Parenting Across Scotland’s ‘teens project’: calling all carers!

Here is a very interesting notice, from Alison Clancy, Project Officer in ‘Parenting across Scotland’ (PAS), a partnership of charities working together to provide a focus for issues and concerns affecting parents and families in Scotland. They are forming a series of focus groups, in support of ongoing work for the government. Want to volunteer (and get £30)? Read on!

‘[Our] teens project follows on from a parent information mapping exercise that CHILDREN 1st conducted for the Scottish Government. That mapping exercise was based on a commitment in the National Parenting Strategy about the provision of information to parents and carers. The mapping exercise found that most resources were for parents of very young children and there was very little information outside of education to support parents and carers of teenagers.

The teens project is managed by Parenting across Scotland and partner organisations. The objectives of the project are to:

• Identify what information is required by parents/carers of young people
• Explore views on current availability of information
• Access views on resources currently available
• Explore the most effective methods of getting information to parents, and
• Identify key issues in the development of information to parents/carers

We plan to run 4 focus groups and hope to organise these in March. We have certain criteria for the parents/carers that we wish to recruit but would like a broad representation. We are concentrating on parents/carers who have children in either P7 and S1 or S2 to S4.

We have commissioned a research company, Scotinform to conduct the focus groups for us. They will contact the parents/carers directly and will facilitate the focus groups. Each group will consist of between 8 -10 participants and last up to two hours. The groups will be held in the evening at 6pm and 8pm to maximise the chance of attendance. Each participant will receive a £30 incentive voucher for attending and any childcare or travel costs will be reimbursed.

This work will feed into an event on 29 April 2014 in Glasgow. All participants will be invited to attend the event and again childcare and travel costs will be reimbursed.

If you are interested in taking part please contact me as soon as possible.

Looking forward to hearing from you
Alison Clancy
PAS Project Officer
0131 319 8071’