Tuesday, June 13th 2023
9:30 AM — 1:00 PM

Webinar

Key Speakers Include:

Cllr Alistair Strathern, Cabinet Member for Children and Young People at Waltham Forest Council

Paul Carberry, Chief Executive at Action for Children

Professor Wendy Sigle, Professor of Gender and Family Studies at LSE

Lucy Peake, Chief Executive of Kinship

Kerri Prince, Public and Political Affairs Lead at British Association of Social Workers

Event Details Website Register to Attend

There was an estimated 14.1% of households where no member of the household was in employment in the period April to June 2022, unchanged compared with the same period last year. In 2021, 1.1 million children (8.9%) lived in long-term workless households, up 1% on the previous year. The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimated that 5.0% of adults (6.9% women and 3.0% men) aged 16 years and over experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2022. The number of police recorded domestic abuse-related crimes in England and Wales increased by 7.7% compared with the previous year, to 910,980 in the year ending March 2022.

The government’s Supporting Families programme – formerly the Troubled Families programme – is a targeted government intervention for families with multiple problems including crime, anti-social behaviour, truancy, unemployment, mental health problems, and domestic abuse. It aims to provide help to vulnerable families with multiple and complex problems to prevent them from escalating into crises.

The first phase of the Troubled Families programme ran from 2012 to 2015, during which period the Government claimed to have “turned around” 99% of the 117,910 families that had been identified as the target. However, subsequent independent evaluation analyses questioned the validity of these claims and the methodology underpinning them. The second and last phase of the programme covered the period 2015-2021 and introduced a range of new tools, including a new financial framework that took effect in 2018. A total of £1.1 billion was invested from 2012 to March 2021. In March 2021, the government launched its Supporting Families programme as a replacement for the Troubled Families programme, providing a whole-family focus and practical, holistic support. The new programme received £165m for 2021-22. This phase of the programme focussed on building the resilience of vulnerable families to help them thrive, and on enabling system change locally and nationally. For 2022-2023, over £200 million was made available to local authorities to improve key local services to help families combat problems such as unemployment, financial insecurity, risk of homelessness and educational inequality. The government has committed a total of £695m planned investment across the three years to March 2025.

Whilst the Troubled Families and Supporting Families programmes have achieved significant progress in transforming service provision and the lives of thousands of people, huge societal challenges remain, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and cost-of-living crisis. Critics argue that much more needs to be done to address the structural issues in the UK that lead to the cycle of deprivation and disadvantage. The family-intervention approach employed by the programmes has also been criticised by experts Stephen Crossley and Michael Lambert, who say the evidence suggests the approach does not work well.

This timely symposium will provide practitioners across local authorities, the police, social services, education, welfare and the housing sector with an invaluable opportunity to examine the Supporting Families Programme and discuss how to effectively galvanise a range of local services around families in order to support them.

Programme

• Assess the progress made in the Troubled Families Programme and Supporting Family Programme
• Review findings from the ‘Earned Autonomy’ model
• Assess the role of Family Hubs and the impact of the ‘hub’ model
• Evaluate the impact that the Supporting Families Programme and the Data Accelerator Fund has had on collating better data and improving how councils use data to support vulnerable families
• Examine ways to enhance multi-agency working to transform the health, social and financial circumstances of vulnerable families
• Discuss how the Supporting Families Programme can be improved to meet the challenges created by the cost-of-living crisis
• Share best practice and discuss innovative strategies to improve the lives of families with complex disadvantages
• Consider ways to support families in navigating services and find practical pathways to employment
• Explore how to deliver an effective whole family intervention approach
• Identify ways to improve educational attainment and child welfare  
• Examine the underlying factors leading to high levels of deprivation and social breakdown in the UK

To register for the briefing, please click here.