How an outreach service links excluded parents with intensive support

Project
Ealing’s children centre outreach service

Purpose
To support families with young children, including the most excluded and vulnerable

Funding
About £700,000 a year from the Early Intervention Grant

Background
Ealing’s children’s centre outreach service launched in 2009 with the aim of ensuring all families, especially the most vulnerable, were accessing the wide-ranging support on offer. It was set up and run by the charity Coram. The council brought the service in-house in April.

Action
The service was initially seen as a key way to draw families into children’s centres and raise awareness of the activities and support available.

It focused on group activities in centres such as drop-in play sessions open to all, with some home visits for those who needed more intensive support. But with children’s centres firmly established in the borough and used by thousands, the service has evolved to offer more specialist, targeted help.

Families who use children’s centres are referred to the outreach service if they are struggling with issues such as domestic violence and poverty. They can get direct help from outreach workers. Taking the service in-house makes it easier to link up with other council services and to co-ordinate support, explains head of early years Charles Barnard.

The service makes every effort not to stigmatise families. Children’s centre staff build up good relationships with parents and so this extra support can be offered in a “non-threatening way”, says Barnard. “It doesn’t feel like they are getting mixed up in some kind of system. It is very early help focused on their family and their needs,” he says. “Timeliness is also important, so a referral is made and then a family will be getting input quite quickly with someone starting to support them. There’s no waiting list.”

Members of the outreach team have specialities so if one of the team comes across a particular issue, they can draw on the expertise of the team. The team also sits within a wider early intervention team so families can be swiftly referred on for more intensive support if necessary. The service prevents problems from escalating, says Barnard. “I have no doubt it makes a real difference,” he says.

The service has changed and is likely to evolve again when councils take over responsibility for commissioning health-visiting services in 2015, he says. “We’ll be able to create an even more integrated service for families with children from birth to five,” he concludes.

Outcome
Between April 2010 and September 2012, the outreach service engaged with 7,851 children and 8,356 adults representing a diverse section of the community. Nearly two thirds of carers who registered with the service were born outside the UK, representing 138 different countries. Children were more likely to be growing up in economically inactive families – just 33 per cent of adults reached were in employment compared with 67 per cent of the local authority’s overall population.

According to feedback from a sample of parents who received one-to-one support, the service had helped reduce isolation and linked them up to support. Before the service intervened, just 18 per cent said they had relationships with people who provided support when they needed it, but that rose to 99 per cent afterwards. The percentage who said they knew who to contact in the community when they needed help rose from 17 per cent before to 100 per cent after; and those who said they had someone to talk to when they were worried about their children, rose from 25 per cent to 97 per cent.

Before and after questionnaires found parenting and advocacy skills had improved for nearly all those who said they lacked those skills before (see pie chart). Asked to respond to the statement, “This project helped me improve my parenting skills”, 76 per cent strongly agreed, 13 per cent agreed, four per cent were not sure, one per cent disagreed, and four per cent strongly disagreed. Before the intervention, more than half – 51 per cent – had issues with meeting their families’ needs with the resources they had, but afterwards, 90 per cent felt more able meet those needs. Ninety per cent of parents strongly agreed that the service had helped them.