separation and post separation support should be a long-term ambition for a successful Family Hubs model. This should recognise the particular needs of families going through this process and the support they will require to ‘separate well’ and to maintain positive co-parenting relationships in the years that follow. The work of the Family Solutions Group has provided a significant amount of evidence on ‘what good looks like’ and the needs of separating and separated families. Managing separation and post-separation parenting well would help the government to improve the number of separated families with informal child support arrangements in place.
Checkout the Family Hubs briefing for more info.
