Report on Family Hubs
July 2016
All
Party Parliamentary Group on Children’s Centres
Family Hubs: The Future of
Children’s Centres
Strengthening family relationships to improve Life Chances for everyone
July 2016
This is not an official publication of
the House of Commons or the House of Lords. It has not been approved by either
House or its Committees. All Party Parliamentary Groups are informal groups of
Members of both Houses with a common interest in particular issues. The views
expressed in this report are those of the Group. This report was researched and
funded by the charity 4Children in their capacity as secretariat to the All
Party Parliamentary Group on Children’s Centres.
Introduction
The All Party Parliamentary Group
on Children’s Centres (referred to throughout this report as “the APPG”)
decided to undertake an inquiry into the future of Children’s Centres as the
centrepiece of its programme of activity for the 2015-16 parliamentary session.
The findings of this inquiry are summarised in this report, and it is hoped
that the recommendations made here will be of particular relevance at this
moment in time as the Government develops its new Life Chances strategy.
The focus of this report – Family Hubs: The Future of Children’s
Centres – is on the role that Children’s Centres’ can potentially play as
hubs for local services and family support. In recent years, the idea of
expanding Children’s Centres’ provision to provide holistic support which joins
up services for the whole family is one which has received an increasing amount
of attention. In 2014, the Centre for Social Justice proposed a model that they
termed “Family Hubs”, which would see Children’s Centres become:
the ‘go to’ place for any parent (including
fathers) to access services or information about all family-related matters
including: birth registration, antenatal and postnatal services, information on
childcare, employment and debt advice, substance misuse services, relationship
and parenting support, local activities for families and support for families separating1
The APPG believes that there is
significant potential in the Family Hub model. Its inquiry therefore set out to
examine the benefits and case for Family Hubs, to highlight examples of best
practice which already exist to demonstrate how the work of Children’s Centres
can be augmented, and to consider the challenges around implementation and how
these can be overcome.
The APPG’s inquiry encompassed four
evidence sessions, held in Parliament. At each session, a number of witnesses
with first-hand experience of working in or with Children’s Centres provided
oral testimony to the APPG (full details are summarised in Appendix A). Each evidence
session looked at a particular form of support that could be delivered within
the Family Hub model, with the topics covered encompassing:
·
Health and Development
·
Employment Support and Childcare
·
Relationship Support
·
Support for Families with Complex Needs
In addition, the Group also issued
a call for written evidence to enable stakeholders to feed their views into the
inquiry, and received a total of 49 responses (a full list of respondents is
shown in Appendix B). The APPG wishes to express its sincere thanks all those
who took time to contribute their views through both oral evidence sessions and
call for evidence.
Chair’s Foreword
Ever since I was first elected as a
Member of Parliament six years ago, families have been one of the causes that I
have been most passionate about during my time at Westminster. I firmly
believe, as do many of my colleagues across Parliament, that strong families
are an essential part of a strong society, and that when families do well all
of us feel the benefit.
As Chair of the All Party
Parliamentary Group on Children’s Centres, I have wanted to explore how we can
build on and broaden Children’s Centres’ existing offer to establish Family
Hubs – using the term first coined by the Centre for Social Justice. These
would be “nerve centres” for families, a one-stop-shop for all manner of
statutory or voluntary sector support, as well as signposting to other
services, to help strengthen family life, relationships within families and the
life chances of children, particularly those from the most deprived
backgrounds. They would be somewhere to go, in every community, where someone
will help you find answers when you are struggling with family issues – throughout
the different stages of family life, and whatever the age of any children you
may have.
As well as continuing absolutely
vital work with children in the very earliest years of life, we wanted to look
at how Family Hubs could potentially deliver a wider set of complementary
services, providing a more joined-up support offer for families, not just from
0-5 but from pre-birth to 105, and even occasionally beyond! In some instances
this is happening already, as our inquiry has heard about the delivery of
services such as employment support and training or relationship support
through Children’s Centres. This report provides many more such examples, about
which we received encouraging evidence. I believe that these kinds of services
should be easily accessible to families across the country whenever they need
them, and that a refreshed vision of Children’s Centres as Family Hubs could
play a key role in this.
Achieving this is, of course, not
without its challenges. Through the course of this inquiry we have sought to
examine the practical issues that need to be overcome if Family Hubs are to
become a reality, and I believe that they have the potential to play a
prominent part in the outcome of the Government’s forthcoming Life Chances
Strategy.
However, this will involve new ways
of thinking and working, in particular with even more integrated working within
the voluntary and statutory sectors at both local and national level, as well
as across Government departments. It is particularly critical that there is
strong leadership at all levels to ensure that whilst it is led by central
Government, the Family Hub approach is also understood and supported locally to
ensure that its potential to transform family relationships, improve children’s
life chances and strengthen local communities is fully realised.
In the months ahead, the APPG
believes that if this vision is to be achieved, it should form a central part
of the Government’s Life Chances Strategy. We hope that this report can make a
valuable contribution to this.
Fiona Bruce MP
A Brief History of Children’s Centres
Children’s Centres have their
origins in the Sure Start Local Programmes initiative which was first
established in the late 1990s. Between 1999 and 2004, 524 Sure Start Local
Programmes were established in selected areas in the 20% most deprived wards in
England, and were expected to provide a range of services including outreach
and home visiting, support for families and parents, health and development
services and support for those with special needs.
Between 2004 and 2010, Sure Start
Local Programmes started to be rolled out nationally, becoming Sure Start
Children’s Centres. This took place over three Phases. Phase One extended full
coverage to the 20% most disadvantaged wards in England; Phase Two expanded
this to encompass the 30% most disadvantaged wards; and Phase Three extended
coverage of the programme nationwide.
Phase One and Two Centres were
largely required to deliver what was termed a “core offer” of services
including early education and childcare, child and family health services,
family support and links to Jobcentre Plus. A significant focus of Children’s
Centres’ work was on supporting the development of children in the earliest
years of life, and as a result they became synonymous with the concept of
“early intervention”.
After 2010, the “core offer” was
replaced by a “core purpose”, which set an overall objective for Children’s
Centres of improving outcomes for young children and their families,
particularly amongst those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, in order to
reduce inequalities in child development and school readiness.2
The latest figures from the
Department for Education indicate that on 31st December 2015 a total
of 3,336 Children’s Centre sites were open, encompassing 2,605 main sites and a
further 731 additional sites offering access to early childhood services.3
Over the lifetime of the Children’s
Centre programme there have been a number of projects which have sought to
evaluate the Centres’ impact, although it is recognised that this can be quite
difficult as the full effects of interventions delivered in the early years may
not become apparent until much later in life. As a result, initial evaluations
produced mixed results, although these gradually became stronger over time as
Children’s Centres became more embedded.
The latest research is being undertaken as part of the Evaluation of Children’s Centres in England
(ECCE) project. Led by the University of Oxford, this has involved
extensive work over a six year period. One of the most recent reports to be
published as part of the project has focused on assessing the effects of
Children’s Centres in promoting better outcomes for children and families, with
the findings suggesting that “Children’s Centres can have positive effects on
outcomes, especially on family functioning that affects the quality of parenting,
and that Children’s Centres are highly valued by parents”.4
Recently, through inspirational locally-led initiatives, many
individual Children’s Centres have expanded their offer. This report highlights
several good practice examples from across the country. These are by no means
isolated ones. There are several more places where key elements of the Family
Hub model are already in operation, such as Newcastle, Manchester, the Isle of
Wight, Staffordshire, and the London boroughs of Bromley and Beckey. This leads
the APPG to conclude that a nationally-led impetus to help transform Children’s
Centres into Family Hubs would be a logical and natural progression of the good
work already started in so many parts of the country.
