Despite soaring need, 15 years of underinvestment and a lack of ringfenced funding has “hollowed out” family hubs and children’s centres, according to the Centre for Young Lives.
The organisation's “A Fresh Start for Children and Family Support” report, finds that 49% of councils were forced to slash their budgets last year (2024/5), including by as much as 81% in one area in the north of England.
The report welcomes a promised £500 million Department for Education investment in early help via the Family First Partnership programme, as well guidance that councils should consider joining up these services with family hubs.
However, it calls for scaled up funding to £2.26bn over the next decade through a ringfenced grant that delivers "joined-up family support to more children and families across England".
It recommends increasing funding by £1.2bn over the Spending Review period of 2026/27 to 2028/29 – to reach 500,000 children per year – with further increases enabling support for 2mn children by year nine.
Family support is now a “patched-up, underfunded, postcode lottery”, said the centre's executive chair, Baroness Anne Longfield, highlighting the mix of non-ringfenced funding from local authority finance settlements, pooling of local budgets and a slice of £126mn for hubs pledged by Labour since it took office.
The report, based on Freedom of Information data from 121 local authorities in England, also calls for new guidance on the core provision of children’s centres and family hubs, devised by a cross-departmental taskforce.
These settings should also be better purposed to maximise policy aims over areas such as SEND and youth justice, it says.
Longfield said: “It has been more than a quarter of a century since the first Sure Start centre opened and many of the challenges children and families face today are even greater than they were.
“Since 2010, early help and family support programmes have been hollowed out.
“The government has a target of ensuring 40,000 to 45,000 more children reach a good level of development before the end of this parliament to reach its ‘opportunity mission’ milestone, yet almost half of local authorities have told us they are having to make cuts to their budget for children’s centres and family hubs.
“This should be a serious cause of concern for ministers.”
Following the closure of more than a third of children’s centres between 2010 and 2022, which were designed to provide universal services focused on children from birth to aged five, family hubs were launched in 75 local authorities with high levels of deprivation in 2021 – just half of all council catchment areas in England.
They are intended as a one stop shop for early intervention services for families with children from birth to aged 19, or 25 for those with SEND.
There are now an estimated 2,100 hubs and centres across England. Local authorities total spending was estimated at £577mn, or 275,000 per hub in 2023/4.
This is just over half of the average spend per hub under Sure Start, and less than a quarter of the £2.5bn spent annually on children’s centres at their peak in 2010.
Recent evaluations by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that children living within a short distance of a Sure Start centre during the first five years of their life performed nearly a full grade better in their GCSEs, with higher impact for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and ethnic minorities.
Sure Start was also shown to reduce youth crime and prevent hospitalisations in 11- to 15- year-olds.
Family hubs were developed to build on Sure Start's legacy, according to director of the Family Hubs Network Dr Samantha Callan, who has said that children's centres are "necessary but not sufficient in family help systems".
