All about… family hubs

In Luton, 20-month-old Yashma is at home with mum Aiza (names changed). They are sitting on the floor with a Level 3-trained childcare practitioner, rolling and squashing playdough and talking about the links between fine motor skills and mark-making.

This is the first visit in a home learning scheme which is a new offer from Luton’s family hubs. ‘A lot of parents think they have to sit down and teach their children to write, so we do mark-making and playdough and link it with early literacy,’ says Sara Coombs, who heads up the programme, which is part of the local birth-to-fives offer, Flying Start. ‘Mum was quite anxious about how to interact with her little one and not keen on going out the house to community groups. She was focused on formal education rather than understanding the importance of play.’

One hundred and fifty languages are spoken in Luton, a town with above-average levels of unemployment and deprivation. Coombs says, ‘A lot of families are quite nervous to come out, so this is a gentle introduction to our centres. We are such a diverse town that language can be a barrier, and different cultures can have different ways of looking at accessing community groups.’

By the end of the six-week programme (see Case study), Aiza is able to use a spoon independently at mealtimes for the first time. Coombs adds, ‘The mother feels she is talking a lot more with her daughter, which has resulted in her daughter communicating more to family members too. Mum has scored herself higher on the goals she set on the first visit as she now has more of an awareness of the importance of play, brain development and ideas of activities to try.’

ONE-STOP SHOP

Luton is one of 75 local authorities, in areas of deprivation and with poor health or educational outcomes that won a slice of £82 million to set up family hubs back in 2021; this followed Andrea Leadsom’s ‘Vision for the 1,001 Critical Days’ review into improving outcomes for babies in England. The funding was part of a £300 million pot to improve the current Start for Life offer aimed at birth to twos, with family hubs a method of accessing these services in a joined-up way.

Like Children’s Centres, the 400 family hubs now in existence are designed to be a ‘one stop shop’ for parents and children offering an integrated early years, health and family offer both in one location and online. Unlike Children’s Centres though, family hubs are open to families of children up to 19, or 25 if they have SEND, and many are offering family support services with virtual components such as online parenting classes. Another crucial difference is funding. While the Government says the investment is ‘significant’, the scale of funding for Sure Start was more than ten times that for family hubs (at its peak in 2010, Sure Start received £1.8 billion a year).

Max Stanford, head of impact and evaluation at Coram, says, ‘I think the big question local authorities are asking themselves is, “are we moving towards more targeted care?”

‘It depends whether a local authority is more intervention focused – some areas still have Children’s Centres and stay-and-plays, and other local authorities have early help and statutory services, and that’s it. There is a feeling that family hubs should be a bit more targeted to things [councils] think are most important.’

In addition, 65 local authorities don’t have any funding at all. Stanford says this ‘will limit what they do. But I think there is an appetite to do [family hubs] just because other areas are doing it, as a way to be more efficient.’

The Anna Freud Centre leads the National Centre for Family Hubs, set up by the Department for Education to champion the programme and share best practice. Abi Miranda, head of early years and prevention, says when it came to Children’s Centres, ‘much of the feedback from parents and carers was they found the support really helpful for young children, but they also wanted to talk about their seven-year-old who might have needs.’

Speaking at a Westminster Education Forum event in 2022, Miranda said, ‘People who know how to access services of their own accord and know how to ask for help will generally be OK. It is the people who find coming into the centres difficult that we are really thinking about.’

LOCAL PRIORITIES

In Luton, where three in every ten children have not had or are not up to date with vaccinations, public health leads the family hub model. Key priorities include promoting take-up of the MMR vaccine, and oral health, for which the team held free pop-up dental clinics for under-eights in family hubs and libraries. Some other councils are opening birth registration services, such as in rural North East Lincolnshire, where the aim is to shorten travel times for families with newborns.

One general focus of the family hubs programme is on improving engagement with fathers. In Stockton-on-Tees, the council ran a 12-week, in-person Family Links parenting programme to help fathers learn the fundamentals of parenting, teaching them to be a supportive and consistent presence for their children. According to a Coram evaluation of the scheme, most fathers had little to no contact at the beginning of the programme; but by the end, contact was intermittent or regular between all fathers and their children.

