Over the last 2 years the Barnardo’s Children Affected by Parental Offending Engagement service has delivered training to over a thousand practitioners in 74 workshops across the Midlands and South West.

Our workshops have included 2 hour awareness raising sessions on the needs of children of offenders, half day training events on how to provide effective support to children and families ‘left behind’ in the community and full day Hidden Sentence courses delivered from inside a prison.

The majority of delegates have come from social care, early help, education or the police, but one of the great benefits of delivering these workshops has been the opportunity for multi-disciplinary professionals to come together and discuss the implications for their services and share good practice.

Our training aims to give a voice to those children and families affected and we ensure that all our events include film or face to face input from both young people and parents (including those in custody). We also know that practical resources are what many service providers really want to support their practice therefore all our training provides resources and practical tools that can picked up and used straight away.

In the last 12 months 100% of our delegates have rated the workshops as ‘good’ or excellent’.

‘Excellent training; interesting/insightful and delivered with passion.  Breath of fresh air for training.’

‘Amazing session, full of first-hand experience and brilliant resources.’

‘Fabulously delivered.  Real insight into a young person's experience.  Emotive, knowledgeable and real.'

‘Excellent day.  Involvement of prisoners invaluable and visit to a prison extremely informative.’

Delegates regularly leave the workshops with a renewed commitment to developing their support for children and families of offenders. Practitioners have adapted their assessment and referral forms so that their services are more effective at identifying the needs of children of offenders, developed resource packs to inform their work, promoted their support for families of offenders across their services and sought ways to challenge the stigma and isolation that these families often experience. This is exactly the impact we were hoping to achieve!

To find out more about how you could attend one of our training courses or commission training for your service visit https://www.nicco.org.uk/training.