Councils in England are to be given over £500 million in funding to help them restore preventive family and parenting support services.
The Department for Education said the funding would help ensure that the most vulnerable children in England are “prevented from falling through the cracks,” and formed part of its plan for change to give every child the best start in life.
Guidance has also been published to set out “clear expectations” for the funds, with Councils and their partners told to “reform family support services to enable earlier intervention and better protect children from harm.”
Key reforms for preventive family and parenting support services
Key reforms for early help and support services include:
- A single ‘front door’ to family and parenting support services in every local area in England to make it clearer and easier for families to access help
- Embracing digital services or uniting different services, such as health visitors, housing support teams and mental health specialists, into an existing setting, such as a family hub to provide universal support
- Thousands more family help leads matched with families to help coordinate support and resources and help prevent issues from escalating
The half billion-pound funding injection will be provided for councils in 2025-26 and represents double their allocation in previous years.
The government says this is “rebuilding the vital support infrastructure needed to reduce the number of children going into care,” and that it is “urgently needed.”
Family support services will provide better support for vulnerable children
Currently, 8 in 10 parents are unable to access the support services they need in their child’s early years of life.
The reintroduction of preventive family and parenting support services is intended to build on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to provide better support for vulnerable children. The bill includes measures such as a unique child identifier, like an NHS number, a register of children not in school and a requirement for every council to have multi-agency child safeguarding teams.”
The Minister for Children and Families, Janet Daby said that families facing complex challenges have been left “battling fragmented services” and have often not received the support they need before issues have escalated.
She said the new preventive family and support services would mean struggling families “can feel assured that they will get the right help at the right stage, as this government delivers the real change that matters to families.”
Meanwhile, the CEO at the National Children’s Bureau, Anna Feuchtwang, said:
“The Families First Partnership Programme has enormous potential to provide earlier support and better address the needs of children within their family networks.
“With further investment in preventative services, shared workforce development and stability, these reforms present a huge opportunity to reorient child and family services towards enabling and supporting wellbeing.
“It is critical that roll out is informed by the ongoing evidence from the FFC pathfinders and that all children, including those with disabilities, are able to benefit.”
Training to support children and families
First Response Training (FRT) is a leading, national training provider delivering a wide and diverse range of training courses. They can provide training in the fields of health and safety, first aid, fire safety, food safety, safeguarding, mental health, health and social care and other specialist subjects.
FRT work with hundreds of early years services, schools and other childcare and support groups across the UK, providing them with high quality training to meet EYFS and Ofsted guidelines.
Their training courses for early years include Paediatric First Aid, Safeguarding Children and Youth Mental Health First Aid. They also deliver courses in topics such as Understanding Mental Health and Anxiety Awareness.
A trainer from FRT says:
“It’s incredibly important that parents, carers and families have appropriate support at an early stage if they are struggling to prevent things getting worse and vulnerable children and families experiencing serious impacts on their physical, mental and emotional health.
“We know from the many organisations that we work with, that those who provide frontline care and support for babies, children and young people are committed to keeping them safe and well and do their utmost to achieve this. Often, though, they face many challenges and significant pressures.
“It’s vital that anyone who works with children and young people completes a wide range of training to help them support the health, safety and wellbeing of children and their families.”
For more information about the training that FRT can provide, please call them today on freephone 0800 310 2300 or send an e-mail to info@firstresponsetraining.com.