How do adult services engage with parents?

In this film, which is part of a webinar that was held on 17 April 2025, Beth Tarleton (Bristol University) and Gillian MacIntyre (University of Strathclyde Glasgow) share key messages from their NIHR-funded research exploring how adult services engage with parents.

Gillian talks about the ways in which the Care Act 2014 may present opportunities for providing a greater level of support to parents with learning disabilities and learning difficulties and outlines how there was a gap in the research in terms of looking at how adult services engage with these parents. This research involved interviews with managers, commissioners, parents, and focus groups with children's and adult’s social workers. It aimed to investigate:

• How adults' social workers identify parents with learning disabilities.
• If, how and when they work with these parents and provide them with support. 

Beth highlights the key findings:

• If a parent had a diagnosed learning disability, they met the threshold for the learning disability team and they got gold standard support.
• For parents with a learning difficulty, consent to a Care Act 2014 assessment was required, but it was not clear whether parents understood what this meant.
• There were differences in professional opinion around whether parents with learning difficulties are likely to be eligible for support under the Care Act 2014.
• If a parent did not have a diagnosed learning disability, but had similar needs, with a possible IQ of just above 70 (learning difficulty), they were often invisible to services.
• Professionals in the general adults team generally felt that they:
  • Did not have experience with working with parents with learning difficulties,
  • Would not feel confident in assessing how the parents’ learning difficulty interacted with their parenting.
  • Would not have the support services available that would work with these parents as they mainly worked with people with physical impairments, older people and people coming out of hospital.
• Adult social care workers did not understand the child protection system, the speed of it and the different stages.
• Children and adult social care workers didn’t have access to each other’s recording systems.
• There was a lack of awareness of counterparts across children’s / adult’s services.
• Children’s and adult’s systems did not fit well together - timescales were so different, adults’ colleagues could not assess the parent before court proceedings.

What worked well:

• Joint protocols between children’s and adult’s services working
• Acknowledgement of the Good Practice Guidance 2021
• Joint funding for working with parents with learning disabilities and learning difficulties
• Training for staff
• Regular communication between the different teams.