Developing an outreach strategy for Best Start Family Hubs in Wolverhampton

The Best Start Family Hubs transformation is building on successful outreach efforts, including funding for voluntary organisations, targeted home learning, and community development programmes. These programmes aim to reach families in need, by providing services closer to their communities. The transformation is also focusing on capturing improvements in outcomes through family feedback surveys, case studies, and data tracking, with the goal of better connecting families with hub services and measuring the impact on individual children and families.

Rebecca Whitehouse and Denise Williams share reflections on Wolverhampton’s approach to developing their outreach strategy.

We have been delivering outreach through various strands across Best Start Family Hubs transformation and now that needs bringing together into a coherent approach. We will draw on our local plan Best Start in Life implementation plan developed in March 2026 which has 12 workstreams. 

We are drawing on our equalities analyses as we do an equalities analysis as part of our standard project documentation. We identify key protected characteristics and evidence how we are addressing different strengths and needs of the local population. We need to collate this information into a document with a supporting action plan.

Our four Locality Partnership Boards bring partners together from across statutory, voluntary and faith sectors to develop action plans responding specifically to the needs in those localities. Localities are areas with very similar demographics. We've got 8 hubs, so one Locality Partnership Board between two hubs. We will develop our approach to outreach with these partnerships.

Last year we funded 32 voluntary organisations with small grants from our family hub funding for them to offer services to families who were unlikely to engage in the traditional way with family hubs. That’s a big plank of our outreach offer, and we will continue to build on that learning.

We've been involved in some work regionally around early years. That has now led to looking at the data and what the data is telling us about GLD, about the outcomes of the EYFS checks at 2-years, and the needs in terms of localities that we really need to focus on. We are focusing on two or three localities where we can see there's developmental issues, either developmental delay or parenting, and then getting a better understanding of the underlying issues.

We've taken on an additional three members of staff to deliver targeted home learning. This involves linking with libraries and leisure centres to deliver pop up family hub sessions closer to where families are using buildings that they wouldn't necessarily avoid. So getting closer to the community.

 

We're working with adult education running classes that can range from things like ESOL to community identified classes e.g. sewing. We bring in adults - parents, grandparents into classes. Adult ed have built on that through developing a volunteer scheme. When people finish the classes, they're saying we would like to develop skills that are getting them closer to work or to start our own business or employment related skills.  We offer work experience or volunteering within the family hubs and the family hub network. We're now running a volunteering scheme for family navigators. We will be able to push that back out into communities as well as within the hub buildings, they'll have a presence, they'll be representative of their communities – it’s a two-way relationship. 

We've always run a Parent Champion scheme. We've got Parent Champions who run groups that offer one-to-one support to families who are going through maybe the social care system. We've got SEND Parent Champions - parents with lived experience of SEND who offer peer support to others. They also run groups, drop-ins, coffee mornings, things like that. We've recently recruited some Fatherhood Champions. So again, that's about pushing that out into their organisations, be that voluntary or statutory and providing that connection with dads. We run Dads’ groups, and groups for LGBTQ+ parents. So again, it's about making sure that we're reaching as far as we can. But we still feel that we're right at the beginning of this journey. There's so much more that we need to be doing and can do.

We're just in the process of commissioning Bebot, a provider, to develop our digital front door. We'll be working over the next three to six months on developing that digital outreach offer.

We will gather evidence of improved outcomes in different ways. One way will be through family feedback surveys. We're collating case studies and ‘stories of ‘difference’ to families through qualitative data. In terms of quantitative data, we are measuring footfall and tracking sessions joined. Through the new digital AI system, we hope to be able to follow family journeys and see that families go on to make better connections with other hub services. If possible, and this is something that we're working on with our data and analytics team through our data work stream. We are looking at if we can track individual children and families as well in terms of progress. For example, where a child is flagged by the health visitor as having areas that they need some support with, through their 2½-year check, we hope to feed them into our community-based sessions - the targeted home learning - then for those children to come back and be reviewed six weeks later to see if any of that is starting to have an impact. During that period, we will also be working with these families around accessing the childcare offer or nursery provision. We've got low uptake of the childcare offer in Wolverhampton that we really need to address. Again, we will be reviewing and looking at progress six months, and 12 months later for those individual children. We've started to do some of that through a pilot with Newcastle University, called PLACES: Promoting Local Access to Children’s Early language and communication Support. They've worked within early years settings as well as family hubs - out in community as well as within the hub buildings. Again, we can contrast and compare where families would prefer to access support.