On 28 July 2013 Karen Woodall blogged about her new venture on the island of Jersey: Magical Milli’s: the future is in our hands

“In tribute to the Milli’s team, this post looks at the template that this group of women offer as an antidote to the often lazy, shoddy, state managed services which have emerged from the Coalition’s efforts to reform family separation services. This team of women, like the team on the Isle of Wight, which was visited by Maria Miller in her incarnation as the Minister with responsibility for Child Maintenance, demonstrate the power of what can be done by people who care.  And how little that costs.  Contrast that to the £14 million currently being squandered by the Help and Support for Separated Families Initiative and you will begin to see why I feel ashamed at ever having been part of such a waste of time and money.  This group of women never once broke concentration in the daily 8 hour training we delivered to them, from the start to the finish they were interested, involved and inspired (as well as inspiring).  Compare that to the late arrival and early departure of the team that attended the HSSF telephony training course early this year and the additional lolling around and focus on going to watch the X Factor that went on throughout the day, all paid for by the state and accompanied by extreme indifference.  When one is faced by this, it is easy to understand why community services are the way forward.”

On 20 December 2013 Karen Woodall blogged a recap of “2013 - A Year in the World of Family Separation”:

It’s January 2013… On my desk in my office is the draft of the telephony training that I have written for the Department of Work and Pensions initiative called Help and Support for Separated Families…

Back at the office I open the draft of the telephony training.  It is destined to train staff on national helplines to offer help and support to separated families.  The idea originated in discussions that I had had with the then Minister with responsibility for Child Maintenance, Maria Miller.  The reform of family services was intended to move delivery of support to the whole family after separation.  I spent many hours sitting in rooms with the heads of government funded charities discussing how to achieve this.  During this period F4J and Mumsnet had an angry encounter over the feminist discussions about men and boys on the Mumsnet message boards. At the time, I commented on the way in which this fight reflected the way in which mothers and fathers who are separating have to take up adversarial positions simply because of the way that the single parent and domestic violence lobby have dominated the field of family separation.  I watched as the women’s rights representatives dominated the discussion space about family separation.  I wondered why no-one representing fathers ever spoke up to defend them or reset the agenda.  Working on the telephony training, I thought about the father I had just spent two hours with and wondered how I could ever write the kind of training that would develop compassion in the hearts and minds of the people who work in the field of family separation.  Compassion for fathers too often being the missing ingredient in most of the support that is delivered to families after separation…

In March, back at my desk, I find myself in an increasingly agitated state.  Still working on the telephony training I am becoming more and more disillusioned with the Help and Support for Separated Families Initiative that I spent such a long time working on.  Back in 2008, I had, alongside Nick, written, developed and delivered, a core part of the training that enabled the reform of Child Maintenance through the development of the Options service.  Having been part of the reform of Child Maintenance since before Sir David Henshaw produced his review in 2006, I was well versed in its purpose and the intentions of successive governments to move from a punitive to a supportive system of post separation financial arrangements between parents.  Between January and the end of July 2008, Nick and I worked twelve hour days alongside the Child Support Redesign Team in bringing the Options service to life. Between 2009 and 2011, we trained all of the new employees of the Child Maintenance Enforcement Commission (as it was then called) Executive in whole family, gender aware, father inclusive support to separated parents.  Our training was nominated and won awards, it was voted the best part of the Commissions induction programme. We grew more confident that whole family support to separated families was something the government would adopt on a wider scale.  By 2011, when the Coalition government began its simultaneous  reform of the Children Act and family services, we were hopeful that a breakthrough could be made.  In March 2013, as I sit looking at the Web Application which is now widely touted by the DWP as a a tool to help parents to sort out separation, I feel my heart sinking. Though I had known, on the day that Maria Miller and Tim Loughton were reshuffled, that any real reform hopes were lost for good, the reality of the swing back to the same old women’s rights agenda begins to dawn on me…

Summer arrives and I have decided that I can no longer support the DWP in their Help and Support for Separated Families Initiative.  Inspired by a visit to Jersey and the work of some wonderful volunteers at Milli’s which is part of theJersey Centre for Separated Families and linked in to our growing network, I write a blog contrasting that with the experience of working with managers from the Options service.  I have pretty much made up my mind by now that I can no longer work with the DWP because what they have produced is so far away from what parents need that it will cause harm rather than serve to support collaboration between parents.  The DWP don’t want me delivering the training I have written for their telephony service after this is published and I am glad to walk away from it.  What began as a vision of reform of family services, with a telephony circle of leading charities working to help parents to collaborate, ends up with a tiny handful of organisations – one of which has clearly over exaggerated the number of people delivering their telephone services, another of which is unhappy with the concept of collaboration. Two of the organisations do have an understanding of what faces fathers and their children after separation so I comfort myself with the idea that at least my efforts went to supporting those.”

Esther McVey: “The HSSF telephony training is designed to make sure that separated parents get consistent information, messaging and onward support. It is not a network in the traditional sense of one phone line supported by one piece of infrastructure, but over 300 agents have received the tailored training, meaning that the benefits of collaboration can be promoted to parents, regardless of which of the partner organisations’ helplines parents choose to use.”

The four organisations which received the training were Family Lives, National Youth Advocacy Service, Wikivorce, and x.