Messages from the Families at Risk Review
The Social Exclusion Taskforce conducted the Families at Risk Review from 2007 to early 2008. This work is now being taken forward by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, including management of the Family Pathfinder programme.
The Families at Risk Review focuses on public services and asks what more can be done to improve the outcomes of the small minority of families who continue to experience multiple problems, and the larger group of families at risk of doing so. In particular, it poses questions to adults' services about the extent to which they treat their clients as parents and family members.
Whilst there has been significant investment and system reform in children's services and increased parenting support, to date there has been less emphasis on the crucial role that adults' services play in improving family outcomes. Therefore the review sets out opportunities for adults' services to work together more closely; and for greater collaboration between adults' and children's services around the family.
The report sets out opportunities to build on the logic of collaboration from Every Child Matters. Excellent children's services, and excellent adults' services, are not enough in isolation. To transform life chances and break the cycle of disadvantage, services must go further; they must ‘think family’.
This means:
- Extending the logic of collaboration from Every Child Matters to include key adults' services.
- Extending or commissioning new tailored family services to support all families at risk. This will build on the experiences of innovative programmes such as the Family Intervention Projects and Family Nurse Partnership.
- Embedding early intervention and prevention within the system of support
- Freeing all services (including adults' services) to innovate and co-ordinate so that they can tackle the root causes of families' disadvantage.
‘Thinking family’ at every level of the system:
Key characteristics of services:
- In a system that ‘thinks family’, there is no wrong door to appropriate support. Contact with any service is seen as an opportunity to identify wider needs and to engage the whole family in sustained support.
- Practitioners look at the whole family situation. They are empowered to do this through high quality training and clear processes for assessment and information sharing.
- Services tailor support to match complex needs. Services adapt in response to different family circumstances and join up to provide a coherent package of support.
- Services start with a family's strengths, not their problems. Family members are empowered to support each other and to build up their resilience and aspirations.
- All services, including adults' services, share responsibility for family outcomes. This is supported by joined up strategy and governance framework.
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