New Mentalization-Based Therapy training for local authority practitioners

Published in Blog by Sarah Ingram on November 1st 2023

For many years, policy-makers have known that intense and sustained inter-parental conflict is highly damaging for children as well as for parents themselves. But until now, we’ve not had the evidence to tell us which programmes can make a difference to families.

A recent Government report ‘Reducing Parental Conflict Programme 2018-22’ published in August 2023, concluded the programme was successful overall, and the most successful intervention was a mentalization-based approach delivered by Tavistock Relationships.

Parents who participated in the programme reported that of all the different types of approach tested, Mentalization-Based Therapy (MBT) was the ‘closest to what parents might expect from an intervention about parental conflict’. This may explain why it saw the largest number of participants and was shown to be the most effective.

Now that funding for this support has been allocated to local authorities, we wanted to find a way to bring this approach to more parents. To do this we’ve created an accessible and affordable training programme for local authority practitioners which condenses our knowledge into a 10-session online course.

Key benefits of the training

Our ambition for this training is to deliver benefits to practitioners, parents and local authorities in the following ways:

• empower practitioners with the skills required to manage complex parenting situations;
• provide effective therapy for parents in conflict, enabling them to think of others (including their partners and children) and modify their behaviour; and
• reduce the strain on local authority resources across multiple departments from parents who previously required high levels of emotional, financial and practical support.

A focus on effectiveness

The intensive nature of mentalization-based therapy means that the training is intensive and that cases require close supervision during the training period to ensure the method is effectively learned and applied.

TR can also provide supervision training for local authority staff - a cost effective way of providing real support for families with tangible outcomes.

Further information

Read the Government’s full evaluation of the Reducing Parental Conflict programme.

Find more details of our Mentalization-Based Therapy training. 

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