Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Home Start UK

HOME-START’S WORK IN LOCAL COMMUNITIES IN ENGLAND

There are 225 Local Home-Starts in England supporting over 26,000 families and more than 56,000 children. Local Home-Starts in England cover 76 % of all local authority areas. Home-Start UK works with local communities to develop new services which are established as separate charities but are linked in a network through Home-Start UK. Home-Start UK supports Local Home-Starts to form consortia to provide family support services across whole local authority areas.

In 2011–12 Local Home-Starts had 226 funding related SureStart/Children’s Centres partnerships and 159 non-funding related SureStart/Children’s Centres partnerships.

Local Home-Starts work closely with Children’s centres in the following ways:

Sitting on Management Committees/or equivalent of children’s centre.

Making referrals to children’s centre.

Accepting referrals from children’s centre.

Contracted by children’s centre to provide home-visiting family support services.

Contracted by children’s centre to provide training to children’s centre staff.

Contracted by children’s centre to provide volunteers.

Contracted by children’s centre to provide training to children’s centre volunteers.

Contracted by children’s centre to provide group work.

Contracted by children’s centre to provide targeted family support work (eg “hard to reach” families).

Contracted by children’s centre to provide other services.

As part of the local arrangements for partnership working Local Home-Starts also provide outcomes data to Children’s Centres.

July 2013