Matt Buttery is CEO of Triple P UK & Ireland and Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Warwick.
A recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has revealed that children from low-income families who grew up near a Sure Start centre performed up to three grades better than their peers in GCSE’s. It has prompted calls from former Labour education secretaries for Sir Keir Starmer to put a new version of Sure Start in his election manifesto.
The good news for Rishi Sunak, and in fact for Starmer too, is that there is no need to start from scratch with a new version of Sure Start. The Government already has an answer to the question of increased family support: its Family Hubs and Start for Life initiatives.
Ministers’ focus now should not be on reinventing the wheel and resurrecting old policies, but building on progress to date by locking in future Family Hubs funding and extending support to cover every local authority in the UK.
Since the announcement in Jeremy Hunt’s Budget last year that the government would be doubling annual spending from £4bn to £8bn, the family support debate has been dominated by childcare. Labour recently confirmed it will keep a similar level of support in place if elected.
Making childcare support universal is a fantastic ambition that can help parents across England. Now it’s time to deepen the conversation, and announce an ambitious plan for greater parenting support by extending Family Hubs.
Parents are the key to creating a home environment that stimulates learning, supports wellbeing, and helps children to be happy, confident, and successful in life.
Government has a role to play in setting parents up for success by ensuring they have the evidence-based strategies, tools, and resources to do so. It must be a priority to ensure parents across the country have access to high-quality services that help them meet parenting challenges.
This is not without difficulty, with a need to provide both practical solutions but also overcome hurdles around perception. Polling of British parents by Triple P Positive Parenting Programme, an international parenting scheme, shows that most parents feel parenting is the most important job they will ever do.
Yet 75 per cent feel there is stigma attached to asking for help. It is here that the transformational Family Hubs initiative can play a crucial role in breaking that stigma and catapulting British parenting provision forward.
In 2021 the Government pledged £300m of investment to the Family Hubs and Start for Life programmes. Family Hubs are designed to be a one-stop-shop, providing support and information for families through a variety of services, including home learning support, parenting classes, midwifery, and perinatal mental health support.
With all 75 Family Hubs in selected local authorities now open, the next steps are to commit to future funding for those areas, and to expand the Family Hub programme to all 153 local authorities in the UK so all families can reap the benefits.
There is already support for doing so. David Fothergill, of the Local Government Association, recently calling for the scheme to be “extended to all councils so these transformative benefits can be felt across the country.” But neither party has yet committed to a comprehensive programme of parenting support.
At the outset of Rishi Sunak’s premiership, he pledged to build a society that values families. With the Spring Budget coming and going without major announcements in this sector, now is the moment to be bold and ambitious.
While parenting programmes are accessible through the Family Hubs offering, the other piece of the jigsaw is to pledge the rollout of digital parenting programmes nationally. Research carried out by Triple P found that 87 per cent of parents polled said they would ask for help, but only 37 per cent would know where to find it; more than a third would turn to Mumsnet or Facebook for advice, rather than evidence-based support.
This needs to change. Firstly, via the future funding of the Family Hubs program being ringfenced solely for evidence-based parenting interventions; secondly, by learning from international precedents how the state can go further to offer parents evidence-based support.
In Australia, the government launched a competitive tender for a nationwide rollout of online parenting programmes, and in 2022 these became available to every family with a child under the age of 12. The rollout has been an emphatic success, with parents and carers reporting feeling calmer, more confident and having a better understanding of their children’s needs.
Helen Lincoln, Chair of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services Policy Committee, recently called on the Government to introduce a national digital early-help service and highlighted the need to explore digital solutions, given parents’ propensity to reach for their phones and laptops to seek advice online.
Sure Start, Family Hubs, and the Australian experience are all examples we can build upon to become genuinely world-leading in our approach to parenting support. This can range in intensity, from early years support for new parents, to lighter touch strategies to manage typical problems parents face, to more intensive support for families at the edge of care.
The IFS report also highlighted that Sure Start increased the prevalence of services for special educational needs (SEN). This follows a recent Guardian report that hundreds of children with SEN have been waiting a year or longer to access support; acording to freedom of information data, there are more than 20,000 cases of families waiting longer than the 20-week limit to be issued with an education, health and care plan.
A national, evidence-based digital rollout can support swifter access to assessments and provide strategies to help parents with child development and potential challenges.
Based on the Australian Federal Government’s rollout of online programmes, an initial budget of £25 million per year would enable the launch of an evidence-based national programme in England that would reach hundreds of thousands of families every year. This approach can continue the momentum Family Hubs have created and negate the need for a Sure Start style relaunch – all without breaking the bank.
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