About the Framework

The Family Hubs Planning Framework sets out the data and research that local areas should consider to strengthen their Family Hubs model, providing the processes and tools that can support them in doing so.   

The framework consists of five complementary applied resources that bring together evidence from child development and early intervention, guidance to help use evidence in a systematic way, and step-by-step processes, to make gathering and analysing evidence easier and more effective. The resources are: 

• A guide to the framework  
• Thinking about your local population needs 
• Thinking about services available to support families 
• Thinking about meaningful engagement with children and families 
• Thinking about your local system 
• Thinking about your workforce.

Development

The Family Hub Planning Framework was developed in partnership with 15 local areas who were early in their journey of developing their local Family Hub approach. The resources were designed to support this journey by helping local areas bring the right stakeholders together, clarify the questions they needed to answer, and gather and make sense of information to build a full picture of local needs. This combination of navigating content and processes, breaking complex tasks into clear steps, and bringing stakeholders together, helped to forge strong relationships across the partnerships. The early versions of the resources were well received and developed over the course of the project through feedback, additional content, and useful templates to be shared and further adapted to suit local needs.

Aims

Taking a whole-system approach to providing support for children and families can open up  opportunities for early intervention to ensure that Family Hubs are delivering effective support for children and families. The Family Hub Planning Framework aims to help local leaders to identify strengths and gaps in their current data, prioritise areas for development and reflect on local arrangements for collecting and assessing different kinds of evidence. Doing so will help to build a thorough assessment of the local context and needs. This strong foundation will in turn facilitate progress at every stage, from decision making, through to planning, implementing change, monitoring and evaluation, and reviewing progress. 

The framework has been designed to support the ambitions of the Family Hubs and Start for Life transformation programme, as well as the guidance available from the National Centre for Family Hubs.