Much of the previous and current Government’s family hubs policy has emphasised help for parents in the early years. The Family Hubs Network has always agreed such support needs to be foundational to the offer but must also be built on with joined-up support for parents with older children, to tackle a range of other social problems.
Preventing young people from becoming or staying NEET (not in employment, education or training) requires working with parents and wider families, as well as with employers and education settings. Alan Milburn emphasises this repeatedly in his interim report, saying ‘What happens at home – parenting, family composition, cultural expectations and the wider community – does most of the heavy lifting, for good or for ill. Yet this is too often the missing piece in the debate…Families are not a peripheral influence but are central.’
Family Hubs need to be working with parents when the warning signs appear in the early years, in speech and language development and in behaviour, but also later when a child falters in attendance, attainment, mental health, and confidence.
Milburn also says, ‘Improving outcomes for young people requires stronger families and more effective services and, crucially, a system that recognises how dependent each is on the other.’
He calls for a systematic policy push to help parents as ‘most forays by public policy into this field have lacked scale and heft.’ Now that family hubs are in every local authority area, they are well-placed to deliver at the scale required. This will need a much greater focus on – and investment in – targeted and preventive work with parents of older children.
(Our co-founder, Lord Farmer, raised this issue in the House of Lords on the 10th of June.)
Back to news