Early intervention must be bold, joined-up and long-term
Anne Longfield
Monday, April 28, 2014
According to a Riots Communities and Victims Panel report in the wake of the 2011 summer riots, 500,000 families were "just coping" - dropping in and out of crisis with little hope of escape from the vicious circle in which they are caught.
The social cost and lost opport-unities for children and families is a national tragedy in its own right. The Relationships Foundation puts the latest cost of relationship breakdown and family break-up at £46bn a year. This cost of dealing with complex family problems is crippling local budgets and hampering our national economic recovery.
Help for families to get their lives back on track when problems spiral out of control requires intensive and costly intervention from a range of specialists who have experience to tackle deep-rooted, complex family problems. The government's Troubled Families programme was established to provide precisely this type of intensive support and "turn around" by 2015 the lives of 120,000 most disadvantaged families.
Dedicated teams working closely with vulnerable families are vital to modernise our country's approach towards family support, but we must go further than simply improving support for those already in crisis. We need to move towards a society that helps families avoid crisis, promotes resilience and nurtures their potential to thrive.
The Chancellor's budget announcement of extra funding for councils to work with an additional 40,000 families across 2014/15 is welcome in relation to this. Plans to extend the Troubled Families programme to a further 400,000 families from 2015 will offer a vital opportunity to embed this new way of working as part of the systematic move from crisis to preventative support. The benefits to those families who are "just coping" has the potential to be profound.
Emerging work from the Early Intervention Foundation, community budgets and more recently the Big Lottery Fund's Better Start programme shows that an integrated and outcomes-driven approach is possible. But it requires breaking down barriers between services and professionals that so often stand in the way of the holistic support we know families want and need. Ultimately, as the Early Action Taskforce says, this is about developing from "a society that waits for trouble and pays the price" to one that "prevents problems from occurring and reaps a triple dividend: thriving lives, costing less and contributing more".
Making this happen demands long-term thinking, breaking through silos and strong leadership. It requires a vision and plan followed through in every agency, with shared goals and a shared purpose to move away from the current, expensive culture of intervening when it is too late. So how do we do this? The Early Action Taskforce - which brings together charities, businesses and government - has argued that at a national level this is about developing 10-year spending plans, treating early action as an investment, with new and expanded funding streams for the third sector.
If we are going to grow the capacity for the voluntary sector to become more actively engaged in the delivery of early intervention, the sector needs the security of long contracts, greater transitional support - such as that offered through the new Social Care Innovation Programme - and the freedom to be both flexible and creative. But what lies at the heart of an effective approach to the delivery of early intervention at a local level? What lessons can we learn from what works at the frontline? And what can government do to support this agenda at a national level?
Many of the answers are beginning to emerge from the experiences of those areas that are now putting early intervention at the heart of their local strategies. The Whole Place Community Budgets pilot areas have already seen increasing opportunities to share budgets across health, schools, police, early years and youth services. The approach sought to develop services focused on users; shift the balance of resources in favour of "early action" measures; and identify investment from partners involving resources to be pooled and aligned.
Independent analysis of the community budgets estimated savings of anything between £9.4bn to £20.6bn could be achieved over five years if the pilots' proposals for public service delivery reform were adopted nationwide.
The Early Intervention Foundation's 20 "pioneering places" are taking strategic testing of the approach to the next level with ongoing analysis and research. The Better Start areas, meanwhile, are showing how a strong focus, backed by real funding can be a powerful catalyst for change. Three to five areas will be chosen to take the work forward during the next decade. They will have the opportunity to transform support for under-threes and their parents and, as a result, will be firmly in the spotlight.
Anne Longfield is chief executive of 4Children