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English councils have increased spending on family support services since the start of the decade following years of stagnation, an analysis has found.

Annual real-terms spending grew by 21% from 2020-21 to 2023-24, compared with 2% from 2014-15 to 2020-21, found research on early intervention funding carried out for the Children’s Charities Coalition (Action for Children, Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society, National Children’s Bureau and NSPCC).

The analysis, by research firm Pro Bono Economics, found that spending on early intervention services in general – Sure Start centres, youth services and family support – grew by 13% (just over £300m) in real-terms from 2020-21 to 2023-24.

Family support compared with statutory social care spending

This was driven by growth in family support spending specifically, which increased from £1.44bn in 2020-21 to £1.74bn in 2023-24, in real-terms.

Despite the increase, family support spending was well below councils’ net expenditure on safeguarding children (about £3.3bn) and looked-after children (£7.7bn) in 2023-24.

The government’s children’s social care reforms, which are being rolled out from this month, are designed to engineer a shift in the balance of spending towards early intervention by enabling more children to remain, safely, with their families, through improved support.

New model of working with families

Under the Families First Partnership programme, councils are expected to set up multidisciplinary family help teams with responsibility for families with multiple and complex needs who previously would have come under targeted early help, child in need or child protection services.

The model is designed to provide families with a consistent practitioner – a family help lead practitioner (FHLP) – to carry out direct work and co-ordinate other services, to enable the family to receive tailored support as early as possible.

While new multi-agency child protection teams will be responsible for carrying out enquiries under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 and other safeguarding functions, family help teams and FLHPs will remain involved and continue to provide support to the family in those circumstances.

Additional funding for prevention

The reforms are backed by a £270m children’s social care prevention grant, which councils are expected to combine with £253.5m previously spent on the Supporting Families programme to develop and rollout the new approach.

Around £13m of the £270m grant is designed to fund the expansion of family group decision making meetings, under which extended families come together to make decisions about how children should be safeguarded where statutory services have concerns.

Under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is currently going through Parliament, councils must offer families an FGDM meeting whenever they are considering issuing care proceedings, to provide family networks with the opportunity to identify alternatives to the child going into care.

There is strong evidence that parenting support services improve outcomes for children and adults in families experiencing adversity, councils have been told.

The latest government-commissioned practice guide to what works in children’s social care said interventions for parents of children aged 0-10 could improve parenting practices and child behaviour, lessen levels of stress and support adults mental health.

It also highlighted the vital importance of practitioners’ skills in building trusting relationships with, and in empowering, parents, and also the value placed by staff and parents alike on interventions that recognised the interconnections between parents’ and children’s needs.

Case for prioritising parenting support ‘has never been stronger’

Sector what works body Foundations, which published the guide today, said it was based on the first major review of UK and international evidence on parenting support for families experiencing adversity, including adult mental health problems, substance misuse or domestic abuse.

On the back of the guide, Foundations’ deputy chief executive, Donna Molloy said: “As councils struggle to cope with the costs of children’s social care, our evidence shows that proven models of parenting support can help to keep children safe with their families, improve their outcomes and alleviate pressure on an already overstretched system.

“The case for prioritising proven parenting interventions has never been stronger.”

Evidence to meet government social care outcomes

The practice guide is the second of a series of Department for Education-commissioned resources from Foundations designed to provide senior leaders in councils and partner agencies with the strongest available evidence to deliver on the outcomes in the children’s social care national framework.

The DfE-issued statutory guidance, published in 2023 under the previous government’s children’s social care reforms, sets four overarching objectives for the sector and three key enablers for achieving them:

• Outcome 1: children, young people and families stay together and get the help they need.
• Outcome 2: children and young people are supported by their family network.
• Outcome 3: children and young people are safe in and outside of their homes.
• Outcome 4: children in care and care leavers have stable, loving homes.
• Enabler 1: multi-agency working is prioritised and effective.
• Enabler 2: leaders drive conditions for effective practice.
• Enabler 3: the workforce is equipped and effective.

