In this blog, Foundations’ Deputy Chief Executive, Donna Molloy, and Nesta’s Deputy Director of the Fairer Start Mission, Louise Bazalgette, reflect on the opportunity to transform access to effective, evidence-based parenting support in the UK.
Parenting support is one of the best evidenced ways to improve outcomes for children, helping parents to address problems early and prevent widening gaps in attainment in the early years. The Government’s child-centred agenda offers a new opportunity to review how we approach parenting and make sure that all families who need it are able to access support. Earlier this month, Nesta and Foundations co-hosted an event focused on how we can develop a shared vision for the UK for scaling up effective parenting support. We invited people from across the sector, including civil servants, funders, parenting intervention developers, local authorities and other local service providers and researchers. On the day over 80 people attended bringing deep expertise from a diverse range of backgrounds and perspectives.
During the presentations and discussion sessions, attendees acknowledged that there has been some progress in recent decades. The sector has sharpened its focus on impact, with a positive shift towards valuing impact evidence and considering evidence about ‘what works’ when designing services for children and families. There is also greater understanding of the importance of supporting parents and parenting through integrated local services, such as Sure Start, that help to simplify and destigmatise accessing support. There is a growing body of evidence about enablers and barriers to scale and the children’s services sector has a better understanding of the resources and partnerships needed to implement parenting support programmes effectively and sustain them over time.
However, there was also recognition that we have lost ground on tackling inequalities in children’s development and scaling up effective parenting support. Since the ringfenced funding for Sure Start and other family support services was ended in 2010, funding for parenting support has substantially reduced in England. Local capacity to deliver evidence-based parenting interventions has dwindled as a result. There was consensus at the workshop that there is an urgent need to rebuild government commitment to supporting parenting. When we polled attendees at our event, we found that the top challenges they wanted to tackle were making policy more supportive, and increasing funding for scaling effective parenting programmes.
Our discussions with those working across the sector highlighted that achieving a step change will require progress in three main areas:
First, there was broad consensus that we need a new focus on parenting in national policy. Parenting support offers a critical route to meeting current Government ambitions of improving opportunity from the earliest years of life and helping children thrive. Policy should consider how best to support all local areas to provide a menu of parenting support interventions suitable for different child ages and levels of child and family need. This requires central commitment to drive this forward and increase local capacity through programmes such as Best Start in Life, Family Hubs, targeted early help and child protection.
Second, to make the progress we need to see, local areas will need support to implement effective programmes. There are ongoing barriers to delivering effective programmes in local child and family services. Currently, local areas lack accurate data about local families’ needs and preferences, which makes it hard to design attractive and accessible services. Also, while local service leaders value research evidence, we need to make it easier for them to navigate the complex market of parenting interventions and make informed decisions about which programmes are most effective and will work best for their populations and the workforce they have available.
With these challenges in mind, support for implementation will be crucial to ensure programmes deliver their intended outcomes. Local service leaders need help to select programmes that are a good fit with local need, to target programmes to maximum effect and to set up effective and sustainable solutions for training and supervising staff. Foundations’ Changemakers programme has been designed to help overcome some of these issues, but it’s currently only being delivered at a small scale. What we need now is policy commitment to support effective local implementation at a far more ambitious scale.
Third, there are some gaps in the current evidence that we still need to tackle if we are to effectively tailor support offers to the needs of different families. This will be essential to support parent engagement and to make sure parenting support achieves the outcomes for families that it is intended to.
We still don’t know enough about which types of parenting support will work best for some family needs, such as families affected by domestic abuse. We also lack good understanding of the mix of delivery methods that are needed for different groups to help overcome barriers to access (eg. face to face services, video calls and digital tools such as messages, videos, apps etc.). And there is a lot more to be learned about how we can most effectively tackle issues that prevent parents from engaging with support such as lack of information or perceived stigma.
These questions deserve focus and attention because there is a risk that if local services aren’t explicitly designed to meet the needs of parents and caregivers from minoritised and disadvantaged backgrounds, they will exacerbate inequalities in children’s outcomes, rather than tackling them.
The next era of research and innovation needs to fill these gaps in evidence, to help drive forward more inclusive services and overcome barriers to parents accessing the support on offer.
Finally, we need a better data infrastructure to support monitoring and evaluation, that can help us as a sector understand who is accessing which types of parenting support, and whether or not it’s benefiting them. This will require central policy coordination so that we work together as a sector to grow our evidence base, to everyone’s benefit.
Our recent event confirmed that there is a lot of enthusiasm in the children’s services sector to collaborate with government on a shared ambition to increase the reach of effective parenting support. The confirmed funding for continued delivery of Family Hubs and for family help and children’s social care prevention over the next year is a great start. We really welcome the emphasis from the Prime Minister that we need to “make sure a record number of children start school ready to learn”.
However, to reach this goal we will need far more ambitious policy focused on scaling up effective parenting support starting in the early years and continuing into adolescence. The kind of ambitious step change that we need to see will require policy that increases the availability of the most effective programmes. We also need to make progress in testing the long-debated potential of implementing the common elements of effective programmes as part of standard practice.
There is already huge expertise in the sector about how to implement parenting programmes most effectively, which can be drawn on to support a reinvigorated policy drive. At Foundations and Nesta, we are committed to collaborating with the sector and government to support this work, helping design new and more effective policies and programmes for radically increasing families’ access to effective support, and ultimately improving outcomes for children.
For more information on our joint event, read the full write up here.
