what we do
Kate Nicolle and Emily Nickson-Williams, the founders of Amity Relationship Solutions with their expert associates, can support your organisation through bespoke consultancy, training, coaching and staff development. We also produce really useful practitioner toolkits and structured support sessions for the frontline workforce that make a real difference to everyday practice, in particular parental conflict, separated parents and child to parent violence and abuse.
We have considerable experience in the public, private, health and education sector helping organisations develop and embed relational, restorative and mediation approaches that will support organisations achieve better outcomes for themselves and the people they work with.
Our resources will help to create a lasting sustainable legacy that will enable the work to continue for years to come.
Parental Conflict Practitioner Toolkits, Structured Sessions and Training
Amity produces toolkits and structured sessions for frontline practitioners working with families. Our toolkits and sessions really make a difference to everyday practice. They provide the essential strategies and tools that are key to supporting families achieve good outcomes. Amity can support you to design bespoke toolkits and sessions based on your needs.
Relationship Essentials – The Toolkit
This is a must have, practical guide to working with parental conflict for your frontline workforce. This is Amity’s unique product, which can be personalised to your requirements so that it includes your own logos, pathways, support options and additional content. It includes (as standard) solution focussed tried and tested questionnaires, assessments, strategies and tools that can be used to support any couple or individual concerned about parental conflict. It has been cleverly designed by subject matter experts to support the frontline workforce to practically and very effectively respond to parental conflict with couples or individuals whether they are together or not. The cost of the licence provides your local authority or organisation with unlimited use and re-production rights to the toolkit for as many practitioners as you wish to train across a range of partnership roles which makes this product extremely cost effective. All practitioners must receive training in order to use this toolkit. It is available in an A4 handbook, e-brochure and PDF options. This toolkit has been described by a range of frontline practitioners as their ‘go to essential guide to working with parental conflict’.
Relationship Essentials – Structured Practitioner Support Sessions (Parental Conflict)
This is sessional structured support intended for use with couples who are concerned about conflict in their relationship and who are working with a frontline practitioner able to spend some time with them across at least 6 sessions. It has been designed by subject matter experts who have worked and trained in a variety of specialist roles including family mediation, family coaching, couple relationship counselling and Children’s Services and has been found to be most useful when used by a range of front-line practitioners across early help, children’s centres, social care, education, health, adult services, youth justice, youth services and voluntary sector organisations. The solution focussed sessions build week on week to help couples understand why they argue, how this impacts on their children, what strategies they can use to communicate more effectively & cope better. This valuable tool can be recorded within existing case note systems with progress measured using pre and post evaluations. Accompanying refresher online tutorials can also be purchased. Amity can offer ongoing workforce supervision throughout the year to support staff to feel confident and capable.
Relationship Essentials – Structured Practitioner Support Sessions
(Parental Conflict, Co-Parenting After Separation)
This is bespoke structured support over at least 6 sessions and is for use alongside parents who are no longer together and who are concerned (or their practitioner is concerned) about conflict in their relationship and the impact that can have on their children. It has been designed to be used by any frontline practitioner who is able to spend some time with them (either separately or together) across at least 6 sessions. These sessions have been designed by subject matter experts who have worked and trained in a variety of specialist roles including family mediation, family coaching, couple counselling and Children’s Services. The sessions have been found to be most useful when used by a range of front-line practitioners across early help, children’s centres, social care, education, health, adult services, youth justice, youth service, voluntary sector organisations. This is a solution focussed, restorative toolkit and builds week on week to help them understand why they argue, how this impacts on their children, how and why their relationship ended, the impact of new partners and children/step-children, what strategies they can use to communicate more effectively & cope better, working together as ‘co-parents’. It ends with a ‘communication and parenting plan’ that can be created with their practitioner and can prevent some families from resorting to the under-pressure family court system. This work can be recorded within existing case note systems and is measured using pre and post intervention questionnaires which evidence progress. Accompanying refresher online tutorials can also be purchased. Amity can offer ongoing workforce supervision throughout the year to support staff to feel confident and capable.
TRAINING
Parental Conflict
This half day training is crucial for all practitioners working with individuals, couples or families and will provide them with the skills, confidence, and knowledge they need to recognise, understand, and respond to parental conflict and can be delivered with or without the elements of the Relationship Essentials – The Relationship Toolkit. Practitioners who complete this training will be left feeling confident, capable and ready to embed relationship enquiry into their everyday practice. We can also provide a bespoke version of this training to fit around existing tools/toolkits you already use.
Domestic Abuse
This half day training is useful for anyone who needs to understand more about domestic abuse including recognising and responding as part of their role. This training requires some pre-work with your organisation so that it can personalised to your local area. It includes information about the Domestic Abuse Bill, what domestic abuse is, the impact of Covid 19, recognising signs and what to do about disclosures or concerns, local services and pathways.