Executive Summary
Health and Development
Children’s Centres currently have a
key role to play in early intervention, particularly given their established
work in the early years when the support has the biggest impact on long-term
outcomes.
Supporting the health and
development of young children aged 0-5 should remain an important part of
Children’s Centres’ work, with services ideally provided on a universal basis
where this is feasible.
However, the APPG’s inquiry has
also shown that Centres are well placed to provide a wider range of services as
Family Hubs, and their offer should be broadened to position them as
one-stop-shops for family support in their local communities.
Employment Support and
Childcare
Family Hubs can be a particularly
effective place to deliver training and employment support, as they represent a
friendly, non-threatening environment.
Building parents’ confidence is a crucial element of
effective employment support – this can encompass broader provision such as
parenting and healthy eating classes which have wider benefits for children’s
outcomes.
Links between Family Hubs and both local employers and
Jobcentre Plus must be strengthened to build on the good work already being
done in this area.
Family Hubs can also
play an important role in the provision of early education and childcare,
either through direct delivery or by supporting other local providers.
Relationship Support
for Family Stability
The quality of the parental relationship can have a
significant impact on children’s development.
Family Hubs’ regular contact with parents and links with
local partners make them well placed to deliver relationship support. This
should encompass couple relationship counselling and courses, already being
trialled in some settings, as well as parenting support.
A crucial aspect of providing relationship support through
Family Hubs is training staff to have the right kinds of conversations with
parents. A relationships approach also needs to be embedded more widely across
the local authority.
Voluntary sector organisations with a proven track record of
best practice should be based in or prominently signposted from Family Hubs.
Family Hubs can also play a key role in engaging fathers, and
their capacity to facilitate collaboration between different services can be
very valuable to this kind of work.
Supporting Families
with Complex Needs
Supporting families with complex needs involves a wide range
of local agencies who will ideally share the same approach.
Children’s Centres have played a particularly important role in
supporting those families on the brink of needing more specialist support. The
Family Hub model can offer valuable benefits in this regard – by bringing
together a wider range of services and professionals, they can help embed
shared approaches and enable knowledge sharing.
Valuable lessons can be learnt from
the successful troubled Families Programme, adapting this to supporting
families before a crisis point is reached, in order to help them prevent this
from occurring.
Cross-cutting Issues
Children’s Centres’ staff are their
greatest asset, and will be vital to the success of an extended Family Hub
model. Levering in additional charitable and community support (including
through the National Citizen Service) will also be crucial to ensuring Hubs
have the capacity to effectively support families.
Physical capacity is also an
important issue when considering an extended service offer. However, the
inquiry has also shown that what is important is the range and quality of
services and support provided, and that they are locally appropriate, rather
than the bricks and mortar in which they are offered. So Family Hubs may just
as well be a focal point for signposting to other services or voluntary groups,
or a catalyst for a self-help group, as a base for service provision
themselves. Delivering services through alternative community venues should be
explored where appropriate, provided such decisions represent the best approach
for addressing a particular need.
There is a need to deal with
persistent barriers to enhancing collaborative working (including ongoing
issues around information sharing) and address challenges around measuring
impact.
The Group remains convinced that
birth registration should be rolled out in Family Hubs across the country.
Recommendations
1. The
Government should give full consideration to augmenting Children’s Centres into
Family Hubs as part of its Life Chances Strategy. Children’s Centres should be
renamed and rebranded accordingly.
2. Local
authority leaders and public health commissioners should
position Family Hubs at the heart of their Health and Wellbeing strategies.
Accessing such support should be normalised – as accessing advice to maintain
and improve physical health and wellbeing now is – and messaged accordingly by
local leaders.
3. Emphasis
should be placed on how mental health needs can be addressed in Family Hubs,
particularly (though not exclusively) children’s mental health needs.
4. The
links between Family Hubs, local employers and Jobcentre Plus should be
reviewed and strengthened.
5.
Relationship support delivered through Family Hubs should encompass not just
parenting support, but also couple relationship counselling, pre-marriage
courses, post-separation support and help with parenting teenagers – at a range
of levels, from ‘light-touch’ to more structured.
6. To
support Family Hubs’ work in this area, local authorities should be required to
record family breakdown statistics on a statutory basis.
7. Lessons
from the successful Troubled Families programme should be learned, but with a
focus on helping families before crisis point is reached.
8.
Engagement with voluntary, self-help and peer support organisations should be
significantly expanded, with a recognition that people who have challenges can
often offer solutions.
9. Every
National Citizen Service candidate should spend time in a Family Hub, both
learning and volunteering, to emphasise that everyone has something to
contribute.
10. Online
support should also be available, co-branded with Family Hubs, and promoted as
a national universally-recognisable point at which a wide range of support can
be accessed.
11. There
must be a concerted effort to share best practice across the country, to
overcome barriers to information sharing and improve the evidence base around
the impact of services.
12. Birth
registration should be rolled out in Family Hubs nationwide, so that everyone
is aware of the support on offer as and when they or their family need it in
future years.
Family Hubs: The Future of Children’s Centres
Over the course of the past year,
the Government has made clear that supporting those from the most disadvantaged
backgrounds through the development of its “Life Chances” agenda is one of its central
domestic policy concerns.
As well as placing a major emphasis
on the importance of strengthening families, which have been described as “the
best anti-poverty measure ever invented”5, the Life Chances Strategy
will also significantly shape the future direction of Children’s Centres, with
Government indicating that policy in this area will be developed as part of the
Life Chances framework.6
Children’s Centres have become a
key part of the support landscape for children and families over the last 20
years. In this report, the APPG has sought to contribute to the debate around
the future of Children’s Centres by setting out a vision for how they can be
expanded to become Family Hubs and help deliver the Life Chances Strategy.
Building on the exceptional work that
Children’s Centres have done over the course of the last two decades,
particularly with children in the earliest years of life, the Family Hub model
would broaden their remit to encompass a wider range of services and position
them as “nerve centres” for all kinds of family support within their
communities. To some extent this is already starting to happen, and through the
course of the inquiry which informs this report the APPG has heard about a variety of projects Centres are doing in areas such
as employment support and relationship support, a number of which are included
as case studies. These help to demonstrate that Family Hubs can play an
essential role in delivering a number of key Government priorities, and that
they should be a central part of the Life Chances Strategy.
Recommendation
1:
As part of its work on the Life Chances Strategy, the Government should give
full consideration to augmenting Children’s Centres into Family Hubs and
renaming and rebranding them accordingly – a “nerve centre” for all types of
family support, with a mixture of statutory, voluntary and specialist help both
on-site and signposted.
Health and Development
Promoting good health and child
development have always been a vital part of the work that Children’s Centres
do, and the APPG’s inquiry began by examining this historic area of strength.