According to Stanford, one challenge is that many local authorities are ‘not the best’ at data collection because they no longer have the analytic power, which could hamper efforts to determine local priorities. There are also more structural challenges: in Cornwall, some family hub buildings were too small to house the variety of services the team wished to have in one space.

Christine Rogers, who works as part of an integrated team with Luton Council for its delivery of family hubs, says, ‘We are looking at a system change across a local authority for a family hub.

‘Children’s Centres were trying to deliver the outcomes of Every Child Matters, but it was more in that locality – we used to call it pram-pushing distance – than as an overarching strategic direction. We have the freedom with the family hubs model to be quite creative.’

Samantha Callan, of advocacy group the Family Hubs Network, wrote in a Centre for Social Justice blog that ‘the central government funding package more or less exclusively required them to offer superb early years services – budgets were very prescriptively sliced up and ring-fenced so there was very little room for exceeding the Sure Start specification. Couple support, for example, was rarely offered and had to be paid for out of additional funds which were hard to secure and often dried up after pilots were completed.’ Now, the Reducing Parental Conflict programme is being offered in some family hubs (see Case study).

FUNDING – MEETING ‘HUGE NEED’

While family hubs are supposed to offer preventative support to stop problems escalating, the current context in which they operate is one of huge need. Action for Children has accused the Government of running ‘children’s services like A&E units, where only those at serious risk of harm get help’.

There has been a 46 per cent drop in early intervention services spending over the last 12 years, according to an NCB report in 2023, with cuts to areas such as youth services fuelling this trend. Meanwhile, six councils have declared themselves bankrupt since 2021, with more likely to follow, prompting an emergency £600 million Government bailout in January.

Action for Children runs 68 Children’s Centres and family hubs. Joe Lane, director of policy and campaigns, says, ‘We work with local authorities across the country and know the financial pressures they are under. Those local authorities that have received funding for family hubs have only had a small one-off payment, so they are facing the same long-term pressures as other councils.’

He adds, ‘What’s clear is that local authority family services – even in areas with family hub funding – do not have the level or certainty of funding they need to build the services we know families need.’

Stanford adds, ‘There is a huge amount of need with mental health, substance abuse. Multi-disciplinary working is really key.’ Professionals had to have the expertise and training to say ‘this family has come in because they need support with infant feeding, but I think she needs support with this as well; that is difficult, and you need the funding to be able to provide that,’ he says.

Rogers thinks that setting up a hub will be hard without strong, pre-existing multi-agency links. She says, ‘We work really closely with midwives and health visitors. About 25 per cent of children don’t have their progress check – we are working with health-visiting teams to see if they can have their details to follow up with them. For areas that do not have such great partnerships in place, it’s a challenge.’

Rogers is also employed by the Early Years Alliance, which she says ‘brings money to the table.’ She says ‘We put in for money that councils cannot access. We have the ability to take funding from community investment funds because they can give it to charities.’

If services are becoming more targeted, and funding is tight, one area of concern is finding the hard-to-reach families that the service has in mind.

James Hempsall, who is supporting Leicestershire County Council on its transition to family hubs, says, ‘You are not going to reach the most vulnerable families by sitting there and waiting for them to come. You have to find them by going out and finding them, working with community advocates, or finding them in ways they aren’t expecting.’

In Leicestershire, it is hoped that situating hubs in libraries will help to reach traveller families who use the libraries to revise for their driving theory test. But investment also matters, says Hempsall.

‘Investment in outreach is absolutely key. There is a cohort of families who don’t seek help, they don’t act on information or the information may not reach them. They need encouraging to come in. Outreach is expensive, but it is effective.’

Hempsall adds that targeting families for extra help can inevitably come with a stigma attached. ‘When you are in a targeted service, it is stigmatising, and the barriers come up. No matter how good the social worker, it is a tense situation,’ he says.

