Thirty Years of Group Work - why is it still relevant today?

CFF celebrated it's 30th anniversary in 2020. As part of our celebrations we asked David Neville, a founder and current board director, to reflect back on why our core values and programme design remain relevant. 
 
The Centre for Fun and Families started running group work programmes in 1990 in the rural area of South Leicestershire. The original group work programme had the following characteristics: they were run predominantly in rural areas and the participants were mainly white. There was only one group work programme referred to as a “Fun and Families Group”, catering mainly for parents of children aged under 10 years of age.
 
In the last 30 years many quite dramatic changes have taken place, partly due to parental choice and partly due to major changes in society generally. These changes have included:-

• The need to offer programmes to families in inner city areas of Leicester and Leicestershire and to parents from a diverse range of ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds
• The need to offer group work programmes to parents of teenagers and also to teenagers themselves.
• The need to focus the groups for teenagers on wider issues than just behaviour. This would include subjects such as anxiety, resilience and general mental wellbeing.
• A major social change has been the dramatic growth of the use of new technology and the associated availability of social media and online information.

With all these changes it would be easy to assume that CFF would become irrelevant to communities that had such diverse needs and had such easy and free access to information about parenting and behaviour. However, 30 years on CFF is still relevant today for a number of reasons:

• CFF's core values allow it’s workers to respond to the diverse needs of families. For example, CFF's group workers encourage parents and young people to think of themselves as the “experts” on the way their family functions. Consequently, any solutions that parents or teenagers work out for themselves as part of the group work process are going to be based on their own knowledge of their family’s religion, culture and circumstances.
• Another key core value is that CFF’s programmes support parents and young people to find solutions for themselves, with the support of other parents/young people within the group setting plus group workers. This core value is in stark contrast to the “Supernanny” approach which assumes that what parents need is an expert to tell them what they are doing wrong and how to do it properly. That is why the vast amount of information on the internet or social media in unhelpful or hard to implement because it is based on giving parents/young people recommendations in the form of “if this happens, do this”. CFF 's approach stops parents feeling like “failures” and shows them they have skills and motivations they can feel proud of and that their experience actually helps other parents/young people.
• The other relevance of CFF’s work is that it is based upon taking a complex set of theoretical ideas (Social Learning Theory and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) that have been made straightforward and accessible to parents/young people. The importance of this was emphasised by a parent who attended a Fun and Families group and said “I attended the local Child Guidance Clinic and then attended one of CFF’s groups. The information provided by both was based upon the same theoretical ideas but CFF had made the ideas much easier to understand and apply."

David Neville

David went on to pen this wonderful poem which features in our Annual Report for 2019-20. 

Keep Finding the Fun!
 
Some thirty years ago, some people had a thought
That parents could find solutions, instead of being taught
to deal with child behaviours that drove them to despair
and made them feel like failures, which really wasn’t fair. 
 
The Centre worked out a method for parents to meet in a group.
To use the strengths of each other, to see if it would bear fruit.
The results were truly amazing, family life became pleasure not pain,
and that nagging feeling of failure wouldn’t raise it’s head again.
 
The Centre for Fun and Families was born with this idea in mind,
That parents are the “experts” on their children and solutions they can find.
Since it’s start in 1990 other groups needed to evolve
plus books, videos and manuals to help parents to problem solve.
 
The help given to families and the hard work they have done
will help them look into the future and continue finding the fun.