Indeed, a common feature across the
evidence provided in this stream of the inquiry has been an emphasis on the
importance of early intervention, and the key role Children’s Centres have
played in this. Seminal policy reviews such as The Foundation Years by Rt Hon Frank Field MP and Early Intervention: The Next Steps by
Graham Allen MP have helped to establish that the most effective way of
improving children’s long-term outcomes, and narrowing gaps in attainment and
wellbeing, is to ensure that support is provided during the earliest years of
life when interventions can have the greatest impact.7 Children’s
Centres’ expertise in the early years, as well as their capacity to integrate
services and bring a range of different and professionals together around a
child, have made them a key vehicle for providing this kind of support.
Case Study 1 offers a practical
example of how providing integrated services through Children’s Centres has
been effective in the context of mental health. In Islington, Child and
Adolescent Mental Health Services work through the Borough’s Children’s Centres
– this has helped to increase the accessibility of mental health services for young
children and their parents, as well as enhancing the awareness of Children’s
Centres’ staff about the impact of parental mental health on parenting and a
child’s wellbeing.
Within an extended Family Hub
model, supporting the health and development of young children aged 0-5 would
remain a vital part of the work that Hubs do, reflecting the enormous
importance of the early years to later life outcomes. Many of those who
provided evidence to the APPG also emphasised the significance of maintaining
an element of universal service provision – open to all rather than just
targeted on the most disadvantaged – wherever possible. Not only do universal
services help to prevent support from being stigmatised as something for
“failing families”, they are often key to enabling staff to identify parents
who are dealing with more complex issues at an early stage (this is
particularly the case when dealing with issues such as mental health, where
problems do not discriminate on the basis of income or geographic location).
The APPG’s inquiry has shown,
however, that Children’s Centres are currently very well placed to deliver a
wider range of services as Family Hubs, building on their established strengths
as this report will discuss. The nature of the Centre setting, strong links
with other partners in the community and regular contact with parents mean they
are ideally positioned to deliver the likes of employment support and
relationship support within a broadened service offer.
The APPG has also heard about
examples of where Children’s Centres are operating effectively beyond their
traditional 0-5 remit, with Case Study 2 showing how Children’s Centres in
County Durham deliver what is termed a “One Point Service” on a 0-19 basis.
Within the Family Hub model, the ultimate ambition should be to extend even
beyond this and either provide or signpost to services for the whole family.
Strong leadership will of course be
crucial to achieving
this. From a health perspective, local authority leaders and public health commissioners
will need to position Family Hubs at the centre of their Health and Wellbeing
strategies if the benefits of this approach are to be realised. Furthermore,
other local partners such as schools will need to be fully engaged with Family
Hubs, particularly around issues such as mental health where an integrated
approach is most effective.
Recommendation 2: Local authority leaders and public health commissioners should position
Family Hubs at the heart of their Health and Wellbeing strategies. There should
be a strong local authority leadership at both Senior Officer and Council
Cabinet level. Accessing such support should be normalised – as accessing
advice to maintain and improve physical health and wellbeing now is – and
messaged accordingly by local leaders.
Recommendation 3: Emphasis should be placed on how mental health needs can be addressed in
Family Hubs, including how support available from other partners such as
schools can be integrated with Family Hub support. Particular emphasis should be
placed on addressing the increasingly concerning issue of children’s mental
health needs.
Case Study 1: Delivering CAMHS services through Children’s Centres in
Islington
Child and Adolescent Mental Health
Services (CAMHS) have been working in Children’s Centres in Islington for 15
years. CAMHS professionals work closely with Children’s Centre staff, raising awareness and
increasing understanding of the impact of parental mental health on parenting
and relationships with children to ensure timely referrals to the right service
for families who need them.
CAMHS co-location in
Children's Centres has significantly increased both accessibility and
attendance rates compared with clinic
attendance, and delivery within integrated Children's Centre teams adds value
by ensuring families have access to support which meets their needs.
The experience of a
young Somalian mother supported by Islington’s Children’s Centres helps
demonstrate this. She and her new born son were referred to a CAMHS
psychologist in a Children’s Centre by her maternity support worker. The
psychologist contacted the Health Visitor and requested that she be offered
listening visits as a first line of intervention, supervised by the
psychologist. The psychologist then met with the mother for ten treatment
sessions in a Children’s Centre and addressed the impact of her own traumatic
background. The psychologist referred her to a Somalian Bilingual Outreach
Worker who supported her to access Baby Massage, Stay and Play, and the Housing
Advice clinic in the Children’s Centre.
Case Study 2:
Delivering a “One Point Service” in County Durham’s Children’s Centres
Children’s Centres are part of what is termed a
“One Point Service” in County Durham.
One Point brings staff together from Durham County Council and the NHS
and provides support to both 0-5s and 5-19s (extending up to 25 if a child is
disabled) meaning that support is available across the entire 0-19 age range in
Children’s Centres.
Alongside a core health offer, One Point offers a
range of advice and support to children and their families, including support
with parenting skills, opportunities for children to learn through play,
support with school attendance and support for young people to progress from
their education into training or employment. However, a protected space is
provided within Children’s Centres for 0-5s.
Building trust and effective relationships
between practitioners is crucial to making this kind of model work, with
monthly multi-disciplinary meetings ensuring smooth working between agencies,
and the strength of these relationships is commented on positively by service
users.
Employment Support and Childcare
With all parties agreeing that work represents a key route
out of poverty, Family Hubs can be an important vehicle for delivering
employment support, particularly for those parents who may be quite a long way
from the job market. Moreover, given the current Government’s emphasis on the
role of high quality early education and childcare in both enabling parents to
return to work and supporting children’s learning and development, it is
important to recognise that Family Hubs can play a vital role in this area too,
both by delivering childcare places directly and also by supporting other local
providers.
In terms of employment support, evidence submitted to the
Group has demonstrated that Children’s Centres can be a particularly effective
site for delivering this, providing a very strong base for Family Hubs to work
from. For those who are quite a long way from the job market, evidence has
emphasised that accessing employment and skills support through a Children’s
Centre can be a much less intimidating experience than attending a Jobcentre
Plus or formal educational institution. This can play a key role in
facilitating engagement, particularly amongst more disadvantaged groups.
An indication of how effective delivering employment support
through Children’s Centres can be was provided by one witness from Derby City
Council, who provided oral evidence to the APPG and had extensive experience as
a front-line employment adviser working through Children’s Centres. She noted
that the contact rates she achieved when running appointments through a
Children’s Centre never fell below 81%, while average attendance rates at the
local Jobcentre Plus office were usually around 40-50%. Explaining why she felt
that better results were achieved through Children’s Centres, she highlighted
that they were often perceived as a safe setting and that for some families,
including those with more complex needs, a Jobcentre could be a scary place –
“being able to go to that building at the end of the road” could make all the
difference in terms of engagement.8
Furthermore, written evidence submitted by the Department for
Business, Innovation and Skills on Children’s Centres’ role in the provision of
their Family Learning programme (which aims to build a culture of learning
within participating families, giving parents the confidence to continue
developing their skills and ultimately enter employment) supports the view that
Centres are a particularly valuable site for providing this kind of support:
Family Learning aims to
attract the most disadvantaged families, and Children’s Centres are key to
delivering this objective. Many parents lack confidence and can find the FE
college environment intimidating, whereas Children’s Centres offer a friendly,
non-threatening setting and deliver a wide range of services that support and
engage disadvantaged parents and carers.9
A great deal of the evidence
provided to the APPG emphasises that building a parent’s confidence is a key
part of providing employment support through Children’s Centres, and that for
many of those who access these kinds of services simply reaching the point
where they can they can contemplate attending an interview represents a major
achievement. Case Study 3 illustrates how a group of Children’s Centres in
Northumberland undertake this kind of work. Importantly, this process of
confidence-building not only encompasses support which enhances parents’ skills
in areas such as literacy and numeracy, but also much broader forms of support
such as parenting and healthy eating classes. This means that as Children’s
Centres support their users in their journey towards employment, they also help
to enhance parenting skills along the way, ultimately yielding much wider
benefits for children and the family as a whole.
