Families With Complex Needs - What Should Local Authorities Do?

The Issue

A number of factors for parents impact on their ability to parent well and impact negatively on their children in terms of both immediate safety and longer-term outcomes, including if a child is taken into care. Most prominent amongst these vulnerabilities for parents are drug misuse, alcohol misuse, mental health problems, domestic abuse and offending.

These vulnerabilities are often linked, overlapping and mutually reinforcing. Families with multiple vulnerabilities present challenges for services, cost the local authority and health services significant amounts of money to respond to, and are difficult for staff to work with effectively across social care and partner agencies.

Policy Context

The new Government has committed to helping families with multiple problems. Nationally, there has been a raft of policies over the last decade placing greater emphasis on the importance of the family, including Think Family, the Drug Strategy, the Youth Alcohol Action Plan and Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance.

What Works

There is a growing evidence base to support the efficacy of whole family

interventions that demonstrate improved outcomes for vulnerable and complex families and provide evidence of cost savings or cost avoidance for public services. These have been shown to be effective for families with parental substance misuse, domestic abuse and mental health problems. These programmes include Westminster Family Recovery Project, Family Intervention Projects, Strengthening Families Programme, Option 2, M-PACT and Family Drug and Alcohol Courts.

Delivery Options

Using the evidence of what works and the local needs analysis, we have developed a set of principles and characteristics of effective programmes that should underpin any future service development, joint working protocols and training. We have also outlined three delivery models to take this work forward:

1. A multi-agency joint working protocol

2. A programme of training, support and co-location

3. Adopting an evidence-based programme

Identify

• Conduct an exercise to identify the top 400-600 complex families that cost local authorities the most money to deal with.


• Pool training resources by bringing together budgets, expertise, venues and overlapping issues (e.g. parental drugs, alcohol, mental health, domestic violence) into a single set of training programmes to: (i) help identifying agencies to spot signs and engage complex families; and (ii) develop whole family working practices across key agencies


• Pool communications resources to ensure that key messages about working with complex families go to all staff across agencies in a joined up way, spreading evidence of what works


• Commissioning priority should be given for parents with vulnerabilities and complex families, with commissioners actively ensuring an appropriate response from service providers

Intervene

• Improve inter-agency working through developing and implementing a specific protocol to drive improved joint working for complex families. Key agencies need to sign up, setting out expectations and commitments from each agency in line with evidence of what works.


• Consider adopting evidence based programmes to deal with complex families more effectively.


• Bridge the gap between adult and children's services by joining up the safeguarding functions and championing a multi-agency approach to complex families, in line with evidence based programmes.


• Consider whether the current use of money for drug testing and substance misuse experts in child care proceedings could be more effectively used to fund specialist drugs worker input co-located with children's social care to joint work these cases.

Prevent

• Address the current gap in support after a child goes into care when parents have vulnerabilities, by ensuring appropriate family strengthening support and parenting skills for the parents and specific support for the children who may experience long term problems.


• Establish self support groups for parents (esp. mothers) going through these issues.

Local authorities should ensure that robust and evidence based interventions are put in place to support families with complex needs, this can represent a cost saving for the authority and a huge increase in outcomes for the families themselves. Local authorities can work with with specialist organisations to provide support, from training to policy development and intervention design. What is not in doubt is the need to better respond to challenging families for theirs and our mutual benefit.

Mark Bowles is the founder of The Training Effect a leading provider of specialist training and outsourcing services to the public and private sectors. At http://www.thetrainingeffect.co.uk you can find further details on the range of training courses we offer, learn why we only use expert's not generic trainers and find out how we can save you money whilst maintaining your current training delivery.

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