Online Family Hubs/Reducing Parental Conflict Practitioners Course

Tavistock Relationships is delighted to offer this new 10-week course led by Honor Rhodes, OBE to local authority practitioners interested in learning the best ways to support and improve parental relationships. Using two-hour weekly meetings over a term, we’ll think together about research and practice, and what obstacles we can overcome by thinking about relationship quality and how to improve it. We will look at relationship quality between parents who are living together or apart, between parents and children, wider family relationships and how professionals work together.

There are three areas of thinking:

1. Focuses on ourselves and a better understanding of how individuals come to behave and think in certain ways.
2. Relationships, between people, within families and across our professional working lives.
3. Study of organisations and how they work, how they change and how we can understand them better, allowing us to work more usefully.

Download the brochure

Webinars

For each cohort there will be a series of 2-hour webinars relating to key ideas and research, relationships, obstacles to communication and change, self-understanding, conflict and collaboration.

Reading and materials

Week by week there are a range of reading options. We offer suggestions for Podcasts to listen to, newspaper articles to read and films to see. We know everyone learns and thinks in different ways, so we try hard to help every student find their own best method.

Tavistock Relationships Tutor Groups

Students are grouped into Tutor sets, an experienced Tavistock Relationships tutor is there to guide, support and encourage you throughout the term.

Applied Research Project Option

This course offers an applied research option for those students who are interested. Previous areas of research have included:

• Why do we find it hard to work with both parents?
• How can we best help parents whose children have autism/ASD or other conditions?
• How can we support better communication between parents who are separated and use children as weapons of war?
• Have we designed a service that is unfriendly to fathers by accident?
• How can we work restoratively using a relationships focus?
• Why is conflict so anxiety provoking?

Students have gone on to present their work to teams and senior managers leading to policy and practice change.

This course is designed for practitioners in settings where family hubs funding is driving a relationship focussed approach.

What our past students have said:

"I'm about to become my Service’s Relationships Champion and fly the flag with the idea."

"I felt privileged to hear from experts in this field and could listen to Honor all day, such a good speaker!"

"I am a family support worker, so I use the knowledge you have taught me on a daily basis. It’s also been good to tell my colleagues what I’ve learned and help them to feel more confident to ask those difficult questions about relationships. Thanks for the memories!"

"Each week I was becoming more confident in my learning, listening to everyone’s research and hopes on how to embed RPC into their individual LA’s and work areas was fantastic. It gave me ideas and I hadn’t thought of. I’ve loved the course."

The course runs from 11 January 2023 to 29 March 2023.

All course components listed below are online events and will take place on Wednesdays.

• 11 January 9.30am - 11.30am
  Introductions, welcome, key ideas, evidence review Organisations
  Workshop (2hrs)
• 18 January 9.30am - 10.30am Understanding ourselves
  Webinar (2 hrs)
• 25 January 9.30am - 11.30am Understanding couple relationships
  Webinar (2 hrs)
• 1 February 9.30am - 11.30am Understanding organisations
  Workshop (2hrs)
• 8 February 9.30am - 11.30am Understanding change and resistance
  Webinar (2 hrs)
• 15 February READING WEEK
• 22 February 9.30am - 11.00am Tutorial Group
  Tutorial groups (90 mins)
• 1 March 9.30am - 11.30am Understanding ourselves as
  workers and colleagues, workand home lives
  Webinar (2 hrs)
• 8 March 9.30am - 11.30am Understanding couple and family relationships, what works to improve communication, trust and hope?
  Workshop (2hrs)
• 15 March 9.30am - 11.30am Understanding organisations, conflict and collaboration, policy practice and effectiveness, acting as internal consultants
  Webinar (2 hrs)
• 22 March 9.30am - 11.00am Tutorial Group material
  Tutorial groups (90 mins)
• 29 March 9.30am – 11.30am End of course celebration, bringing the work together
  and review
  Workshop (2hrs)