‘There’s a lot of discrimination’: UK training scheme aims to help social workers dealing with disabled parents

“It feels like they don’t listen to your voice. It’s really frustrating. They see us as parents with a disability, they don’t see past that,” said Jennifer Brown, as she reflected on her dealings with social services over the past decade. Brown, 39, has a learning disability and cerebral palsy and she believes this was part of the reason why her son was removed from her care and given to relatives of the child’s father soon after he was born.

Research suggests between 40% and 60% of parents with a learning disability have had their children removed due to being assessed as unable to provide an adequate standard of parenting, and they are over-represented in the child protection system.

Brown is helping to deliver a new training programme, Voices of the Parents, thought to be the first of its kind in the UK, to help social workers better understand and communicate with disabled parents.

“There’s still a lot of disability discrimination going on. A lot of the parents I work with, social services aren’t giving them a chance to parent,” Brown said. “They’re looking at the disability rather than whether they’re capable of doing it.”

Brown said she was a victim of domestic violence after giving birth, which exacerbated her poor relationship with social services. She had to undergo cognitive and parenting assessments to judge her ability to look after her child, which made her feel “like social services are constantly on your back”.

Designed by parents through the Birmingham-based charity CASBA Advocacy , the training she is helping to run aims to improve relationships with social workers and combat discrimination.

It aims to help professionals understand the unique challenges parents with learning disabilities face, as well as how they can make spoken language, written letters and meetings more understandable and accessible.

Some trial sessions have already taken place, and it is due to be rolled out to trainee social workers in the city later this year.

Charlotte Hulbert, a senior social worker and practice educator at the Sweet Project, a social enterprise family support service in south Birmingham, who is completing the training, said: “I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything specifically focused on parents with learning needs, which is baffling. These are people we’re interacting with on a daily basis.

“It’s so important to get first-hand accounts of people’s experiences working with professionals and what we need to do better. So when training is offered from a parent perspective, we need to grasp on to that. We need to learn.”

Martyn and Christine Spooner, who have been married for 21 years, had their two children taken from their care more than two decades ago, in a painful process that Christine said caused her to develop depression.

Martyn, 44, has epilepsy and muscular dystrophy, while Christine, 42, has a learning disability, ADHD and autism. They said their disabilities were cited as one of the main reasons why they were deemed not fit enough to care for their children.

“There’s a very old stigma that people with learning disabilities can’t be parents, and that’s unfortunately what you still see even today,” said Christine, who is chair of People First, a national self-advocacy charity for people with learning disabilities.

“A lot of these social workers have probably never been around somebody with a learning disability before. So the training is vital because unless they spend time with us, they’ll never learn what we’re capable of doing, their attitude will never change.”

She added that many parents with learning disabilities felt they were subjected to a “double standard”, where they were criticised for small things non-disabled people would not be. She also said that while resources, such as “easy read” materials, were available, they were rarely provided or signposted.

Research has found that when given appropriate support, many parents with learning disabilities can become effective and responsible carers for their children.

Many of the parents with learning disabilities working with CASBA struggle with poor housing conditions, poverty, domestic violence and vulnerability, all of which pose risks to child safeguarding.

The charity’s broader Pregnancy to Parenthood project aims to tackle some of these issues by running workshops on domestic violence awareness, self-esteem and parenting skills.

Denise Monks, a social worker and professional officer with the British Association of Social Workers, said underfunding meant the situation for parents with learning disabilities had not changed much over the past two decades.

“The most basic element is: can this parent take on and learn the skills needed to care for the child? A lot of parents can learn that, but they might just take longer to do it,” Monks said. “And given that we’ve had over a decade of austerity cuts to local authority budgets, the resources haven’t been there to actually give parents some of the opportunities they’ve needed.”

She added that in many cases social workers were walking into “really complex and difficult situations” that should have been on the radar of adult social services earlier, and individuals were often not experts in working with parents with learning disabilities.

Training and resources for this were direly needed, she said, but across more than just social services. “We know there are now generations of families affected by this,” she said. “If we cannot provide the right support to improve the parenting skills within families, then we’re just storing up pain and heartache and difficult lives for generations to come.”