Background
The Family Hubs Evaluation Innovation Fund formed part of a £2.5 million budget, announced in 2020 by the Department for Education, for research and the development of best practice around the integration of services for families, including family hubs.
Two evaluations were commissioned, assessing family hub models in six local authorities (LAs) across England, each with a different family hub model and stage of maturity:
• Sheffield Hallam University evaluated the family hub model in Doncaster
• Ecorys UK in partnership with Clarissa White Research and Starks Consulting evaluated the family hub models in Bristol, Essex, Leeds, Sefton, and Suffolk.
A summary of main findings is provided below:
1. Implementation and process
The evaluation reports provide a detailed overview of the implementation of family hubs for all six LAs involved. Timeframes for transition varied across LAs, but transformation could take at least 3-5 years without dedicated funding and staff capacity. Both studies highlight that the implementation of Family Hubs hinges on a clear vision with whole local system buy-in.
Partnership working across services and professionals was underpinned by robust governance and leadership arrangements at a systems-level. A key feature of a Family Hub model is a strong focus on staff development which is embedded across all aspects of staffing from recruitment and induction to continuing professional development, training, and supervision.
2. Outcomes & Impact
Quasi-experimental impact evaluation of individual level data in the Sheffield Halam evaluation of Doncaster family hubs found:
• A Statistically significant positive impact on EYFSP, with family hub pupils 1.06 times more likely to attain a ‘Good Level of Development’.
• A Statistically significant positive impact on Year 1 Phonics assessment, with family hub pupils 1.02 times more likely to be ‘Working at the Expected Level’.
• Insufficient statistical evidence to suggest that family hubs affected the likelihood that pupils with a characteristic generally associated with lower level of attainment (such as a SEND; FSM eligibility or English as an additional language) would achieve either of the educational outcomes.
• Interviews with a small group of families highlighted that parents using family hub support perceived improvements for some outcomes, such as parental mental health and children developing in confidence and new skills, with more neutral perceptions of improvement for others.
Analysis of LA level data from publicly available national datasets in the Ecorys evaluation found potentially beneficial impact of family hubs on:
• The number of 3- and 4-year-old children benefiting from some free early years education, observing a statistically significant increase of 2.9% in one LA.
• The number of Key Stage 4 children going to, or remaining in, education or employment, observing a statistically significant increase 0.7% in one LA.
• Positive signs that a number of other indicators were moving in the right direction or maintaining good levels.
However, due to issue with data quality, it was not possible to determine if family hubs were directly driving these changes.
3. Cost-benefit
Cost-benefit analyses conducted by Ecorys estimated savings of between £36,694,368 and £133,356,284 across the family hubs. Most of these savings related to estimated benefits from one family hub model (a commissioned service). However, efficiency savings were identified across most models. These savings are in effect cashable and can be redeployed to deliver additional services. Moreover, given the lack of high-quality data available, these figures are likely a significant underestimate of the true potential cost savings the family hub model can provide.
Q&A from webinar
12th December 2023
Q. Could attendance at family hubs itself signal parental characteristics, engagement etc, potentially explaining the absence of association between number of visits and impact on outcomes? Were wider factors, such as Home Learning Environment, considered in the evaluation?
A. This is something that we considered as there are indications that there may be some biases in households who attend. The available data means we cannot assess or account for this perfectly. However, this is one of the reasons why we have a preference for pupils from Doncaster’s statistical neighbour LAs as the best control sample. We also included available proxy’s in the matching process which on average for a large sample are likely to account for factors such as home learning environment.
Q. Do you have an estimate of the reach of the hubs (% of denominator eligible population) in terms of attracting the parents within a locality?
A. The way data was able to be gathered and presented for the evaluation means we couldn’t reliably make this estimate. In the interim and final reports, we give some suggestions for work to develop data gathering that would make this clearer.
Data for 20/21 suggests at least 70% of 0–5-year-olds were accessing their Family Hubs in Doncaster.
(From LA): All our members are logged onto our membership system which is e-start. This has the functionality to run a report broken down by LSOA so we can then target outreach into areas where we have low membershipQ. Did you consider using earlier data such as ASQ undertaken by Health visitors at 12 months?
A. I am not sure if this was considered in the past, but we can check this. There is a possibility that this was affected by Covid, which led us to drop a lot of otherwise good indicators.
(From LA): We are two-years into the development of an information sharing agreement with Health to gather this.Q. Could you provide more information about the attribution of significant differences and positive signs to family hubs?
A. For impact to be attributed there need to be certain conditions: close links between family hub activity and outcome indicator, a statistically significant difference between Essex/ Leeds and the synthetic comparator, and no other similar trends/effects detected across comparator LAs. There is more information in our report about our approach on this, which will be linked at the end in case of interest.
Q. Was the £30.7m efficiencies across all 4LAs or just from Essex please?
A. £30.7m of efficiencies includes £29.4m from Essex, £866,000 from Sefton and £435k from Suffolk.
Q. Have you managed to embed a common needs/assets assessment tool such as CAF amongst all professionals? If so, what were the challenges in implementation?
A. In Leeds we are in the process of doing this. It’s a constant work in progress because of the size of the workforce. Our implementation team can constantly reinforce the importance of this formulation, benefits for families and professionals.
In Essex we have adopted the shared family assessment which incorporates approaches used in Strengthening Families approach and Children’s social care. Part of our core training and core competencies, this is embedded in it to make sure that all staff are working to the same assessment.Q. For Doncaster – your 85% membership rate of 0-5 is really impressive. Who takes the lead on getting families to be become members and how long did it take to embed this into their standard practice?
A. We have 96% of midwifery appointments operate from family hubs which is hugely helpful in this membership rate – while families are waiting in the reception, area business support colleagues have conversations with families about the support offered and get them signed up as members to the Family Hubs. High levels of engagement though we see a drop off at around age three, but there is high take up of childcare, so we know where these children are and therefore don’t see it as a negative.
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