Supporting Communication for Parents with Intellectual Impairments: Communication Facilitation in Social Work Led Parenting Meetings

People with intellectual impairments are recognised as having communication difficulties and even people with mild intellectual impairments can be challenged by complex language and limited literacy. The focus of this paper is parents who have learning disabilities, outlining a novel approach to support them in stressful case conference situations. Parents with intellectual impairments are frequently the subject of multiple interventions, case conferences and legal proceedings which challenge their communicative capacity. Case conferences often involve professionals with little or no experience of learning disability, including social workers and lawyers. The language in these case conferences can have complex sentence structure, low frequency legal vocabulary and difficult concepts, which are challenging for learning disabled parents to follow. The Communication Facilitator role is a recently developed approach to supporting parents in case conferences, aimed at enabling LD parents to understand and contribute to the proceedings. This paper reports the motivation and practical issues in developing the role, and the use of Communication Facilitator in child protection meetings where there are high stakes for not understanding, resulting in the potential removal of children from the parental home.