MEASURING IMPACT

Family Hubs Network’s Callan tells Nursery World that while 3,500 Children’s Centres was an ‘amazing achievement, it needed to evolve’. She says the centres ‘were very expensive for the small numbers of people being positively affected’.

One Sure Start evaluation, ECCE, set up in 2009, had ‘identified a number of significant but relatively small positive effects’ for children, mothers and families. A more recent report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that at their peak, Sure Start centres prevented 13,000 hospitalisations a year among 11- to 15-year-olds, and the savings from reduced hospitalisations up to age 15 offset around 31 per cent of spending on the programme. And last month, the IFS found that children from low-income families who grew up near a Sure Start centre did better than their peers at GCSEs.

‘The substantial variation in how Children’s Centres and hubs have been organised and delivered locally has made it challenging to evaluate their impact,’ a report co-authored by Stanford found. It added that, ‘There is, as yet, no evidence on the impact of extending the age range for children’s centre services, or the effectiveness of a family hub approach. However, there is a logical case for more holistic and joined-up approaches to delivering area-based family services.’

Stanford adds that a lot of Children’s Centres ‘never got where they wanted to be’ before ringfenced funding was removed.

So what does the future hold? Funding for the current family hubs programme runs out in March 2025. The DfE did not say when asked if more funding would be allocated beyond this date, or to the remaining 65 councils currently without hubs. A spokesman told Nursery Worldthat the Government ‘would like’ to see family hubs across the country, but added it was ‘crucial’ to focus on delivering well in the areas it is working with and building the evidence base (several evaluations are ongoing). She added that all local authorities are able to access expert advice, guidance and resources from the National Centre for Family Hubs.

Another ‘big question’ is if Labour were to win the next general election, ‘will this mean an increase in support/more funding?’ Stanford asks.

Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson has said that while family hubs are a ‘pale imitation’ of Sure Start, she would not ‘wind back the clock’, and early education is her first priority. In a speech last year, she said, ‘Family hubs may support the public health aspects of early childhood, for those who live near one… The programme guide for family hubs and Start for Life mentions education or similar 32 times. But the only direction is that families should be educated about breastfeeding.’

Either way, the multi-agency model is here to stay, and this means the views of early years staff should be integrated too. Hempsall says, ‘I look back at the time I ran a Children’s Centre and sometimes wince and think I was cocky, because I was in my 20s and I would challenge head teachers and doctors – and many of them I’m still in touch with now.

‘It is not about sitting back and waiting for permission. [Professionals] would be making judgements about a child based on a half-an-hour visit once a month. I would say “I see this child every day for two hours after school”.

‘I would tell family hubs to reach out to their early years providers, and early years to get in touch with them.’

family hubs in statistics

87 councils get central government funding (75, + 12 from an earlier round). 65 councils don’t have hubs.

£301.75 million for the family hub and Start for Life programme was first announced in 2021. This funding runs out in 2025.

The Start for Life public health campaign is a core offer of family hubs that comprises six services for children between birth and two: midwifery, health visiting, mental health support, infant feeding support, safeguarding and SEND support.

Services continue for families with children up to the age of 19, or up to 25 for those with special education needs and disabilities.

Early years: Activities (but not childcare) for children aged birth to five are mandatory; the home learning environment is a funded part of the offer and staff have a statutory duty to provide families with information about their funded entitlements.

Councils can offer other areas of support on top, e.g., domestic violence support or debt advice.

The Family Hubs Network lists six types of family hub: community led, expanded civic buildings, health settings, repurposed children’s centres, school based and virtual hubs.

CASE STUDY: promoting home learning in Luton

The home learning environment is one of the core priorities of the family hub offer, and the Government has awarded £28.7 million across all hubs for targeted, evidence-based interventions that train practitioners to support parents at home. The Government says this ‘will support educational recovery and the school readiness of children who were babies during the pandemic’.