Recognising the difference between parental conflict and domestic abuse
This is an extremely popular half day training session for any practitioner working with parental conflict and has been created in response to questions raised by the wider workforce who are keen to recognise the difference between parental conflict and domestic abuse. This session explores the language used to describe parental conflict and domestic abuse, local risk assessment, safety planning, the critical difference between the two concerns, how sometimes this is confusing and what do if we are concerned about either. This session requires some pre work with your organisation to understand local risk assessment processes and pathways for domestic abuse and parental conflict.
Child to Parent Violence and Abuse
This unique half day training will support the frontline workforce to recognise child to parent violence and abuse (also known as adolescent parent violence, child on parent violence) and confidently support parents and practitioners to implement strategies, undertake safety planning and signpost to local agencies. The training will explore real, anonymised families affected by this specific type of underreported family conflict and case studies reflecting their journeys.
Workshops/
Supervision/Coaching
Bespoke tutorial videos
We offer a range of short practitioner videos/webinars that are subject specific and helpful in terms of ongoing supervision and refresher training. We can discuss this with you depending on your needs.
Consultancy
In any transformative process and in the spirit of our relational practice and co-production culture, we believe it is important to understand the organisational context in which you want to inform sustainable change. We can support you through bespoke consultancy in the form of one-to-one meetings, webinars and workshops for senior leaders, elected member, practitioners, and citizens including making use of planning tools and maturity matrix models. We would want to take account of your current local governance arrangements and review policy and strategy to ensure that changes support a long-term change vision for you as opposed to short term benefits or quick wins. We understand that you want to leave a lasting, sustainable legacy for your families and will support you to achieve this.
Early Help Management Consultancy
Amity founders and associates have considerable strategic experience in the Early Help arena. We can support you to design and review your Early Help systems, processes, and procedures. Contact us for a conversation about problem solving or ‘sense checking’ any aspect of your offer including re-structure/re-design. We can, for example, support you to design and review your neglect screening tool, Early Help ‘front door’ systems and processes including assessments, recording systems, supervision processes. One of Amity’s founders was responsible for the development of the UKs first ever Adolescent Graded Care Profile as well as a range of other strengths based assessment designs/re-designs.PRIVATE SECTOR
At Amity we believe that people are more productive if they are surrounded by healthy workplace relationships. We also know that if you live with positive relationships at home you are more likely to be more productive in the workplace too. So whichever way you look at it, positive relationships play a key part in ensuring that an organisation and it’s people thrive.
How relational is your workforce?
By working with us your workforce will learn how to be more relational, we will coach your employees to recognise and use the skills required to have more harmonious relationships. Stress is relationship kryptonite, it causes conflict and work and home lives are often full of stress! Through our menu of training, toolkits and coaching we can provide your work force with the knowledge they need to function in a more healthy, relational way.
Respect at Work Workshops
Everybody has the right to be treated with respect in the workplace but that’s not everyone’s experience. We all get it wrong sometimes, write an email that get’s taken the wrong way, do something that someone finds patronising when it was meant to be helpful. It’s normal to find people’s working relationships are littered with misunderstandings and assumptions. Ineffective relational skills and poor communication often under lies a workplace that lacks respect.
Our workshops are designed to tackle this issue and transform how teams interact with one another, improving relational capability and creativity.
Domestic Abuse Training – Feel more comfortable with the uncomfortable
We need to have a societal shift in attitude and culture change towards domestic abuse. You know it happens but you don’t know what to do about it….but at Amity we do. Let us create your domestic abuse policy, engage us to train your staff so they feel more comfortable with the uncomfortable and are well equipped to respond to those suffering from domestic abuse.
Unfortunately, healthy relationships can feel unattainable to many people for lots of reasons. Domestic abuse has been elevated in our societies consciousness as we saw cases rise dramatically during Covid lockdown. It is not a reality that businesses can afford to ignore any more, domestic abuse happens to people across the spectrum of our society, it may be happening to one of your work colleagues. But we don’t talk about it. It’s likely that managers don’t feel confident to identify that it is happening or comfortable responding to it. Not responding can result in a lack of productivity (not to mention possible harm to the person) and often in the employee leaving their role unable to cope with their situation.
Mental health used to fit into this, ‘let’s pretend it’s not happening’ category until it became a conversation society began to have, even the royal family were encouraging us to talk about it. It was then that we recognised as a society that poor mental health is a reality for many people. Now organisations are expected to have a Mental Health Policy and to show they have a duty of care for their employee’s mental health and wellbeing. The same is necessary for respect at work and domestic abuse and we have the solutions.