The evidence that the APPG received
has highlighted some key lessons that can be learned from the experience of
delivering employment support through Children’s Centres, which can help
enhance the provision within the Family Hub model. The importance of developing
strong relationships with local employers so that Hubs are aware of vacancies
and also skills gaps in local job markets was stressed during the course of the
inquiry.10 Furthermore, links with Jobcentre Plus are viewed as crucial,
but witnesses indicated that a strong mandate for joint working is needed in
order for such relationships to be effective and endure over time.11
Recommendation 4: Evidence
provided to the inquiry indicates that Family Hubs can be a particularly
effective setting for delivering employment support, particularly for the
long-term jobless. To maximise their impact, the links between Family Hubs,
local employers and Jobcentre Plus should be reviewed and strengthened.
High quality early education and
childcare is also recognised as a crucial driver of parental employment, as
well as having an important developmental impact for children themselves.
Evidence submitted to the APPG agrees that Children’s Centres are currently
playing an important role in the provision of early education and childcare
places, something that would continue to be the case within the Family Hub
model.
The dynamics and capacity of local
childcare markets will determine the best way in which Family Hubs could add
value in this respect, but there are several ways in which they can contribute
to the delivery of high quality care. One is through the direct provision of
places. Data indicate that at present, significant numbers of Children’s
Centres are involved in childcare provision, with 44.9% of Centre managers
surveyed as part of 4Children’s Children’s
Centre Census stating that they provide places. Of these 85.3% offer places
for 0-2 year olds and 79.0% offer places for 3-4 year olds.12 A
number of responses have highlighted the key role Centres currently play in
delivering the free early education entitlement, particularly given their reach
amongst more disadvantaged groups, and this would remain an important aspect of
their provision as Family Hubs. As the Government extends the 3 and 4 year old
entitlement to 30 hours for working parents, it should be conscious of the base
of provision that already exists in such settings and their consequent
importance to ensuring the policy can be delivered sustainably.
In addition, Family Hubs can also
play a broader role in supporting other local providers to enhance quality and
improve practice. 4Children’s three year “Early Learning and Community
Childcare Hubs” project, discussed in Case Study 4, is a prime example of this
kind of work, and provides a model of how Family Hubs could bring together
local providers and drive up quality across the board.
Case Study 3: Employability, Skills and Training at
Blyth Valley Children’s Centres
Blyth Valley Children’s Centre
group serves the south east corner of the county of Northumberland, and has a
strong track record of developing opportunities for families for whom learning
has not been a positive experience.
Centre teams understand that learning activity must be enjoyable and
fun, manageable in small steps, successful, relevant to daily life and
stimulating for further learning.
The Centre group concentrates its programmes
of learning around activities that enable more confident parenting and caring,
activities that support parent/carer personal interests (in order to develop
learning and literacy and numeracy skills) and accredited programmes that
secure qualifications that may offer access to employment. All achievement through these programmes is
celebrated generously within the Centres creating a culture where learning is
the norm and feels good. It creates an aspirational culture in which children
and parents enjoy the pleasure of success. Learning programmes raise parental
confidence in their role as their child’s carer and first educator, but skilful
encouragement by Centre workers leads adults into volunteering schemes and
pathways to employment. The experience of one parent, Lisa, is an example
of this. After undertaking a “Spring Arts” course (which provided creative
development for her and ideas to use with her child) and a Triple P parenting
course, Lisa was motivated to sign up for a series of computing courses and now
has the skills and confidence to consider employment.
Case Study 4:
Early Learning and Community Childcare Hubs
4Children’s Early Learning and Community Childcare Hubs
project was a three year programme which piloted how early years settings can
bring together local providers, schools and childminders into a learning
network, and provides a model of how Family Hubs could be involved in this sort
of work. During its inquiry the APPG heard from one of the settings involved in
the programme, Sheringham Nursery School in Newham, which exemplar of how this
kind of approach can work.
Sheringham’s involvement in the programme helped to drive a
marked improvement in quality in the area, with all participating settings now
rated “Good” or “Outstanding”. This was achieved by involving settings in the
learning network in a number of projects, including initiatives to support
children experiencing language delay, to improve the quality and take-up of
free entitlement places, and to engage with Area SENCOs to identify support and
training needs within settings. Sheringham also led a childminder network,
which promoted local childminders and provided them with regular support and
training.
Relationship Support for Family Stability
Strengthening families and
supporting high quality parenting are key strands of the Life Chances Strategy,
and are a central part of the Government’s vision for tackling poverty and
disadvantage. To reinforce this, a number of significant policy announcements
were made this at the start of 2016, including a doubling of Government funding
for relationship support services through to 2020 as well as a plan to
significantly expand the provision of parenting support in order to “make it
normal, even aspirational, to attend parenting classes”.13
It is now widely recognised that
there are considerable economic and social costs to family breakdown, with
figures from the Relationships Foundation suggesting that the overall cost to
the state is around £47.31 billion per year.14 Government research
shows that for every £1 invested in strengthening family relationship, a saving
of £11.50 of the social costs incurred as a result of family breakdown can be
made. The investment in young lives and in improving their life chances is
unquantifiable. Relationship failure has a significant impact on children’s
development – the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships (who’s Director of
Strategic Development gave oral evidence to the APPG’s inquiry) have
highlighted that:
Research on factors affecting children’s outcomes, in terms of their
social, emotional and psychological development overwhelmingly implicates the
quality of parental relationships. For example, one extensively studied area –
the effects of inter-parental conflict on children – shows clearly that
frequent, intense and poorly resolved conflict, as well as non-acrimonious
conflict (i.e. involving emotional withdrawal, lack of warmth/affection), is
detrimental to children’s development.15
Supporting strong and healthy
relationships between couples and within families would be a fundamental part
of the work of Family Hubs. Doing so can help prevent a wide range of other
poverty drivers which so often follow fractured relationships or family
breakdown – addiction, debt, inadequate housing, and mental and physical health
issues. Ultimately, this support should encompass a wide range of interventions
including parenting support, couple relationship counselling, pre-marriage courses,
post-separation support and help with parenting teenagers. Some of
this support will be structured – at other times, much more ‘light touch’ –
somewhere for anyone to go where they can find a listening ear and some
answers.
Evidence provided to the APPG
indicates that by building on a number of Children’s Centres’ traditional
strengths, Family Hubs would prospectively be well positioned to deliver this
sort of comprehensive programme of family relationship support. Children’s
Centres’ regular contact with parents means they are ideally situated to
identify issues within a relationship at an early stage, to help prevent
further fracturing and the costly consequences that entails, while the links
that Centres have built up with other agencies through consistent partnership
working over a number of years mean that they can facilitate access to wider
services where necessary.
Case Studies 5 and 6 help to
demonstrate this, providing examples of two projects which are placing
Children’s Centres at the heart of supporting strong family relationships in
Hartlepool and Hertfordshire.
