Family Support Services - Family Action

A strong, stable and loving family network provides a foundation for all family members to flourish and fulfil their potential.

However, many families will face difficulties at some time and some have multiple complex needs.

We know that these families often have poor outcomes in health, social interaction and educational attainment. The multiple needs are often accompanied by greater involvement of costly state interventions such as child protection, children in care, educational support and NHS mental health support.

Our services

Our Family Support Services offer a whole family approach.

They are professional, home-based services designed to meet the needs of families with multiple, complex needs.

We work with families dealing with mental health problems, difficulties with parenting or with their own relationship, domestic abuse, children with behavioural difficulties, problems engaging in education, emotional or physical welfare issues, supporting older members of the family, and financial and material hardship. Our work is based on the principle of empowerment, working with families, supporting them into universal services until they are able to manage without support.

Our Birth Parents Support Services use a volunteer befriender model to support parents following a decision by the local authority for their children to be adopted out of the family.

Birth Parents Support – Information for Professionals

We also deliver a large number of Troubled Families Services across the country and our Building Bridges Service supports parents with mental health and other chronic health difficulties.

Details

Our aim is to strengthen families and communities by building skills and resilience, preventing family breakdown and children entering into care, and improving outcomes for children, their parents and other members of the family.

Work starts with the family’s own perspective of the action they need to take, in conjunction with the issues identified by professionals.
We offer home-based, practical flexible family support tailored to the family’s needs including weekend, evening or early morning work to help families establish routines, relationship and practical support, and activities for children and parents
Our work is targeted, regularly reviewed and time limited
All our services are led by qualified Family Support Workers with a multi-agency approach
The Family Star is used as the primary Outcomes tool for the service. Read more about our Evaluation, Outcomes and Impact

Our impact

An independent evaluation showed that Family Action’s Family Support Services have reduced:

Care Programme Approach by 53 per cent
Child protection plans by 46 per cent
Local Authority care by 30 per cent
Common Assessment Framework Team Around the Child, Single Agency by 48 per cent
Common Assessment Team Around the Child, Multi-Agency by 33 per cent
Children in Need by 46 per cent.

Families working with our services generally made a median progress of 2 points on the Family Star, moving from:

Trying: where families recognise that it is up to them to improve things for their children. They are trying new things but may feel tentative and give up quickly.
to:
Finding what works: where families are learning what works and what doesn’t with their children and are managing to be reasonably consistent.

A C4EO analysis showed that Family Action’s Family Support Services have:

Saved the Department of Education and local authority £114,400;
Saved the Department for work and pensions £158,400;
Saved the NHS £67,200.

With an average unit cost of £3,500 per family, our Family Support services reduce costs to commissioners.

Family Action Building Bridges evaluation 2011

Evaluation of Young People’s Building Bridges

Grasping the Nettle

In your area

We deliver services across the country. Search for a service local to you.

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Contact us

For more information about Family Action please contact us on

Email: [email protected]
Telephone: 020 7254 6251