By Gillian MacIntyre
June 2023
Work on our project “how adult social workers support parents with learning disabilities” has been underway for several months now and during this time we have been learning more about the adult social care landscape in England, as well as getting to grips with some of the challenges of conducting research in a sector where staff are under ever increasing pressure due to rising demands and significant budget constraints.
Before starting out on our field work we had some understanding of the key challenges faced by parents with learning disabilities. Our previous work and a review of the most recent literature (published since 2019) paints an increasingly familiar picture of the lives of parents with learning disabilities. Their lives are often complex and characterised by disadvantage, marginalisation and discrimination. They are over-represented in the child protection system and are less likely to have their children living with them than parents without a learning disability. Literature suggests that professionals sometimes feel unprepared and have limited knowledge about the needs of parents with learning disabilities and that a number of barriers to professional practice remain.
None of the literature that we reviewed looked specifically at the role of adult social workers and this combined with the views of our parents’ advisory group, who were unaware of their entitlements under the Care Act to support with parenting, highlighted to us the necessity of this research. Our intention is to work with social work teams across England identifying five case study sites. These will be different types of local authority and we aim to ensure representation across urban and rural areas as well as trying to encapsulate different demographic characteristics. We are also interested in learning from those areas who have developed a specialist policy to support parents with learning disabilities.
So far, we have collected data across one case study site and have just embarked on data collection in a second site. This has involved carrying out interviews with key stakeholders including service managers, principle social workers and those with responsibility for commissioning. We have also facilitated focus groups using a vignette to discuss possible support options for parents with a formally diagnosed learning disability as well as for parents with a learning difficulty or learning need where diagnosis has been less clear. We have held focus groups with social workers from different types of teams – specialist learning disability teams, generic adult teams and children and families teams. We are also interviewing parents with learning disabilities about their experiences of receiving support from adult services as this is where the significant gap in our knowledge appears to be.
While we had a good understanding about the complexities inherent in the lives of parents we had much less understanding of the complexities surrounding the adult social care landscape. We now have a greater sense of the different ways in which services are configured in different areas and understand that the pathway to receiving support for parents with learning disabilities is not always straightforward. A number of factors appear to influence how and if a parent with learning disability accesses support and from whom. These include different diagnostic criteria, different legislative frameworks and eligibility criteria as well as competing demands for resources. Alongside these structural factors we have also begun to learn more about positive practice characterised by a willingness to learn about the specific needs of parents with learning disabilities and a commitment to focus on the individual and their environment, key features of relationship based practice.
As we continue to learn more about supporting parents with learning disabilities our intention is to provide carefully constructed feedback to each of our case study sites, highlighting key aspects of positive practice to enhance learning across organisations. We also aim to feed into the development of national policy around supporting parents with learning disabilities as well as providing more general guidance for social workers across England.
This is a really exciting project and we feel very grateful to the Local Authorities, Social Workers and parents with learning disabilities who have already given up their time to support our work with the ultimate goal of enhancing future practice. If this sounds like the kind of project that you or your organisation might like to get involved in please do get in touch. It does not require a lot of time commitments and provides a great opportunity to learn and shape future practice.