The key to the success in this
area, it has been argued, is training and supporting Children’s Centre staff to
recognise potential problems and have conversations about relationships in the
right way. Arlette Kavanagh, Development Lead at the charity Changing Futures
NE who have been developing a network of Family Relationship Centres, explained
this in oral evidence she provided to the APPG, saying:
We are not expecting
all the staff to deliver couples therapy or sex therapy, not at all. But what
we are looking for is, when a parent walks in off the street, the first person
they speak to will be able to support them on some basic level, to have a
discussion about any relationship issue.16
Delivering relationship support through Family Hubs, evidence
has made clear, would not be about expecting staff to resolve all of someone’s
problems in an instant. Rather, this kind of work is about equipping staff to
open up a dialogue, and to help parents to access the wider services they need,
whether these are provided directly by a Family Hub or by another service which
families can be signposted on to.
In addition, the APPG’s evidence sessions highlighted that in
order for a relationships approach to succeed, staff in local authorities and
partner agencies also need to buy into it. It was noted that in Hartlepool,
where Changing Futures NE had worked closely with the local council to embed
their relationships approach, this had necessitated additional changes on the
part of the local authority to things like assessment frameworks to make it
fully effective.17 Indeed, order to
support work in this area, the APPG also believes that there is a case for
local authorities to be required to record statistics on family breakdown on a
statutory basis, which could be shared with Family Hubs to help them identify
those who may be in need of support.
Family Hubs should also take full advantage of the extensive
expertise that the voluntary sector possesses in providing a wide range of
parenting and couple relationship counselling services. Initiatives such as Let’s Stick Together,17a a
one-hour session offering advice on straightforward, practical steps to
strengthen relationships, particularly those of new parents in settings such as
post-natal clinics, provides a strong example of good practice in this area. So
too do the pre-marriage courses Loving
for Life17b and Preparing
Together17c, and The Marriage Course17d which
has been translated into 40 languages and is now run in 109 countries. Family
Hubs represent an ideal vehicle for either delivering this kind of support
directly or signposting parents or couples towards such services to ensure that
anyone who needs help to maintain a healthy relationship – something most
people, regardless of background, need at some stage in their life – can access
this.
Recommendation 5: Relationship support delivered through Family Hubs should be
significantly augmented at a range of levels, both structured and ‘light
touch’, and include not just parenting support, but also couple relationship
counselling, pre-marriage courses, post-separation support and help with
parenting teenagers. Wider use of voluntary sector initiatives, of which strong
examples of good practice exist, should be expanded across the country and
delivered and signposted in Family Hubs.
Recommendation 6: To support Family Hubs’ work in this area, local authorities should be
required to record family breakdown statistics on a statutory basis.
The significant role that Family Hubs can play in engaging
fathers in their children’s lives was also examined as part of this strand of
the APPG’s inquiry. Evidence highlighted that supporting dads is one of the key
aims of the work that Children’s Centres do, with a written submission by
Family Action noting that “It is important that we address the father’s
relationship with their child, even if they do not live in the family home, as
they are a primary educator”, and that while there are often challenges around
this, “Children’s Centres can break down barriers if the service is delivered
right”.18 Indeed, supporting fathers represents a major priority for
many Children’s Centres, with 4Children’s Children’s
Centre Census indicating that 75.3% of Centre managers work with dads as
one of their “target groups”.19
Oral evidence given to the Group on this subject by Ashley
Warke, a Family Support worker from Packington Children’s Centre in the London
Borough of Islington, helped to illustrate some of the most significant
elements of a successful approach to engaging with fathers.20
In particular, it was stressed that it is vital to make
engagement with fathers part of what happens “every minute of every day” within
a Children’s Centre – even if it is primarily the mother who attends the
setting, which is frequently the case. The importance of staff understanding
the role of the child’s father in their life was emphasised as being very
important, and staff need to be equipped to address these kinds of questions in
an appropriate way.
Furthermore, the issues around working with dads who may not
live in the family home, and may potentially have wider support needs was also
discussed. At Packington Children’s Centre, an inter-disciplinary support group
has been organised which brings together a range of different professionals
such as Family Support Workers, youth workers, health specialists and
employment advisers. This enables the fathers participating in the group to get
one-to-one support from an appropriate professional on particular issues they
are dealing with, but also to help each other, with peer-to-peer support
representing an important aspect of the group’s work.
This illustrates how Children’s Centres’ capacity to facilitate
collaboration between different services can be especially valuable to engaging
fathers, and that Family Hubs would therefore be very well placed to continue
providing this kind of support.
Case Study 5: Family Relationship Centres in Hartlepool
Changing Future NE is currently
leading the development of a Healthy Relationships Programme in partnership
with Hartlepool Borough Council and voluntary sector groups. This seeks to put
relationships at the heart of everything that professionals working with
families do, and aims to reduce the demand on children’s social care and other
late intervention services by effectively supporting family relationships
before problems become entrenched.
The Programme also aims to
achieve a culture shift amongst families in Hartlepool to encourage more people
to seek help before their relationship breaks down.
As part of this, three Family
Relationships Centres will be established, two of which will be based in local
authority Children’s Centres. These will offer specific relationship support
services (such as family and couple group work, couples counselling, mediation,
relationship focused child and youth programmes) and activities to bring
together community members (reducing isolation and combating loneliness). The
first Centre is due to begin implementing this offer in April 2016.
In addition to the services
themselves, the Healthy Relationship Programme and Family Relationship Centres
aim to make “thinking and supporting relationships” part of the core practice
skills of those who work with children and families in education, early years,
Children’s Centres, health, and family support across sectors and across the
town.
Case Study 6: Children’s Centres’ role in Hertfordshire’s Local Family
Offer pilot
Hertfordshire is taking part in the
Department for Work and Pensions’ Local Family Offer pilot. This aims to
strengthen the support given to current and prospective parents in sustaining
positive relationships, and enable them to manage and resolve conflict to
ensure a safe, stable and nurturing family environment within which children
can thrive.
Children’s Centres have an important
role to play in this, and are well placed to notice early signs of stress in
relationships and offer early interventions. Through conversations, staff can
break down the stigma of seeking support for relationship issues. Relationship
breakdown can have a greater impact when there are other vulnerabilities in the
family. Hertfordshire is seeking to support families holistically – addressing
relationship support needs alongside other areas of need. Children’s Centres
work with a wide range of cases alongside Hertfordshire’s “Families First”
(Early Help) teams and will support the identification of those most at risk of
complex issues, as well as providing non-stigmatised pathways to increased
support.
Supporting Families with Complex Needs
Growing up in a family dealing with
complex issues such as substance misuse or domestic abuse, or where people are
experiencing acute health needs or where a parent has served or is serving a
custodial sentence, can have a significant impact on a child’s development.21
This final strand of the APPG’s inquiry sought to examine Children’s Centres’
role in supporting those children and families with more intensive needs, and
understand how Family Hubs can best contribute to improving their outcomes in
the future.
The APPG received oral
evidence about approaches taken to supporting families with complex needs from
staff in several areas with quite diverse characteristics, including the London
Borough of Barking and Dagenham, Cambridgeshire and Liverpool. While the
practical challenges faced by each could be quite different, they all
highlighted the overwhelming importance of partnership working between a range
of different agencies, including Children’s Centres, to address the issues
faced by these families. Ensuring that support was delivered as consistently as
possible across different services was stressed as being crucial, with the need
for a common vision and approach amongst all partners viewed as essential to
enabling this.
