8. What action is the Welsh Government taking to promote positive parenting? OAQ(5)0058(CC)

Parents have access to a range of services that promote positive parenting, delivered by partners in local government, health and education. This forms part of a package of measures to promote positive parenting, including the ‘Parenting. Give it time’ campaign and our significant investment in Families First and Flying Start.

Thank you for that answer, Cabinet Secretary. You’ll know that I’m a huge advocate of positive parenting, particularly given what I think are premature plans from your Government to ban smacking and criminalise parents. However, I note that you as Cabinet Secretary agree that positive parenting is something that ought to be available to all parents who need it. Unfortunately, though, in spite of your efforts, that isn’t the case. There have been about 3,000 positive parenting courses delivered over the 15 months to June 2016. A third of those were in Cardiff, and in some local authority areas, including Conwy, there have been none whatsoever. What action are you taking to make sure there is equitable access to positive parenting for all parents across the whole of the country?

Well, I’m working with my team now to push out the next phase of positive parenting. I think the Member is absolutely right—we have to engage with parents. I’m not convinced, actually, as we sit here today, that poster campaigns or website-based programmes are the real deal for positive parenting. I think there is a lot of peer-to-peer support or mentoring through community groups, whether that be religious church-based groups, or in school settings, or mother and toddler groups, or father and toddler groups. I think it’s really important that we’re able to share examples and it’s a much more positive way of engaging.

The suite of tools that I’m looking at is to provide a package around positive parenting delivered through trusted sources, and then we will also make sure that we legislate, which I know the Member isn’t favourable to. But this is a suite of tools on positive parenting, and we will legislate at the end of that to remove the defence of reasonable punishment.

Would the Cabinet Secretary agree that one of the best ways of supporting parents is by groups where parents support each other and learn from each other parenting skills? Would he congratulate the organisations that have been set up by parents for mutual support, in particular Single Parent Wales, which is working in partnership with Gingerbread, and which I met recently, and which are there to support each other and to promote healthy living, and which went on a very successful ramble around Barry Island last weekend?

Indeed, and who am I to argue with Julie Morgan in this field? Of course, I wasn’t invited to the ramble—maybe that was a good idea. [Laughter.] But the Member is absolutely right: I think it is about the interventions that we have with each other. Relationships—what works well and what doesn’t work well, and a non-stigma approach to how we are able to enhance the development of young people is important. I’m giving that some very serious consideration, because the campaigns that we currently have are process driven, rather than personalised and individual. I think the Member raises a very important point.