The first guide, on kinship care, was published in October last year, and the one on parenting through adversity for parents of babies and children aged 0-10 is the first of four on parenting support. The others will cover support for families in adversity with children aged 11-19, parents or carers of children with disabilities or severe mental illness and adoptive and foster parents.

Rising parental mental health needs ahead of family help reforms

The parenting through adversity guide comes amid a growth in the numbers of children in need assessments identifying parental mental health or substance misuse problems, which directors of children’s services have warned is increasing risks to the youngest children.

At the same time, councils are set to implement significant reforms to the way they support families, through the rollout of the family help model in 2025-26.

This involves the merger of targeted early help and child in need services into multidisciplinary teams, designed to provide families experiencing adversity with early, non-stigmatising help, =to resolve issues and prevent them escalating into child protection concerns.

Though the government is providing a £270m grant to implement the changes, the reforms come with councils under significant financial strain.

Guide ‘will help councils focus resources on what works’

Foundations’ head of practice guides, social worker Nimal Jude, said the latest guide would enable authorities to determine where to invest their resources.

“We are acutely aware of some of the workforce pressures and the wider financial situations that local areas are in,” she said. 

“It feels like this guide has come at such a crucial time during this transformation to family help, because you can really make some decisions about what things that you might want to scale back and what things that you might want to focus attention on, not least because you can now focus your attention with the full confidence that this is actually the best available evidence.”

The evidence base

The guide is based on two systematic reviews of the evidence around parenting support for families with multiple and complex needs.

The first, carried out by the Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI), in partnership with the universities of Oxford, Amsterdam and Monash, examined which interventions relevant to the UK, had the strongest evidence for reducing child maltreatment or improving child outcomes, along with what practice and delivery approaches contributed to success.

It examined 95 randomised controlled trials – where participants are randomly allocated into a group that receives the intervention and a control group – of 50 parenting interventions, finding:

• Small to moderate statistically significant effects on children’s emotional and behavioural problems, child wellbeing and parent-child relationships.
• Small to moderate statistically significant effects on promoting positive parenting (for example, appropriate disciplining, praise, warmth, and nurturing behaviours) and reducing negative parenting (for example, hostile parenting or laxness).
• Small statistically significant effects on parental mental health and reducing parental stress.
• Small but non-significant effects on reducing parental maltreatment and child abuse risk.

Strengthening parent-child relationships 

Based on the CEI’s systematic review, Foundations said there was “strong evidence” for the benefits of providing parenting interventions to strengthen parent-child relationships, and that councils should make these available to families with children aged 0-3.

It said these should be based on, and delivered by practitioners well-trained in, attachment and/or social learning theory (which posits that children learn through observation, including parental modelling). These staff should be able to observe and reflect on how parents respond to children’s cues and explore parents’ own attachment experiences.

The guide also said there was “strong evidence” for councils commissioning interventions to improve child behaviours, reduce negative parenting practices and improve positive practices.

Improving child behaviour and parenting practices

In relation to behaviour, key features shared by effective interventions were supporting parents in setting clear expectations and boundaries and promoting child-led interactions.

Promoting positive parenting can include practitioners taking on a coaching role, which requires them being skilled in coaching techniques and being able to build long-lasting, trusting relationships with parents.

The guide also said there was “strong evidence” that parenting interventions can reduce parental stress and improve mental health for those with mild-to-moderate problems.

Improving mental health

It said practitioners should be skilled in understanding the impacts of stress on parents experiencing adversity and should be given time to develop relationships with them, to enable parents to learn new skills and make use of feedback.

While the guide stressed that that parenting interventions were not sufficient to achieve significant changes to mental health, it said there was evidence they could improve parenting skills, even in adults with clinical levels of illness.

It said these programmes should involve practitioners offering guidance on child development and supporting parents’ abilities to manage their emotions.

Evidence ‘promising’ in relation to reducing harm

On reducing the risk of harm to children, Foundations said the level of evidence for parenting interventions was “promising”.

It said programmes that involved a fixed and structured series of sessions tended to be more effective in this area than those that were flexible.

