Breaking barriers: How to help children’s centres reach disadvantaged families

The Children’s Society is committed to ensuring that children receive both the best start in life, and the best chance for a positive future. Over the last decade, Sure Start children’s centres have played a core role in both, but they can only achieve this if they can reach the children and families that need their support the most. For this reason, breaking barriers to engagement must be at the very heart of children’s centre services.

These centres have always sought to work with the most deprived families, who often need their services the most. Many of these families are the very hardest to reach, facing multiple barriers to sustained engagement with services.

Now more than ever, it is crucially important to find ways to effectively reach these families. As this report shows, funding for early intervention services has been significantly cut since 2010 – a trend set to continue in the near future. The Early Intervention Grant, which provides funding for children’s centres, will be halved in real terms between 2010 and 2015, from £3bn a year down to £1.5bn.1 As a consequence, many children’s centres are inevitably under extreme financial
pressure.

However, despite these cuts, children’s centres can still reach the most disadvantaged children and families. The report sets out the steps involved in supporting a family’s path to sustained engagement with services:

• Awareness of children’s centre services – ensuring parents are aware of the existence of the centre, and what’s on offer through it.
• Getting families engaged – promoting the value of services available, and ensuring ease of access.
• Keeping families engaged and developing involvement – developing a welcoming environment and providing volunteer opportunities.

The report is based on a survey of parents with children aged 0–5 who do not use children’s centres and consultations with our children’s centre staff and users. The key findings from the survey and consultations are:

• More than four in 10 parents surveyed had never used a children’s centre because they had not heard of the service.
• Nearly three quarters of parents were not aware of what services were provided by their local children’s centre.
• A quarter of respondents said they found it difficult to use their local children’s centre, with transport being one of the most common reasons given.
• Most of the children’s centres consulted faced difficulties identifying the disadvantaged families in their reach area because they were not provided with adequate information.
• The types of parents that practitioners identified as most difficult to engage with were teenage parents, parents with mental health problems, fathers and those with children at risk of abuse or neglect.

Breaking barriers recommends changes to policy and practice at every level. These include central government protecting funding for early intervention services and making sure important data is more effectively shared with children’s centres, and local authorities consulting with children’s centres about their reach areas.