‘Train practitioners to counsel couples’

Social care professionals should be trained to provide relationship counselling if they are to fulfil the Every Child Matters agenda, according to a think-tank this week.

The Institute for Public Policy Research said the staff would need the training to help them respond to relationship difficulties in couples they encountered in their work. The issue of including relationship counselling in the social care remit was raised in Every Child Matters.

The research goes on to call for a UK-wide study to explore how relationships within families could best be supported by policy.

● Freedom’s Orphans: Raising Youth in a Changing World