In a report published today 4Children provides a package of measures to tackle family breakdown and child poverty. Building on a developing understanding of risk factors associated with children who grow up in troubled families, the charity calls for drastic action to assist ailing families. The report, entitled Mind the Gap, provides recommendations to help turn the tide through tailored support to prevent family breakdown and reinforce parents and carers.

Despite the development of a range of new services for children and families through Sure Start, children’s centres and extended schools, evidence increasingly shows that vulnerable families are failing to access these as envisaged by policy chiefs in Whitehall. At the same time many specialist services are limited to only those who are in the greatest need. The result is a gap in the system through which many families on a daily basis fall.

“Recent Government attempts to tackle this issue including the results of a cross departmental investigation have simply not been ambitious enough” said Chief Executive Anne Longfield OBE.

“Many families with complex needs simply fall through the net. These are the families who are seen as too difficult for mainstream services to work with, but are not in enough need to get referred to more specialist help. Newspaper headlines provide a constant reminder of what happens when things go wrong but we need to step in early to prevent crisis, not just to treat and mitigate its effects – to do this we need a seamless system of support for families in trouble so that they can get the help they need at an early stage.”

In its report Mind the Gap 4Children highlights that:

—Currently there are an estimated 7,500 struggling families, 60,000 children in Local Authority care and 10 per cent of 16–18 year olds not in education or employment

—The UK spends around a huge 60 per cent of its overall spend on children’s services on the care system (accounting for £2.2 billion annually) although only 0.5% of children are in care each year.

—Research reveals that even where parents ask for help early on, they can be turned away if their needs are not sufficiently high.

—The complexity of some families needs make it hard for any one local service to provide all the answers, but dealing with many different agencies can be difficult.

—There are very few drivers for Local Children’s Trusts to invest in preventative work rather than simply meeting their statutory obligations

4Children is calling on the Government to:

—Fund and develop a new tier of services to reach families in trouble early on.

—Create new Parent Advocates to advise and broker local support from public services.

—Support families to create their own solutions by putting family group conferencing on a statutory footing.

—Train all those working with children and young people to offer more support for vulnerable families.

—Reward prevention rather than ‘cure’ to encourage Children’s Trusts to work with families early on.

Download a copy of the report.

 Print this page
 Email a friend

 Back