Government moves family support programme to DfE
Joe Lepper
Thursday, March 28, 2024
The government’s Supporting Families programme is being moved from the Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities to the Department for Education.
The programme, which supports vulnerable families with complex needs, transfers to the DfE’s family support division from next month.
This division is within the department’s children’s social care directorate, which is led by civil servant Shazia Hussain.
The move has been taken to integrate the programme into other linked policies and initiatives, including the roll out of family support hubs, said the government.
“The transfer will support us to create a coherent system that will help deliver a better, more seamless system of support for families, led from one department but working across government and local partnerships,” it added.
Through the move the DfE is looking to build on partnerships with other government department-run programmes designed to support families.
This involves linking up with Department of Work and Pensions and Ministry of Justice initiatives including, Reducing Parental Conflict, early intervention youth programme Turnaround and Supporting Families Employment Advisors.
The Supporting Families scheme launched three years ago, replacing the Troubled Families programme, that ran for five years from 2015.
Its objectives include forming local and national partnerships to better identify families in need and joining up support.
Families' long term outcomes are also being tracked through the scheme.
Latest figures show Supporting Families helped 197,213 families from April 2021 to December 2023.
More than 612 families have been supported since 2015, including through the Troubled Families initiative.
A total of 21 areas involved in the initiative have been awarded "earned autonomy" status due to the “maturity” of their early help for families.
The six most recent areas to be added are Dorset, Hertfordshire, Lancashire, Norfolk, Somerset and Wolverhampton.
