About us

The Family Potential Knowledge Exchange is collaboration between The University of Nottingham, The University of Birmingham, and The Open University. The Knowledge Exchange hosts research responding to the challenges facing contemporary policy and practice in relation to how to work innovatively with families, including looking at responses to international policy agendas and work with families who may be perceived as ‘troubled families’. The research is framed with an understanding that families are variously seen as both the problem and the solution. This tension presents challenges for service delivery and in providing coherent and effective strategies for engaging with the complex realities of family life.

The focus of the Family Potential Knowledge Exchange is to develop innovative ways of thinking family that cut across traditional domains of services and renegotiate traditional child/parent focused policy and practice. The Knowledge Exchange is responding to the dearth of research looking at a genuinely ‘whole family’ perspective. Through understanding the lived experience of families the Knowledge Exchange aims to develop service models; inform professional practice; and influence policy to enable strategies to develop and flourish that mobilise family strengths and potential.

Research themes

These are some indicative themes of work that the Family Potential Knowledge Exchange is interested in and engaged with. If you would like more information about any of these research agendas or are interested in contributing, please do not hesitate to get in touch:

• Thinking Family: cross national comparisons in policy and practice
• The impact of system design on professional practice
• Models and practices for conceptualising and engaging with families, relational networks and communities i.e. Family Group Conferencing; Open Dialogue; Family and community engagement work; Restorative justice
• Asset based approaches and models of intensive family support
• Family-inclusive approaches across mental health, adults and children’s services
• Lived experience of families facing complex challenges
• Mental health, families and young people
• Families, networks and communities
• Families and caring relationships i.e. young carers, young adult carers, and caring where a member of the family may have a mental illness
• Care, mutuality, resilience and wellbeing

Who we are