The guide added that local leaders should examine the need to invest in these services for families with children on the edge of care and in the rollout of family help.

Vital importance of practitioners’ interpersonal skills

Alongside the CEI review, Foundations carried out its own systematic review of studies on the barriers and enablers to successful implementation of parenting interventions for families in adversity and on parents’ views, experiences and preferences in relation to these. This drew upon 33 studies.

Among two findings that had “high” certainty, based on the strength of the evidence, was that practitioner interpersonal behaviours were “essential to building trusting relationships and empowering parents”.

The review said parents valued practitioner characteristics such as openness, non-judgmentalism and encouragement, which facilitated the development of the trust that was “essential” in promoting change.

Building trust was supported by an initial home visit, communication outside of scheduled sessions, regular attendance from the parent and a consistent workforce, with parents highlighting the challenges of doing so when workers changed.

Recognising that parents’ and children’s needs are ‘intertwined’

The other finding that was deemed to be of high certainty was that both parents and practitioners value interventions that recognise “the intertwined relationship between parents’ practical and psychological needs and the needs of their children”.

Practitioners appreciated that supporting the parent, by focusing on their practical, social and emotional needs, was often the best way to help the child, with this approach welcomed by parents, the review said.

Based on its review, Foundations identified 12 principles for working with families in delivering parenting interventions:

1. Tailoring parenting support to ages and stages of child development.
2. Using strengths-based approaches to engage parents and offering parenting support across the system.
3. Ensuring that parents from minoritised ethnic backgrounds have equitable access to effective parenting interventions and that these are delivered in a way that fully meets
   their needs.
4. Understanding that parenting interventions work well for families where the parent has poor mental health, and, when delivered successfully, support parents to improve parent and child outcomes.
5. Prioritising face-to-face delivery of support.
6. Implementing both fixed and flexible delivery models to support a mixed local offer and prioritising more structured interventions to effectively reduce the risk of serious harm to children, directing resources where they are most needed.
7. Tailoring local programmes to meet the specific needs of families, offering both group and individual options to support engagement and provide parents with choice.
8. Focusing on careful implementation, effective delivery, and ongoing quality assurance to ensure the success of interventions.
9. That a strong local offer should start with a robust population needs analysis and involve place-based system leadership to develop a multi-agency offer.
10. That local areas should have effective referral routes into parenting interventions from a range of local services.
11. That effective parenting support requires a skilled and integrated workforce to deliver effective interventions.
12. Parenting support should form part of a wider system of support that strengthens the resources available to parents.

Four in ten family support and early help workers have personal experience of domestic abuse, a survey has found.

The proportion of those who reported personal experience of domestic abuse (39.1%) compares with a prevalence rate for women aged over 16 across England and Wales of 27% as of 2023, according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) data.

Women accounted for 90.9% of the 350 practitioners, across 11 local authorities, surveyed online as part of a scoping study into early help and family support staff’s domestic abuse knowledge and skills.

The study, commissioned by children’s services evidence body Foundations, found that personal experience had helped some staff understand the impact of domestic abuse on those they supported.

However, it also underlined the importance of providing wellbeing services, including counselling and reflective supervision, for practitioners, said the report, produced by social work academics from the University of Central Lancashire and King’s College London.

DfE plans to expand role of early help staff

Foundations commissioned the research in the light of the Department for Education’s children’s social care reforms, which envisage an expanded role for early help staff in supporting families in significant need, including domestic abuse.

Under the plans, currently being tested, existing targeted early help and child in need provision will be merged into a new family help service, designed to provide early, non-stigmatising support that prevents families’ needs from escalating.

At the same time, early help and family support practitioners – and other non-social workers – will be able to take responsibility for child in need cases, with social work supervision, under revisions to the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance.

Concerns over knowledge and skills

However, inspectorates including Ofsted have raised concerns about some early help staff already receiving overly complex cases.

At the same time, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel has detected a “simplistic and over-optimistic” approach to domestic abuse within children’s services, generally.

