Supporting Families Programme

A better way of targeting help and support to those families who need it most. Supporting Families focuses on the whole family and brings together the skills and expertise of all our frontline partners.

Supporting Families (formerly Priority Families) Programme

The Government's Troubled Families Programme was launched in 2011 and locally it was adopted as the Priority Families Programme. It has maintained a focus on supporting families with multiple and complex problems to change lives. The national programme was launched because families had been failed by services, which responded to the one problem that presented itself at the time, whether it was truancy, domestic abuse, anti-social behaviour or worklessness. Services were not always designed to deal with the many and inter-related problems that a family might have been facing, and as such the success of any intervention was often limited.

The programme’s funding and support provided a catalyst for local services to transform and work together in a more effective and cost-efficient way to achieve better outcomes for families. The programme did not mandate how services should ‘transform’. Instead, through programme guidance and latterly the Early Help System Guide, the programme aimed to incentivise a re-configuration of services around families and to encourage innovative, multi-agency practice that best fits the local context.

Over time, the scope of the programme has grown. As we enter the next phase, we want to be ambitious for vulnerable families and see them thrive. We want to build their resilience by providing effective, whole family support at the earliest possible point, and to help prevent escalation into statutory services. We also want to drive system change locally and nationally, so that joined up local services are able to identify families in need and provide them with the right support at the right time, tracking their outcomes in the long term as the norm.

To mark this next iteration of the programme we will call this new phase Supporting Families.

Contact

Email: fip@nottinghamcity.gov.uk

Telephone: 0115 8763606