Funding Opportunities
We want all children and young people to have the foundational family relationships they need to thrive. To achieve this, we fund work to synthesise and generate evidence about the best programmes in England that improve services which support family relationships.
Where we find that programmes work, we will spread good practice and advocate scaling these up so that they are available to more children and families across the country.
Funding opportunities are advertised on this page and announced in our newsletter and our social media feeds.
We use our grant funding to:
- Support the delivery of promising programmes. We want to fund well defined programmes that have a theory of change that is informed by evidence and aim to improve the outcomes of children.
- Commission a robust evaluation of the programme, carried out by an independent evaluator. Depending on how well developed the programme is, we fund different types of evaluations. In general, these evaluations tell us, or get us closer to understanding, whether the programme works, how and for whom.
We also use our grant funding to commission evidence reviews and other types of research which help us to maximise our impact and ensure more children are provided with the best support to reach their potential.
How We Work
We have five principles that guide us in all our work:
- We actively pursue a preventative and early intervention approach in our work
- We use robust and transparent evidence standards to generate and champion rigorous evidence
- We seek change so that children and families have more power in how services work
- We ensure our work actively promotes equality, diversity, inclusion, and equity
- We work with partners to enact change.
Our Five Priority Areas
We work across five priority areas that make up the bulk of our work. We retain some flexibility to be responsive to the changing policy environment.
We are working in these areas because of the scale of the problem they represent, because there is considerable policy interest in addressing these problems and because we think the evidence base needs further development to maximise impact. We review our priority areas regularly to ensure we are tackling the most important issues to improve the family environment and achieve positive outcomes for vulnerable children.
Our priority areas are:
- Supporting parenting
- Strengthening family networks
- Domestic abuse
- Relationships for care experienced children
- Service and practice models
Find out more about our priority areas and the change we want to create here
Across these areas, we will use the following measures as indicators of our impact on improving the lives of children and families:
- Increase in the use of evidence-based interventions and approaches available for children and families
- Increase in the number of government programmes that promote evidence-based interventions and approaches
- Increase in the number of policies and practice that embed high-quality evaluation
- Increase in the number of interventions and approaches shown to have an impact (and that can be recommended for delivery) in our priority areas
- Decrease in the use of interventions and approaches proven to be ineffective/that have no impact on child outcomes
- Improvements in the capability, opportunity, and motivation of local leaders to deploy evidence-based interventions and approaches.