As well as the online survey, the Foundations-commissioned study was based on:

• Staff feedback on an online training module they were invited to complete alongside the survey.
• Case studies in five of the authorities, involving interviews with practitioners and managers and analysis of strategic documents.
• Interviews with four domestic abuse training providers.
• A review of policy documents in England and Wales.

Positive impact of domestic abuse training 

Most survey respondents (84.3%) had worked on at least one domestic abuse case in the past six months and a similar proportion (85.1%) of staff had received domestic abuse training.

Overall, two-thirds (67.9%) of respondents said they had had sufficient training to assist victims, with the rest not confident or unsure.

And while most staff expressed confidence in relation to key practice tasks and skills in domestic abuse, levels of confidence were related to whether they had received training.

For example, while 65% of those who had not received training felt confident they could make appropriate and sensitive referrals for those who had experienced domestic abuse, this was true of 88% who had received training.

Recognising indicators of abuse

This gap was also evident in relation to recognising possible indicators of domestic abuse, self-reported knowledge and attitudes.

Staff who had received training were significantly more likely than those who had not to always/nearly always enquire about domestic abuse in response to mental health, physical health, parental conflict or school attendance problems.

Having had training was also associated with better self-reported knowledge on all of a list of 18 areas.

Domestic abuse knowledge and attitudes

Overall, respondents were most likely to say they knew quite a bit or a lot about the impact on children and young people (83.1%), signs and symptoms (80.3%) and their role in relation to domestic abuse (78%).

Knowledge was lowest in relation to national guidance, for example on the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, where 28% reported knowing quite a bit or a lot, followed by responding to perpetrators (37.6%).

In relation to attitudes, while 31.3% of staff believed that ‘women abuse men as much as men abuse women’, this belief was significantly more common among untrained staff.

Feedback from staff who completed the training module after the survey identified improvements in self-reported knowledge compared with their levels beforehand.

Impact of experience on domestic abuse skills

Alongside training, those who had worked for their employer for longer were more likely to express confidence in their skills and self-reported knowledge of domestic abuse. Over half (57.4%) had worked for their current employer for more than five years.

Case study local authorities provided early help and family support staff with a range of external and in-house training – the latter being more generic – but acknowledged that provision was constrained by budgets.

Practitioners identified knowledge and training gaps in relation to working with disabled children, families from diverse communities and LGBTQ+ families.

And though much early help and family support work in the case study areas involved domestic abuse, practitioners had limited experience of working with perpetrators, who tended to be referred to specialist staff.

Case study authorities provided staff with support to deal with the challenging aspects of domestic abuse work, including reflective and clinical supervision, debriefing, group sessions and access to counselling.

Improved domestic abuse training urged

The report set out a number of implications for policy and practice from the research, including that:

• Training on domestic abuse, from induction to advanced level, should be embedded in councils’ early help and family support workforce development strategies.
• Authorities leverage the skills and knowledge of domestic abuse specialists in supporting their early help and family support staff.
• Councils build early help and family support staff’s confidence and skills in working with perpetrators and supporting children affected by domestic abuse, including disabled children.
• Training represents the experiences of diverse communities in relation to domestic abuse.
• Authorities support the wellbeing of their workforces through clinical and reflective supervision and access to counselling.

Support is available 24/7 from Refuge’s freephone national domestic abuse helpline (0808 2000 247).

Families are missing out on the social work support they need because some early help staff are being given overly complex cases, inspectors have found.

Inspections of five areas identified some “excellent” early help practice, but also cases where lead professionals did not have the necessary skills and experience to provide robust oversight of the situation, amid a lack of early help staff capacity across agencies.

Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) found cases where families should have been stepped up from early help to statutory social care earlier than they were because of the risks to children. There were also variations between areas about where this threshold lay.

The inspectorates delivered the messages in a report published today summarising findings from the five joint targeted area inspections (JTAIs), carried out between December 2022 and March 2023.

These were focused on targeted early help, a voluntary, casework-based service for children and families with complex needs who do not meet the threshold for statutory social care

Social care reform concerns

The report comes with the Department for Education planning to merge targeted early help with child in need services as part of its children’s social care reforms, in order to improve the quality, timeliness and continuity of family support.

