Reports

On 2 February 2023 the government published a new vision to transform children’s
social care: ‘Stable Homes, Built on Love: Implementation strategy’, along with an accompanying consultation. This report, published in September 2023, summarises the consultation findings, and the government’s response to them. Their ultimate goal is to implement ambitious reforms across the children’s social care system, guided by the unique insights shared by those who have personal experience of it.

The Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy focuses on the importance of love and stability as fundamental foundations for both children and adults to flourish. Family Hubs provide families with easy access to integrated early help and prevention services, with a focus on strengthening relationships and providing the right support at the right time in each unique situation.

The government is committed to investing in key areas for all families, and have already announced over £1billion for programmes to improve early help services, including delivering on Family Hubs and helping families facing multiple-disadvantage through the Supporting Families programme, and Holiday Activities and Food programme. The NHS is also investing additional funding in children and young people’s mental health.

This annual report marks the tenth anniversary of Supporting Families, (originally launched as the Troubled Families programme in 2012), which has evolved to become a crucial element of the early help system across England. The Supporting Families programme has already supported over 650,000 vulnerable families, and with it’s overall funding now reaching £695m, their goal is to work with 300,000 families between 2022-2025. The keys to the success of the programme are whole family working within a context of more integrated, accessible services. By focusing on targeted early help, the need for more costly and complicated statutory interventions is reduced. This report highlights the importance of joining up services, and already Family Hubs are places through which many families are able to access the Supporting Families programme.

This report charts the UK Government’s progress in supporting infants and families through the first 1001 days of a child’s life. A large proportion of this support is through Family Hubs.

Dr Samantha Callan OBE, Co-founder and Director of Family Hubs Network, was commissioned by the government to conduct an independent review to assess the current framework of CMS operational policies and procedures that are intended to provide support and assistance to customers experiencing domestic abuse. Here you can read the Callan Report, in which she made 10 key recommendations that included:

• Preventing the CMS being deliberately used as a form of coercion and control (for example, by withholding maintenance or making deliberately erratic payments).
• Doing more to ensure child maintenance liabilities for low-income paying parents are affordable.
• Including both parents’ income in child maintenance calculations.

She also emphasised the need to integrate early intervention with the CMS, so parents are helped to avoid or resolve entrenched conflict at an early stage. Family Hubs have a key role in providing this support and linking it to services to tackle debt, mental health, housing and other problems often faced by separating families, in which at least a third of all children live.

This report synthesises the findings from four research projects that were delivered by the Centre for Behavioural Science and Applied Psychology (CeBSAP) and Sheffield Institute of Education Research and Knowledge Exchange (SIRKE) at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU).

The four projects were:

• Durham: Developing and evaluating more father-inclusive messaging to promote father engagement in parenting support, for fathers of young people aged 11-16 years.
• Sheffield: Developing and evaluating effective messaging to promote a New Fathers Support Group for fathers of infants aged 0-6 months.
• Wolverhampton: Evaluating a community outreach programme to promote family hubs services to families of minority ethnic groups with children aged 0-6 years for whom English is a second language.
• Wakefield: Evaluating a communication strategy delivered by schools to promote family hubs and ‘team around the school’ services to families of primary school aged children.

This report documents the findings from the four behavioural science projects, the learnings from the work and recommendations for those working to enhance engagement with Family Hubs services in other local authorities.

(This report was no. 2 in a series of 5)