Reports

To improve children’s outcomes in the early years of life, it’s important that the people in your workforce have the skills and capacity to provide effective wraparound support to children and their families. As a whole the workforce needs to be well integrated and multi-skilled. The best start for life: a vision for the 1,001 critical days prioritises ‘developing a modern, skilled workforce to meet the changing needs of families’. The practical guidance in this resource will support you to act on this priority. The guidance is based on the premise that integrated services and interprofessional working are the most effective and efficient ways of providing services for families – especially those from disadvantaged or marginalised backgrounds. To achieve this, we need to attend to the ‘fragmentation’ and ‘silos’ that hamper the delivery of services for children and families at a local level

Every local area has services and interventions that support babies, children, young people and their families. They include everything from the first services that parents (or expectant parents) turn to when they are struggling with an issue, to targeted support that focuses on specific needs.

The guidance sets out a step-by-step approach on how to conduct a population needs assessment, which includes some of the data that can be collected to understand need(s) that fall across the full scope of local family hub offers (ages 0-19/25). The guide also explains what should be covered in a maternity and early years needs assessment (ages 0–5). This will help you understand needs that relate to the services and activities that are part of the local family hubs offer.

This framework was developed in 2022/23 in collaboration with 15 local areas supported by the Early Intervention Foundation, and then Foundations, to make progress in developing their Family Hub approach. As such it has been designed for those at an early stage of their transformation, however learning over the course of this work and feedback from local areas tells us that the approaches and tools in the framework have wider applicability as local areas continue to develop their offer, to strengthen their data, and seek to evidence that their local offer is effective in meeting local needs.

As well as being founded on research evidence, it is crucial that the family hub model is rooted in family experience and local practice.

Overall, there is a high degree of energy and enthusiasm about family hubs from council officers. They see the value of the hubs, and all councils are making great strides towards developing and improving their services, whether they received additional funding through the Family Hubs and Start for Life programme or not.