Witnesses explained
the various strategies they adopted in order to achieve this. In Barking and
Dagenham, all the Borough’s Children’s Centres share the same core offer, guiding
principles and outcomes framework – the latter maps closely on to the Troubled
Families programme’s outcomes plan, enabling this to be fully embedded within
the local authorities’ Centres.22 Meanwhile,
as explained in Case Study 7, in Cambridgeshire all partners that
work with families have adopted what is termed a “Think Family” model, to
enable a consistent approach to supporting families to be taken across all
agencies. An important aspect of this is the development of a whole family
approach to the Common Assessment Framework which Children’s Centres have
played a key part in rolling out.23
Representatives from Liverpool’s
Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) also outlined an approach that arguably took
partnership working to its furthest extent. Recognising that much of the
support on offer to those with more complex needs is segregated in nature, a
key strand of the CCG’s commissioning strategy involves a “Neighbourhood
Collaborative” model, which seeks to bring all partner agencies in a community
together and “genericise” certain services so that such families are not
treated as special cases to quite the same degree. As the CCG’s Vice Chair Dr
Simon Bowers explained:
Some families have very, very acute levels of need, but historically what
we’ve done is leave them in that high level of need rather than pick out the
bits of their need that can be managed by universal services and make it all
feel normal.24
This approach, labelled “No Wrong
Door”, is examined in more detail in Case Study 8. These various examples highlight is
that support for those with complex needs works most effectively when
responsibility is shared across the full range of different agencies working
with the family, all of whom share the same approach. With a wide range of
stakeholders invested in supporting such families, it is important to
understand the nature of the role that Children’s Centres currently play, and
the opportunities provided by the Family Hub model to enhance the support that
the community as a whole provides.
Oral evidence provided to the Group help to clarify the sorts
of families that Children’s Centres are primarily involved in supporting. As
Toby Kinder from the Delivery Unit at the London Borough of Barking and
Dagenham explained:
From an early
intervention perspective, these are the families for whom we would say ‘If we
don’t do something really quick these families are going to go over the edge’.
We wouldn’t say they were in crisis and we wouldn’t say they are chaotic, but
routines need to be managed and some things need to be addressed otherwise they
will slip over into [needing specialist support].25
While Children’s Centres are not currently dealing with the
most complex cases of all, they do play an important part in supporting those
families who, without help, could potentially fall into much more serious
levels of need.
The Family Hub model would
prospectively help to enhance the support available to families with more
complex needs, as by drawing in a wider range of services and professionals
more closely it can help to embed the shared approaches which evidence
presented to the APPG suggests is so important, and would also enable
practitioners to share knowledge and information more effectively.
Hubs should also seek to learn
lessons from other programmes which provide intensive support to those with
complex needs, such as the Troubled Families initiative, although with a focus
on avoiding crisis through early intervention.
Recommendation 7: Lessons from the successful Troubled Families programme should be
learned, but with a focus on helping families before crisis point is reached.
Case Study 7: The “Think Family” approach in Cambridgeshire
As a large shire county which needs to
maximise the impact of available resources, strong integrated partnerships are
essential to the success of all Cambridgeshire’s work with families.
In order to facilitate this, Cambridgeshire
County Council have adopted what they term a “Think Family” approach across all
their services. This aims to improve outcomes for children, young people,
adults and families by considering and understanding the needs of all family
members and coordinating the support they receive from children’s, young
people’s, adult’s and family services in a single family support plan
coordinated by a Lead Professional. This kind of cross-partnership model also
helps to minimise duplication across services and maximise the effectiveness of
budgets.
The “Think Family” approach has been adopted
by all agencies working with families in Cambridgeshire including health,
Jobcentre Plus, schools and the police, as well as Children’s Centres. It is
also at the heart of Cambridgeshire’s Troubled Families programme.
An important aspect of the “Think Family”
model has been the development of a whole family approach to the Common
Assessment Framework (CAF) process. A new “Family CAF” has been developed which
supports all Cambridgeshire’s work with families with complex needs, including
through the Troubled Families initiative. Children’s Centres have played a key
role in the adoption of Cambridgeshire’s Family CAF approach across services
supporting young families.
Case Study 8:
The “No Wrong Door” approach in Liverpool
Liverpool CCG, in partnership with the local
authority and provider based colleagues, is developing a city-wide network of
neighbourhood-based community care teams for children and their families. These
“Family Health and Wellbeing teams” bring together practitioners and clinicians
from health, social care and education. This system will therefore integrate
Liverpool’s early help services with its social care and health services for
children and families. Families, particularly those with complex needs, will
have access to co-ordinated early help in accordance with need as soon as it is
identified.
A revised network of Children’s Centres will play
an important role in delivering this approach. Greater multi-agency
collaboration at a neighbourhood level will maximise the opportunities for
stronger service integration, and provide a more effective community model of
care to support children and families. Within this system Children’s Centres
will provide one point of entry for support, but it will be possible to access
services through any number of routes (“No Wrong Door”).
Cross-cutting Issues
Throughout the course of the APPG’s inquiry, a number of
cross-cutting issues emerged which were relevant across all four of the
inquiry’s core strands – this section examines these, and their implications
for the Family Hub model, in greater detail.
One of the most prominent such
considerations raised during the course of the inquiry concerned the
implications that developing Children’s Centres into Family Hubs will have for
staff, and how they will be supported to deal with the enhanced workload that
comes with an extended service offer.
The APPG is clear that staff
represent Children’s Centres’ greatest asset, and that this would undoubtedly
remain the case under the Family Hub model. As well as ensuring that staff are
able to access appropriate development opportunities, and engage in reflective
practice wherever possible (offering them the chance to reflect on the issues
and challenges they face in their day-to-day work with peers and experienced
professional, the value of which the APPG is keen to highlight), external
partners can also play an important role in supporting staff capacity.
Within the Family Hub model, there
is a definite role for levering in additional support from voluntary, community,
self-help and peer support organisations in service provision, and their role
in this should be significantly expanded. In particular, it should be
recognised that those who have experienced challenges can often be very well
placed to offer solutions, and Family Hubs should seek to engage those who have
overcome difficulties in their own lives in their
services. Alcoholics Anonymous provides an excellent example of just such a
self-help programme.
Equally, young people
engaged through Government programmes such as the National Citizens Service can
potentially also add value to Family Hubs’ work, and there is a case for every
National Citizens Service candidate to spend time in a Family Hub. This could
involve a combination of both volunteering and more structured learning, and
opportunities for initiatives such as one-to-one mentoring through Family Hubs
could also be explored.
Recommendation 8: Engagement with voluntary, self-help and peer support
organisations should be significantly expanded, with a recognition that people
who have challenges can often offer solutions.
Recommendation 9: Every National Citizen Service candidate should spend time
in a Family Hub, both learning and volunteering, to emphasise that everyone has
something to contribute.
The physical capacity of Children’s
Centre buildings was another important cross-cutting issue to emerge from the
inquiry, it will be important to address the challenges that this poses for
implementing an expanded Family Hub offer in circumstances where available
space is already limited.
