Evaluation

Demonstrating effectiveness and delivering good outcomes for the children and families who benefit from Family Hubs are crucial. We encourage all Family Hubs who register with the Network to include information on the outcomes they have achieved and any evaluation or other reports which explain how they are tracking progress. We also publish short case studies which give insights into how particular problems were successfully addressed using a Family Hubs model.

We welcome the Government’s commitment to build the evidence base on integrated family service models through the evaluation innovation fund, and look forward to sharing the learning from all the research projects.

Such information is a key aspect of the shared learning platform this website aims to provide for policy-makers, commissioners and providers. The aim is that local authority areas can learn from each other how best to develop, evaluate and improve their Family Hubs so they are as effective as possible in helping families and preventing poor outcomes. 

In May 2021, the Family Hubs Network held a Designing Outcome Frameworks webinar to explore how local authorities have approached this challenge. Four local authorities – Plymouth, Essex, Doncaster and the Isle of Wight – presented their work, each focusing on a different stage of the process involved in creating an outcomes framework and reporting and sharing the findings, and this was followed by a Q&A session.  

As well as watching the recording of the Designing Outcome Frameworks webinar available on YouTube, we encourage all those delivering Family Hubs and integrated family services to benefit from peer learning and access our collection of outcome frameworks and reports which members of the Family Hubs Network have generously shared with us. We welcome further submissions so please upload your documents if you would like to.