The changes will also enable councils to allocate child in need cases to non-social workers – which is currently prohibited by the Working Together to Safeguard Children statutory guidance – a development Ofsted has previously warned may undermine quality and increase risk.

In today’s report, the three inspectorates said that the lack of capacity in early help “was likely to hinder progress in achieving the full vision of the reforms”.

The JTAIs drew on inspections of front door services, a sample of early help cases, observations of multi-agency meetings and decision making and discussions with families, children, practitioners, managers and leaders, among other sources of evidence.

Ofsted, the CQC and HMICFRS identified “a great deal of good practice in some local areas”.

‘Striking’ variability in practice

However, they said their most striking finding from the JTAIs was the variability between and within the local areas, both in the level of support provided to families and in how it was delivered, they said.

This chimed with previous evidence, with the inspectorates citing research findings from charity Action for Children that early help provision ranged from less than 1% of children to over 15% between areas in 2019-20.

The inspectorates attributed this variation in part to the lack of a statutory framework for early help and the fact that Working Together did not have “clear enough expectations in relation to early help and thresholds”.

Each area took a different approach to the level of intervention that could be provided at either side of the early help-statutory social work threshold, they said.

Delays in referring cases to social care

In some areas, there was no clear process to consider whether the family had reached the threshold for statutory intervention leading, in some cases, to a delay in getting the right help to families.

Inspectors frequently questioned councils and partners on whether stepping cases up to social care might have reduced risks to children sooner.

“Some children’s cases that remained with early help professionals would clearly have benefited from statutory social work intervention because there was a higher level of risk or because their situation was not improving,” the report added.

Early help staff ‘working with increasing complexity’

Early help professionals were “increasingly working with highly complex family situations” that were sometimes “above a level that they felt was appropriate for them”.

“Those families needed the professional expertise of a social worker and more robust oversight through reviews and monitoring of plans,” the inspectorates said.

They called for consistent expectations about early help practitioners’ skills, training and experience, underpinned by high-quality, reflective supervision.

However, they added that “having an effective and skilled workforce depends on there being adequate staff capacity”, which was lacking in the agencies inspected.

Information sharing problems

In some cases, there was no lead professional co-ordinating multi-agency work, which led to agencies working in silos and poor information sharing about risks.

This was exacerbated by barriers in accessing information across agencies, with information about family mental health being often being difficult to source when practitioners were making safeguarding checks.

Lack of effective joint working also led to work being duplicated and families facing repeat assessments, taking away from a focus on the interventions they needed, inspectors found.

Inadequate information sharing was underpinned in some cases by poor recording, with some areas not recording information about the child’s ethnicity, culture or religion, the report said.

Need for improved consistency

The inspectorates concluded: “We saw well-trained and knowledgeable early help workers from a range of agencies undertaking effective work with children and families, meeting need and reducing risk.

“However, this was not consistent. More needs to be done to ensure that all professionals have the skills and knowledge to assess, help and safeguard children and families effectively.”

To address variations in early help provision, the DfE plans to introduce clearer guidance on eligibility for family help, so there is “consistent national understanding of who should receive this support, but local areas can meet families’ needs flexibly”.

This will be tested through its current families first for children pathfinders, who are trialling the family help model.

‘Simply not enough money in the system’

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services said it welcomed the focus on early help in the government’s strategy but it needed to be met with sufficient funding, both to meet existing need and deliver on the reforms.

“There is no doubt the earlier we work with children and their families to overcome the issues they face, the less impact these challenges may have on their lives, and on society,” said vice president Andy Smith.

“Local authorities are committed to supporting families at the earliest possible opportunity but the current method of funding children’s services doesn’t enable this approach in all local areas; there is simply not enough funding in the system to meet the level of need in our communities.

“Too often funding is competitive or time limited, which means not all children benefit and future funding is uncertain, or it is taken out of the system and into the hands of private equity firms, profiteering on the backs of vulnerable children. The government must address this.