One potential approach to
addressing the pressure on Centre buildings was highlighted in a number of
written responses, and involves making use of wider venues within the community
to deliver Children’s Centre services. As a submission by Action for Children states:
By thinking outside the
box and not just delivering services from a Children’s Centre building, local
authorities can ensure that programmes and classes are still delivered to
families in their area by situating them in various locations across the
community.26
A significant theme to come through from the APPG’s evidence
sessions is that Children’s Centres should be viewed as services rather than
simply as physical buildings. A number of witnesses have emphasised that from the perspective
of supporting children and families, the most effective way of addressing a
need is to identify the service that is needed to meet it first, and decide
which building is most appropriate to deliver from after that.
Within an extended Family Hub, there are undoubtedly certain
types of support which are most appropriately delivered on-site, such as early
years services and (as has been highlighted in this report) employment and
skills support. In addition, where co-location is especially important to
improving outcomes by facilitating better dialogue between different
professionals, having services based in the same physical building is clearly
vital.
However, the Family Hub model should not simply be seen as an
effort to locate as many different services in a single building as possible,
but rather as a means to better co-ordinate different types of support and
deliver these in the most effective way for families. Where this can be
achieved most appropriately by using alternative venues this should be
considered, providing such decisions ultimately represent the best approach for
addressing a particular need.
Outreach is perhaps one example of where this is particularly
important. A number of written submissions have stressed the importance of
effective outreach, to ensure that support is not restricted for those who
cannot easily access a single site. This represents an important consideration
in ensuring that Family Hubs can effectively serve their whole community, and a
strong outreach service should therefore be recognised as an essential element
of their provision.
Furthermore, opportunities for delivering advice and guidance
through wider channels, such as online, could also be explored as a way of
extending Family Hubs’ reach beyond the physical building. Ideally this would
be co-branded with Family Hubs, so that this overall offer becomes increasingly
recognised and understood.
Recommendation 10: Online support should also be available, co-branded with Family Hubs so
that this becomes a highly visible national brand.
More broadly, collaborative working between
different services is at the heart of the hub approach, and is historically
something that Children’s Centres have been very strong at enabling. However,
evidence received by the APPG has highlighted a number of persistent issues on
the ground that stand in the way of greater integration and collaboration which
need to be overcome to fully realise potential of the Family Hub model.
In particular, it is clear that
information sharing between Children’s Centres and other agencies such as
health remains an ongoing issue for many of those who provided written evidence
to the APPG. The challenges encountered in this area, especially a time of high
staff turnover, has been emphasised in a number of written responses, and the
importance of having strong service-level agreements in place has been stressed
as a key enabler of better information sharing. A number of other factors have also been highlighted
as being vital to enhancing collaborative working, notably the need for
properly integrated digital systems and the need for strong shared vision and
leadership at senior levels. Evidence submitted to the inquiry indicates a need for
continuing action at all levels to address these issues.
In addition, the need for Children’s Centres to
build the evidence base on the impact of their interventions is an issue which
has arisen during the course of the inquiry’s evidence sessions. This is a
complex issue, and it has been stressed in some representations to the APPG
that as the benefits of early interventions only fully manifest over the
long-term, creating challenges for policy-makers and practitioners trying to
take decisions now. In order to make Family Hubs as impactful as possible,
these are challenges that will need to be overcome.
Recommendation 11: There must be a concerted effort to share best practice across the
country, to overcome barriers to information sharing and improve the evidence
base around the impact of services.
Lastly, this APPG has had a long
standing commitment to extending the provision of birth registration services
in Children’s Centres. In a previous inquiry into best practice in Children’s
Centres, the APPG received evidence from the Department for Education
highlighting the positive impact these services can have for for Centres’ reach
and engagement.27 The APPG has also taken oral evidence on this
subject in the course of this inquiry,28 and remains convinced of
the case for delivering birth registration within Centres, believing that this
is a practice which should be rolled out nationwide as part of an extended Family
Hub offer.
Recommendation 12: Birth
registration should be rolled out in Family Hubs nationwide, with a concerted
effort to ensure that parents are provided with information at this stage about
the wide range of support available throughout the different stages of family
life.
Conclusions
Through the course of this report and the inquiry which
underpinned it, the APPG has sought to set out a vision for extending
Children’s Centres into Family Hubs, and explore how they can help deliver many
of the key priorities of the Life Chances Strategy.
It has found that, in addition to Children’s Centres’
existing health and development work, many of their established strengths such
as their family-friendly setting, strong local partnerships and reach amongst
more disadvantaged families mean that they are very well placed to deliver a wider
range of services. The evidence that the APPG has received has highlighted
extended Family Hubs can potentially play an important role in the provision of
employment support and childcare, relationship support and support for those
with more complex needs. They are key to the delivery of programmes led by a
number of Government Departments, and the APPG believes that there is a strong
case for making Children’s Centres central to policy-making around Life
Chances.
In addition, the inquiry has also identified some of the
challenges involved in implementing the Family Hub model and suggested the
sorts of developments that will need to take place to make this a reality.
In particular, supporting staff to ensure that they can deal
effectively with the demands of an extended service offer, and managing the
additional pressures that will be placed on the physical capacity of buildings,
are two key issues that will need to be addressed. In doing so, levering in the
support of wider voluntary, community and peer support organisations will be
crucial, and their role in provision will be expanded within the Family Hub
model. Delivering services through alternative community venues should also be
explored where this represents the best approach to addressing a particular
need.
Furthermore, concerted action and clear leadership to deal
with persistent obstacles to collaborative working between Family Hubs and
other services will also be required at both a local and national level, and
efforts made to address the complexities around measuring the impact of
services.
With all this in mind, the APPG makes twelve recommendations,
which aim to provide a base for developing Children’s Centres into Family Hubs.
These are shown on the following page. The APPG urges local and central
government to implement them, to fully realise Children’s Centres’ potential by
transforming them into Family Hubs. If the Government’s Life Chances Strategy
is to be successful, it is critical that this vision of Family Hubs is at its
heart.
Recommendations
1. The
Government should give full consideration to augmenting Children’s Centres into
Family Hubs as part of its Life Chances Strategy. Children’s Centres should be
renamed and rebranded accordingly.
2. Local
authority leaders and public health commissioners should
position Family Hubs at the heart of their Health and Wellbeing strategies.
Accessing such support should be normalised – as accessing advice to maintain
and improve physical health and wellbeing now is – and messaged accordingly by
local leaders.
3. Emphasis
should be placed on how mental health needs can be addressed in Family Hubs,
particularly (though not exclusively) children’s mental health needs.
4. The
links between Family Hubs, local employers and Jobcentre Plus should be
reviewed and strengthened.
5.
Relationship support delivered through Family Hubs should encompass not just
parenting support, but also couple relationship counselling, pre-marriage
courses, post-separation support and help with parenting teenagers – at a range
of levels, from ‘light-touch’ to more structured.
6. To
support Family Hubs’ work in this area, local authorities should be required to
record family breakdown statistics on a statutory basis.
7. Lessons
from the successful Troubled Families programme should be learned, but with a
focus on helping families before crisis point is reached.
8.
Engagement with voluntary, self-help and peer support organisations should be
significantly expanded, with a recognition that people who have challenges can
often offer solutions.
9. Every
National Citizen Service candidate should spend time in a Family Hub, both
learning and volunteering, to emphasise that everyone has something to
contribute.
10. Online
support should also be available, co-branded with Family Hubs, and promoted as
a national universally-recognisable point at which a wide range of support can
be accessed.
