Volunteers absent among first family champions

The Working Families Everywhere programme forms a crucial part of Prime Minister David Cameron’s plan to transform the lives of England’s 120,000 most troubled families by 2015.

Emma Harrison, its creator, has previously said she wants the "family champions" delivering the project to be a mixture of paid staff and volunteers, claiming that the programme will eventually be underpinned by thousands of volunteers.

But it has emerged that a number of local pilots have yet to decide whether they will recruit volunteers, with one – Westminster – ruling it out altogether.

The government is keen to sell the volunteering concept – a large part of the big society vision – to boost local capacity. Children’s minister Tim Loughton has already signed up to be a family champion.

But it is unclear whether volunteers will be widely in place in pilot areas in time for planned evaluation reports that will assess their impact before the national roll-out of the initiative begins in 2014.

The concept of volunteers attempting to address the problems of families with multiple needs has been greeted with scepticism in some quarters.

Baroness Claire Tyler, chief executive of Relate, has labelled the programme itself as a "blunt instrument".

But in response, Harrison said: "From the very beginning we have been clear that we don’t want the Working Families Everywhere campaign to be about toothless rhetoric.

"Right now we have to focus our efforts on finding these families, making sure that we have committed family champions to work with them and bringing together the services to get that family working."

She added: "We are already seeing families transformed but, as Baroness Tyler points out, we must scale up our efforts in order to make the impact we need."

HULL

Hull City Council is unsure of how the family champions scheme will develop, with project manager Russ Waterman stating that a decision on whether to recruit volunteers will not be made for at least six months. "It is a bit early to say how it will progress yet," he said.

In Hull, one of three councils in the first phase of pilots, there is a focus on helping second and third
generation out-of-work families using a "localities model" with all services working together, alongside Jobcentre Plus.

Referrals have come in from children’s centres in  the city as well as partner services in the area, among which, the Working Families Everywhere programme has been widely publicised. However, the pilot areas are upbeat about the prospects of the scheme.

Waterman said Hull’s six family champions are  already working with 80 individuals since the pilot launched four months ago, well ahead of the target  for the first year of 75. Of these, six people have
already found jobs.

SHEPWAY

Shepway Council in Kent has recruited four family champions, who will be supported by a multi-agency working group project. But it is also holding fire on plans to recruit volunteers.

Project manager Jenny Bullows said it is something the authority had been keen to do, but that a decision will be made further down the line – in April 2012 at the earliest. "We felt we needed to get up and running with professionals – people with the right skills – because we haven’t done anything like this before," she said. "We will look at volunteers at some point in the future to see how practical it could be."

Bullows said the authority is taking a different approach to the first wave of pilots, which included Westminster, as it does not have an existing family intervention project. "We have other types of programmes such as a family management programme and parenting classes," she said. "We will be drawing some families from those and there will also be a referral process from partners in the project group."

WESTMINSTER

Westminster, a first-phase pilot alongside Hull and Blackpool, has said it will not attempt to recruit volunteers during the pilot programme.

"The programme is going to be finishing in 2013 and we have got to be clear about what we can do in the space of time we can do it," said Lucy Taylor, project manager for the scheme in Westminster, run by Action for Children.

"Volunteers would mean additional resources in order to train them and make sure they have the capacity to work with families," she added.

In Westminster, the family champions were selected based on previous experience working with families, with two working on referrals from the borough’s family recovery programme and one working on referrals from a family intervention project in Kensington and Chelsea.

There are five family champions based across three Action for Children centres in Westminster, plus one based in Kensington and Chelsea.

These six family champions are aiming to work with 166 families by 2013. But Taylor said different delivery methods should be considered if the government is going to deliver on its pledge to help 120,000 families.

She said family champions should be Jobcentre Plus advisers who have been given additional training and relocated to local services. "Jobcentre Plus has got the bodies, and I think it is about getting them out to children’s centres, health centres and schools," Taylor said. "We should be wrapping the initiative around services and working in localities."

WORKING FAMILIES EVERYWHERE

• Sixteen areas are involved in Working Families Everywhere pilots, which will run until 2013. The first phase involved Westminster, Hull and Blackpool. Shepway joined this month, with the others expected to follow later this year
• Under the Working Families Everywhere campaign, families identified as in need of intervention will be given access to a "family champion"
• The family champion, who will either be a professional or trained volunteer, will be able to use existing resources to help families overcome problems such as parenting challenges, poor health, debt, addiction, dependency or lack of
  motivation
• The programme has been designed to help move people into employment and create "happy, working families with a new sense of purpose and an active role in society"