In Luton, the home learning link workers are part of the Flying Start team and funded by a range of sources including public health, national lottery and the family hubs programme. Different agencies, including early years settings, can refer; one referral came from a local home safety service for under-fives, where officers had visited to offer safety advice following an accident and noticed there weren’t many toys in the house.

Under the scheme, parents are given a checklist to assess their home learning environment, covering areas such as resources, media use and parental interactions. The practitioner takes resources such as blocks, books and playdough and will model some play activities with the child.

Sara Coombs, senior community link worker, who is employed by the Early Years Alliance, says, ‘It is not really about us going on floor and playing with the child, it is about modelling it for the parents.’

After the first home visit, the families do three to four group visits with up to six other families and two link workers in family hubs. These sessions are based around the PEEP learning together programme, an evidence-based parent education programme developed by the charity Peeple, which aims to improve parenting skills and the home learning environment for three- to four-year-olds.

Coombs says the home learning programme was devised partly as a means of encouraging parents who may be unconfident about accessing community groups to get on the radar of family hubs.

‘The aim is to get them from a targeted offer to a universal offer – that is why it is important to have part of the programme in the centre,’ Coombs says. Participants also have a follow-up phone call for a more confidential discussion about how they are doing in relation to thetargets they have set themselves and a final home visit to assess howfar they have come, with a final follow-up by phone six weeks later.

Children can also be referred on to other services, e.g., if there is a speech and language concern, the referral will be to the five-week ‘little talkers’ programme or a speech and language therapist.

CASE STUDY: reducing parental conflict in Leicestershire

In Leicestershire, 37 family hubs are currently open, in libraries and children and family wellbeing centres, offering antenatal support, new parents groups and one-to-one clinics helping people with issues such as mental health and housing support. Another key programme is reducing parental conflict; this national scheme is funded by Government until 2025 and aims to deal with conflict where there is no evidence of domestic abuse.

Julie Crookes, who leads Reducing Parental Conflict (RPC) for Leicestershire, says the need is greater than ever. ‘Parental conflict is a massive indicator of life chances of children and young people. It affects the ability to form relationships in later life. I think it has been heightened since Covid, with the economic stresses and financial problems people are under. Feedback from teachers is they joined the profession to be educators, but increasingly their role is become a pastoral one. Parents are dropping their children at the school gates and saying “we split up this morning, deal with it”.’

Leicestershire has trained 35 ‘relationships leaders’ who have co-delivered training to 555 professionals and volunteers from agencies such as social care and police, with a fifth coming from schools.

‘Practitioners said they lacked confidence and the tools to be able to do anything, so that is why we commissioned a toolkit,’ Crookes says. ‘We are trying to make RPC everybody’s business, which is why we want a multi-agency approach.’

Training lasts from 50 minutes to 2.5 hours, with a bespoke session for early years practitioners. This is then delivered to parents in five 1.5-hour sessions virtually or four face to face. Courses include ‘arguing better’, with videos showing fictional parents reliving past arguments from a distance and rethinking how they could have better dealt with them.

Crookes says the top areas of parental conflict are money, sex and raising children. The courses make a case ‘not to help parents stay together but to communicate better for the sake of their children’.

Another key aspect of the programme is working with police to get the correct referral. Crookes says, ‘If a neighbour calls police out to a house because of shouting, that will be recorded as domestic abuse. We are trying to help them see the difference between parental conflict and domestic abuse so we get the right referral, which is more time-efficient, more cost-effective and means families don’t get unnecessarily labelled.’

FURTHER INFORMATION

• https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/list-of-family-hub-sites
• https://www.coram.org.uk/news/a-coram-evaluation-of-family-hubs-in-six-local-authorities-highlights-the-importance-of-strong-local-partnerships
• https://www.eif.org.uk/report/planning-early-childhood-services-in-2020-learning-from-practice-and-research-on-childrens-centres-and-family-hubs
• https://foundations.org.uk/our-work/reports/family-hubs-planning-framework
• https://www.nationalcentreforfamilyhubs.org.uk
• https://familyhubsnetwork.com
• https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/family-hubs-and-start-for-life-programme-local-authority-guide