Empowering parents and communities: The role of coaching at Kids Matter

Katie Akhurst, Head of Training & Programme Development at Kids Matter, recently joined Claire Pedrick on The Coaching Inn podcast to discuss the profound impact coaching has within our organisation.

Coaching is a big deal at Kids Matter and could easily be described as part our DNA because not only does it inform the way we communicate internally but it forms a key approach in the running of our programmes – empowering parents, building confidence and ultimately changing lives. The Coaching Inn podcast offers many keen insights about the value of coaching as a tool to facilitate trust and growth (individual and collective) in different contexts (definitely have a listen!), which we have summarised below if you’re keen to find out more about coaching and how we use it at Kids Matter.

What is coaching?

Coaching is a powerful tool to help individuals find their own path through challenges, boosting their confidence and enabling them to thrive. Coaches don’t provide answers but create a space for parents/carers, facilitators and employees (within the context of Kids Matter) to discover their own solutions.

How coaching works with families and facilitators:

To understand the coaching dynamic at Kids Matter, it’s helpful to have some context about how our model works.

Kids Matter works in partnership with churches and organisations to run parenting programmes in their local communities. These programmes are facilitated by trained facilitators, who use a coaching approach when coming alongside parents and carers in community groups.

The way we enable effective, life-changing community-based provision is through the following:

• Live coaching: During training, facilitators receive live feedback while role-playing delivery of material. This method provides immediate learning experiences for facilitators, helping them improve their skills in real time.
• Ongoing support: Facilitators are assigned a support coach once they complete training. The coach stays with them throughout their journey, offering ongoing guidance. Support coaches act as sounding boards, celebrating wins and helping navigate challenges, awkward session dynamics or roadblocks encountered when running programmes in their communities.
• Community impact: This continuous support structure ensures that coaching is effectively delivered at a community level.
• Wisdom in the room: Facilitators believe in the innate wisdom of parents and create space for them to realise their own solutions. Parents already possess the knowledge and skills to support one another. Coaching helps surface that wisdom in a collaborative environment.

If you have read these points and are wondering why we use evidence-informed booklets if the wisdom is already in the room and simply needs unlocking, allow us to explain. We do not use ‘pure coaching’, which is entirely client led, in our parenting groups (although we may do so in the context of an internal coaching session at Kids Matter) but rather a coaching approach. This means that parents are guided through evidence-informed booklets, which have been designed so that the knowledge is in bite-sized chunks and is used a starting base for the discussion. So, whilst parents may not, for example, have come across the idea of Love Languages, which we talk about in Session 2 of our programme, as a helpful tool they could use to connect with their kids, the way they  absorb the learning is through personal experience and discussion within the group.

In an educational context it would be the same as tutor groups or group work, whereby new thoughts are introduced and grappled with through interaction, as opposed to a teacher standing at the front and talking at you. The impact of a coaching approach can be seen in increased confidence and wellbeing of parents after completing a Kids Matter programme.

How coaching works internally, at Kids Matter:

At Kids Matter, we would not expect the parents/carers who take part in our programmes to do anything that we wouldn’t be prepared to do ourselves, and our aim is to create a collaborative workspace that enables this statement to be true. Enveloped in coaching is an attitude of curiosity and vulnerability, which practically manifests in the asking of questions (and being prepared to answer them) – exploring ideas, attitudes and even grappling with conflict in the workplace.

We also work to ensure our team members who provide coaching (both internally and externally to facilitators) have the skills to do so. Coaches within Kids Matter are upskilled through ICF (International Coaching Federation), creating a solid foundation across the team, and four team members have achieved ACC (Associate Certified Coach) status, with Katie herself being a PCC (Professional Certified Coach), further strengthening the coaching framework within the team.

 If you would like to find out more about Kids Matter, or want to talk about coaching and how we use it in our organisation, then we’d love to hear from you. Email us Katie at katie.akhurst@kidsmatter.org.uk