Working With Parents
Lifelong Learning UK (LLUK) represents employers, stakeholders and staff working with parents, the key purpose of which is to provide and promote a diverse range of learning and development opportunities and supportive activities to enable those in a parenting role to better understand their own and their children's personal, emotional, social, intellectual and physical needs, in order to raise their children as well as they possibly can and to meet the changing demands of society on family life.
There are two main types of job roles:
- those whose main focus or core purpose is working with parents and those in a parenting role to deliver education or support to parents, e.g. parenting service co-ordinators, facilitators, midwives, development workers, tutors, or specialists in a particular field such as psychologists, family therapists or counsellors.
- those who interact with parents but for whom it is not their main role or purpose.
The main focus within the sector relates to the former and encompasses services for all parents including those requiring extra support, such as vulnerable parents and those who have been referred or who may have self-referred because of their child's behavioural or psychological problems. Parents with learning, behavioural or mental health problems, who may be having problems with or causing concerns for professionals with their parenting, are also included.
It is important to note that volunteers undertake much of the work in parenting, although no specific, separate description of a volunteer role has been made, and that, where volunteers deliver the same work as paid practitioners, they need the same training and support.
This text has been updated and adapted from the "Common core" occupational and functional mapping, issued by the former National Training Organisation for Community Learning and Development (PAULO) in 2004, which is available by clicking on the link.
