Photos and findings from the After the Riots Conference

Photos and findings from the After the Riots conference are now available. The conference, held in London on 21st January 2012, was a great success, and brought together parents, practitioners and young people to discuss the causes of the August riots. The Foundation will be producing a detailed summary as well as video of the event. We are discussing with our partners how issues raised on the day are addressed.

New parental mental health e.learning resources

Families can be helped to stay together and thrive if the right support is offered at the right time. The Social Care Institute for Excellence’s (SCIE) Parental mental health resources (external website) focus on the whole family, demonstrating how parents will always receive the best support with integrated working across children's, adults' and health services.SCIE has developed an eLearning package, Parental mental health and families (external website). The resource sets out all the key relationships, linkages and systems that need to be understood and taken into account of in parental mental health and families work.

First UK-based facilitator trainers certified!

For over ten years SFSC facilitators have been trained by accredited facilitation trainers from Parenting Across Cultures, including Marilyn Steele, Judy Gaines, Paul Nagle-McNaughton, Neldine Edwards, Linda Reyes Songer and Vicky Fitzgerald. However, we are now proud to announce the certification of our first two UK-based SFSC facilitator trainers - Bernadette Rhoden and Maurice Kennedy.

Both Bernadette and Maurice are experienced SFSC facilitators with a huge amount of experience in delivering and supporting the programme. Following additional training and observation of their skills, the Parenting Across Cultures team has now accredited them to provide facilitator training across the UK.So, what difference will this make for existing and new facilitators? Although the delivery model for SFSC will remain unchanged, in future prospective facilitators will benefit from:

• a facilitator training which takes account of the SFSC co-facilitation model
• the UK knowledge and links of facilitator trainers
• easier access to facilitator trainings
• ongoing input to the programme from UK based trainers through the Race Equality Foundation

We hope you will join us in congratulating Bernadette and Maurice on achieving the high standard required to become accredited SFSC facilitator trainers! If you have any questions or comments about this, please speak to a member of the SFSC team.

New parent certificate ordering process

From January 2012, the process of issuing parent certificates will change. The parent certificates for attending an SFSC programme will now be sent to you electronically.There will be a number of benefits to this:

• It will allow for a quick turnaround, and will mean that your certificates will arrive with you in good time for your graduations
• It will mean that corrections can be made quickly and easily when mistakes are made with spellings etc.
• It will mean that you can control the way you print the certificate out – you can use plain paper, card or laminate in order to present to parents

In addition the template we are using is more in keeping with the programme materials and the manual, and is unique to the programme as opposed to the old generic style certificates.This new system will reduce the administrative cost of producing certificates. With the current system, we would have had to introduce charges in order to cover the materials, postage and admin involved. However we also believe that this system will result in better certificates, on time and with greater accuracy.

The certificates continue to come in two formats - participation and completion. In order to receive the certificates you need to complete the 'certificate order form', which is sent out to you when you register a programme, this has your unique programme registration code on it. You will need to return this form two weeks before requiring the certificates. We will produce an electronic file which contains your completed signed certificates and this will be emailed to you for you to print. Whilst the certificates are in colour, you can print them in either black and white or colour, depending on the type of printer you have. For those people who would still like us to print and post certificates, we can do so but you will need to specifically request this and we will now need to charge for this service. Good luck with your programme delivery, and we hope you like the new certificates!

Conference remembers Dr Marilyn Steele
This year's Strengthening Families Strengthening Communities conference enjoyed great success, with a strong turnout and enthusiastic debate on the theme of 'parenting in a time of austerity'.Delegates at the conference also heard from Miles Tanter, the son of SFSC programme developer, Dr Marilyn Steele. Dr Steele sadly passed away earlier this year, and Mr Tanter thanked facilitators and UK staff for their condolences after his mother's death, speaking both of his mother's and his own commitment to the programme.

Dr Steele's positive contribution to the parenting community is also to be commemorated with the announcement of 2 new awards, the Marilyn Steele award for outstanding facilitation and the Marilyn Steele parent award for community action.

Further details of the awards will be published in January 2012 when we formally announce the awards and the timetable for nominations for the awards. Further information will appear on our websites and Twitter feeds (@raceequality and @ref_sfsc) soon.

• See presentations from Changing Times: Supporting parents in a time of austerity.

SFSC conference announced!
This year's SFSC conference will take place on 21st November, and will look at the theme of supporting parents in a time of austerity. The event will see contributions from parents, young people, practitioners, and policy makers. There will be two panel discussions: one looking at strategies for sustaining parenting support. The other panel will debate the role of parents in preventing violence. In addition there will be a series of workshops, including:

• Delivering parenting programmes to learning disabled parents
• Supporting non-resident dads in their parenting role
• Delivering SFSC to parents of under-fives
• Online parenting support – what should this look like?
• Parenting programmes as a response to communities affected by guns, gangs and knives

For more details see the conference page.

Free parenting classes to be offered to over 50,000 mothers and fathers
The Race Equality Foundation welcomes the Government’s announcement of the offer of parenting classes to all fathers and mothers with children under the age of six.The Foundation’s Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities inclusive parent programme is already being taken-up by parents across England as well as in Camden, one of the Government's pilot sites. Evaluation and comments from parents suggest that they think it is of value to all parents and should be offered as early as possible.

Strengthening Practice to be relaunched!

Strengthening Practice is an online network, designed to facilitate information-sharing and support between SFSC facilitators. We are currently rebranding the Strengthening Practice site to bring it into line with the Race Equality Foundation's other websites. We plan to launch the new website by the end of the year- watch this space!

Foundation secure funding for SFSC parenting programme under Communities Against Gangs, Guns and Knives Fund

The Race Equality Foundation has secured funding from the Home Office through the Communities Against Gangs, Guns and Knives Fund. The work will support families living in areas blighted by gang, gun and knife crime, by building on the evidenced-based violence prevention parenting programme, Strengthening Families Strengthening Communities (SFSC). We will help parents to work with their children to keep them safe, and also support parents to make an impact on the communities in which they live.

What increases the risk of involvement in violence?
There is evidence to suggest that the risk of involvement in violence (including involvement in gangs and the use of guns and knives) is increased by:

• societal factors (for example, poor rule of law)
• community factors (such as poverty)
• relationship factors (such as friends being involved in violence)
• personal factors (for example, alcohol/drug abuse)

How can SFSC help?

We know that warm and authoritative parenting is key in preventing children and young people from becoming involved with gangs, guns and violence. Parenting programmes, such as SFSC, can foster a positive style of parenting, and promote the social competence, self-esteem and solution building skills of children and young people. Building on this evidence, the Race Equality Foundation will work with a range of partners to deploy an enhanced version of the SFSC parenting programme. We will work in Croydon, Leeds and Haringey, targeting areas which have a greater risk of children and young people being involved in gangs, guns and violence. The enhanced version of the SFSC programme will introduce a new film resource, to trigger discussion and plans for individual, family and community action. The project will reach 180 parents over the lifetime of this work.

See the Challenging gun, gang and knife crime through supporting parents project pages

See the Home Office Challenging gun, gang and knife crime through supporting parents FAQs (250kb PDF file).

SFSC is now on Twitter!
You can now keep up to date with events and current affairs information by following our SFSC feed on .

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