The Toolkit highlights the importance of understanding and analysing local need, consulting widely, and focusing on children, their parents and carers as individuals rather than making assumptions based on their background, abilities, cultural or other identification.

Checklists provide questions and discussion points, covering the groups identified by the Sure Start Children’s Centre Practice Guidance (November 2006) as “families that are experiencing particular challenges that mean that their children may be at risk of poor outcomes’’. These groups include teenage parents, fathers, minority and ethic families, disabled children and parents, partners and families of prisoners, parents with drug or alcohol problems, families in temporary accommodation and those living in poverty.

The Toolkit for Reaching Priority & Excluded Families is published by Together for Children, the national partnership of childcare services providing dynamic support and delivery of children’s centres in all 150 local authority regions. The five Together for Children partners are: Serco, CareandHealth, 4Children, ContinYou and PA Consulting.

Visit www.childrens-centres.org to download a free copy.