11. There
must be a concerted effort to share best practice across the country, to
overcome barriers to information sharing and improve the evidence base around
the impact of services.
12. Birth
registration should be rolled out in Family Hubs nationwide, so that everyone
is aware of the support on offer as and when they or their family need it in
future years.
Appendix A: Inquiry Sessions
Between October 2015 and January 2016, the All Party Parliamentary
Group on Children’s Centres held a series of four evidence sessions as part of
its inquiry. Witnesses who gave oral evidence at each of these sessions are listed
below:
Meeting 1: Health and
Development (October 2015)
·
Hilary Earl (Health Visitor, County Durham and Darlington NHS
Foundation Trust)
·
Jane Young (Speech and Language Lead, Nottinghamshire Children and
Families Partnership)
·
Dr Yvonne Millar (Head of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services,
London Borough of Islington)
·
Fiona Horrigan (Children’s Centre Lead, London Borough of Islington)
·
Jonathan Rallings (Associate Director for Policy and Research,
Barnardo’s)
Meeting 2: Employment
Support and Childcare (November 2015)
·
Fiona Colton (Head of Integrated Services, Derby City Council)
·
Liz Annetts (Troubled Families Employment Advisor, Derby City Council)
·
Vicki Lant (Head of Children’s Centre Development, Barnardo’s)
·
Kay Tarry (Head of Operations – South, Barnardo’s)
·
Dr Julian Grenier (Headteacher, Sheringham Nursery School and
Children’s Centre)
Meeting 3:
Relationship Support (December 2015)
·
Honor Rhodes OBE (Director of Strategic Development, Tavistock Centre
for Couple Relationships)
·
Arlette Kavanagh (Development Lead, Changing Futures NE)
·
Penny Thompson (Advice and Guidance Hub Manager, Hartlepool Borough
Council)
·
Ashley Warke (Family Support Worker, Packington Children’s Centre)
·
Jenny Andrews (Development Manager – Children’s Services, Hertfordshire
County Council)
Meeting 4: Supporting
Families with Complex Needs (January 2016)
·
Toby Kinder (Delivery Unit, London Borough of Barking
and Dagenham)
·
Jo Sollars (Head of Family Work – Early Help,
Cambridgeshire County Council)
·
Helen Freeman (Children’s Centre Strategy Manager,
Cambridgeshire County Council)
·
Dr Simon Bowers (Vice-Chair, Liverpool Clinical
Commissioning Group)
·
Jane Lunt (Nurse Lead, Liverpool Clinical
Commissioning Group)
·
Ray Guy MBE (Liverpool Clinical Commissioning Group)
·
Geoff Baxter OBE (Managing Director, Restorative
Practice)
Appendix B: Call for Evidence Responses
As part of a call for evidence that ran alongside the inquiry’s four
evidence sessions, the Group received 49 written responses from the following
organisations and individuals:
Action for
Children
Banstead
Children’s Centre
Barnardo’s
Bath and
North East Somerset Council
Birmingham
Adult Education Service
Blackpool
Council
Bolton
Council
Bristol
City Council
Cambridgeshire
County Council
CSH Surrey
Department
for Business, Innovation and Skills
Dr
Gwendoline Adshead
Dr Michael
Craig Watson
Duke Street Children’s Centre
Durham County Council
Elizabeth Beck
Essex County Council
Family Action
Family Links
Froebel Trust
Gateshead Council
Hale Sure Start Children’s Centre
Hampshire
County Council
Healthwatch
Northamptonshire
Hertfordshire
County Council
Howgill
Family Centre
Indigo
Children’s Services
Islington
Council
Kathy Peto
Liverpool
City Council
Mellow
Parenting
Middlesbrough
Council
National Institute
for Adult Continuing Education
Northumberland
County Council
OMEP UK
Paradise
Park Children’s Centre
Pen Green
Research Base
Potters
Gate Children’s Centre
Reading
Borough Council
Relationships
Alliance
South
Tyneside Council
Staffordshire
County Council
Sue
Deedigan
Suffolk
County Council
Sunderland
City Council
Surrey
Early Years and Childcare Service
The Communications Trust
Warwickshire County Council
West Sussex County Council
Appendix C: Endnotes
1 Centre for Social Justice
(2014) Fully Committed? How a Government
could reverse family breakdown, p.48
2 Department for Education
(2010) The “core purpose” of Sure Start
Children’s Centres
3 Sam Gyimah MP,
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Childcare and Education, Response to
Written Question 38640 by Daniel Zeichner MP (9 June 2016)
4 Department for Education
(2015) The impact of Children’s Centres –
studying the effects of Children’s Centres in promoting better outcomes for
young children and their families (ECCE, Strand 4), p. xxxv
5 Prime Minister’s Office, 10
Downing Street, “Prime Minister’s speech on life chances” (11 January 2016)
6 Lord Nash, Parliamentary
Under-Secretary of State for Schools, Response to Written Question HL6408 by
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (9 March 2016)
7 See Rt Hon Frank Field MP
(2010) The Foundation Years: preventing
poor children becoming poor adults and Graham Allen MP (2011) Early Intervention: The Next Steps
8 Oral evidence from Liz
Annetts, Troubled Families Employment Advisor, Derby City Council
9 Written evidence from the
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
10 Oral evidence from Vicki
Lant, Head of Children’s Centre Development, Barnardo’s and Kay Tarry, Head of
Operations – South, Barnardo’s
11 Oral evidence from Fiona
Colton, Head of Integrated Services, Derby City Council
12 4Children (2015) Children’s Centre Census 2015, p. 10
13 Prime Minister’s Office, 10
Downing Street, “Prime Minister’s speech
on life chances” (11 January 2016)
14 Relationships Foundation
(2015) Counting the Cost of Family
Failure: 2015 Update, p. 2
15 Tavistock Centre for Couple
Relationships (2011) Parenting work which
focuses on the parental couple relationship: A policy briefing paper from TCCR,
p. 1-2
16 Oral evidence from Arlette
Kavanagh, Development Lead, Changing Futures NE
17 Oral evidence from Penny
Thompson, Advice and Guidance Hub Manager, Hartlepool Borough Council
17a www.careforthefamily.org.uk/courses-lets-stick-together; http://www.marriagecare.org.uk/how-we-help/marriage-preparation/preparing-together; www.mothersunion.org/our-focus/marriage/preparing-couples-marriage/loving-life; www.themarriagecourses.org;
18 Written evidence from
Family Action
19 4Children (2015) Children’s Centre Census 2015, p. 9
20 Oral evidence from Ashley
Warke, Family Support Worker, Packington Children’s Centre
21 Graham Allen MP (2011) Early Intervention: The Next Steps, p.
17
22 Oral evidence from Toby
Kinder, Delivery Unit, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
23 Oral evidence from Helen
Freeman, Children’s Centre Strategy Manager, Cambridgeshire County Council
24 Oral evidence from Dr Simon
Bowers, Vice Chair, Liverpool Clinical Commissioning Group
25 Oral evidence from Toby
Kinder, Delivery Unit, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
26 Written evidence from
Action for Children
27 All Party Parliamentary
Group on Sure Start Children’s Centres (2013) Best Practice for a Sure Start: The Way Forward for Children’s Centres,
p. 26-33
28 Oral evidence from Jonathan
Rallings, Associate Director for Policy and Research, Barnardo’s
