Guidance and information for workers

The aim of Stronger Families is to change the way families are supported to improve their lives using a whole family approach coordinating services through a lead worker.

What is it?

Doncaster Council and its partners are developing ways of working supported through the Governments national Supporting Families Programme. The national programme uses a model where the Council receives some funding upfront to help to change the ways of working with families, and payments-by results when we can demonstrate that families have been supported and no longer need help.

This is a key Government Policy and is supported by the Team Doncaster Partnership and a multi-agency Steering Group.

The programme must meet the requirements set out by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities in their Financial Framework. This can be viewed by the link below:

Financial Framework

Which families?

Any family that has 3 or more issues such as:

Getting good education
Improved mental and physical health
promoting recovery and reducing harm from substance use
good early years development
Financial stability
Secure housing
Improved family relationships
Children safe from abuse and exploitation
Safe from Domestic abuse
Crime prevention and tackling crime

Family Outcomes Framework

While we know that many families will already be working with individual services and making progress, to support this, these families must will be offered the new way of working as this is a requirement of the programme to enable families’ access the extra resources and for agencies to access extra capacity to support them.

The Government requires us to have an outcome plan. This sets out our local priorities and indicators in Doncaster under the government ten headline issues. Our outcomes Plan is a described as a ‘living’ document that changes periodically to reflect the principals of the national programme, the priorities in Doncaster and the needs of the family as they change. It also sets out how we will monitor and report progress that families make.

How does it work?

We need to be able to demonstrate that we are working with families following the principles below

A lead worker is allocated to the family and is recognised as such by the family and other professionals
A whole family assessment has taken place taking account of the needs of \ALL family members inc adults
A whole family action plan is in place with interventions in place to tackle all the identified issues in the whole family assessment, outlining who will do what (inc family members).
The objectives in the action plan align to the priorities in the Outcomes Plan