Research and analysis

Ten years of Supporting Families: Supporting Families programme Annual Report 2022-23

Published 8 March 2023

Applies to England

Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section (3) 6 of the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016

© Crown copyright, 2023

Copyright in the typographical arrangement rests with the Crown.

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Ministerial foreword – Felicity Buchan MP

This year sees the tenth anniversary of the Supporting Families programme.

In this time, over 650,000 vulnerable families have been supported through whole family working to achieve positive and sustainable outcomes. The programme has put whole family working and early help at the heart of local offers for families. It has continued to improve families’ lives and reduce the burden on statutory services.

We are in challenging times. The current economic climate, with high levels of inflation, is putting pressure on household budgets and therefore increasing the vulnerability of families. There has never been a more important time to support vulnerable families. The Supporting Families programme has and will continue to work with those who face hardship, and we know the positive impact the programme can have on this cohort.

The Supporting Families evaluation has shown the programme has had a positive impact on the lives of families across England. For example, it found the proportion of children on the programme going into care reduced by a third; the proportion of adults receiving custodial sentences decreased by a quarter; juveniles receiving custodial sentences decreased by almost 40%; and the proportion of adults on the programme claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance decreased by 11%.

These positive outcomes have come about due to the systems change driven locally by the Supporting Families programme. Ensuring families do not have to tell their story to a range of different services and ensuring whole family working has improved the lives of almost 535,000 families since 2015.

Early help is vital in preventing contact with expensive statutory services. The Care Review highlighted many of the positive features of early help and has put it at the forefront of the agenda for supporting vulnerable families. In early 2023, government published an implementation plan for children’s social care reform. We will be using the Pathfinder areas to test the alignment of Supporting Families funding alongside options to inform future decisions on the programme in the next Spending Review period.

Over the past year we have seen great change across the Supporting Families programme. This year, we now have a joint team with the Department for Education. This partnership has seen our funding expand, and our ambition with it. Over this Spending Review period we have received an increase of £200 million, bringing our overall funding for the programme to £695 million. Our goals are also greater than ever, as we now aim to work with 300,000 families between 2022-25

It is also important that we continue our cross-government work to ensure we are connected with family policy across departments and that we are championing a strong, joined up approach to supporting vulnerable families. Recently, we have worked closely with the Department for Education on their development of Family Hubs policy and new school attendance guidance. Alongside this, we have supported the Department for Health and Social Care’s work on ensuring the Best Start for Life for children and babies and supported the Ministry of Justice in the design of their new youth justice programme, Turnaround. This continued join up across government will ensure we can keep pushing to deliver better, more connected services for vulnerable families across the country.

Felicity Buchan MP
Minister for Housing and Homelessness
Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities

Executive Summary

• The Supporting Families programme is celebrating its tenth anniversary. This year has marked 10 years of delivering the programme since it started as Troubled Families in 2012.
• Since the publication of our last Annual Report, 64,589 families have been supported to achieve a successful family outcome. The programme has now achieved 534,961 successful family outcomes from April 2015 to December 2023.
• Programme funding for 2022-23 was £205 million. This funding is a part of a total of £695m for 2022-2025. This includes a £200m uplift in funding compared to the previous Spending Review period.
• Local authorities and their partners implemented the updated outcomes framework in October 2022. Outcomes such as secure housing, early years development and recovery from substance misuse can now be claimed for by local authorities.
• Local areas have been working towards the vision set out in the Early Help System Guide. Published in April 2023 this provides a national vision for early help services. In 2022, all local areas completed a self-assessment against this vision and were provided with support in response. Key themes are outlined in this report.
• 15 local authorities have now achieved Earned Autonomy status. This year we have seen Lincolnshire County Council join the 14 local authorities who have already achieved Earned Autonomy. This removes the Payment by Results model for local authorities, with all funding being provided up front. The prospectus for the application to achieve Earned Autonomy for 2023/24 has now opened.
• The 2022 Data Survey shows improvements in local data systems. There have been substantial self-reported improvements in the maturity of local authority data systems and data sharing. All local authorities responded to the survey, with only 33% now considering their system to be basic or manual compared to 47% in 2021.
• Stable Homes, Built on Love: Implementation Strategy and Consultation has been published. In May 2022, the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care was published. In response, the government published an implementation strategy for children’s social care in February 2023. The implementation plan proposes Pathfinder projects to test new approaches to children’s social care and early help.
• New evidence review on family support services. The Supporting Families national team has worked with What Works for Early Intervention and Children’s Social Care to produce a review of the evidence on different approaches used as part of family support services. It sets out the evidence for different approaches as well as identifying gaps in evidence.

Chapter 1 – National programme update

This is the programme’s seventh annual report and sets out the key achievements and policy developments over the last year. This report fulfils the duty to report on disadvantaged families in the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016.

The programme

Supporting Families provides targeted interventions for families with complex interconnected problems including unemployment, poor school attendance, mental and physical health problems, involvement in crime and antisocial behaviour, domestic abuse, and children in need of help and protection.

Supporting Families is committed to driving strong multi-agency local partnerships in every local authority area and enabling mature local and national data systems. This means investing more in good practice, overcoming barriers to data-sharing, and involving the voice of families in service design and commissioning. Services are managed by upper tier local authorities in England working together with a range of local partner organisations, with an aim to drive service transformation across the system to ensure families only tell their stories once and get the targeted whole family support that they require to enable positive outcomes. More information about the programme can be found on GOV.UK.

The programme has seen significant change in 2022-23. For the first time it has a shared governance arrangement between the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) and the Department for Education (DfE). This has seen integrated working across departments to develop policy and support local authorities as well as shared governance structures. The programme has seen a significant expansion too, with an increase in funding of 40% in cash terms over this Spending Review period which means we can support even more vulnerable families. Between April 2022 and January 2023, the programme has achieved outcomes with 50,860 families, a significant step towards its aim of helping 300,000 families between 2022-23 and 2024-25.

The programme continues to work across a range of outcomes and supports many different priorities across government. In October 2022, local authorities implemented the updated outcomes framework, which has brought in new outcomes including early years development and secure housing.

Ten-year anniversary

This year marked the tenth anniversary of Supporting Families and a decade of progress in whole family working. DLUHC and DfE are proud to celebrate the tenth year of the programme. Launched as the Troubled Families Programme in 2012, the programme has developed and grown to be the backbone of the early help system across England.

Over the last 10 years, the programme has supported hundreds of thousands of families to make sustained improvements in their lives. It has funded local authorities and their partners to provide early access to tailored support from the right professionals at the right time, empowering families to overcome multiple and serious challenges.

Supporting Families supports the government’s ambitions to level up key services to tackle problems such as unemployment, financial insecurity, risk of homelessness and educational inequality, with funding allocated based on deprivation and population figures.

Throughout the year we have been sharing examples of how local authorities and their partners have used the Supporting Families programme to transform local delivery. These examples have ranged from how local authorities have invested in their workforce, sourced specialist training for lead practitioners and built on the team around the school model to improve attendance.

We have shared updates via the good practice blog and have led webinars. To celebrate this achievement the Department hosted a conference in March 2023, inviting every Supporting Families Co-ordinator to attend. The conference was an opportunity to reflect on the programme’s achievements and difference it has made to the lives of families in England. It was also an opportunity to thank those who have delivered the programme for their hard work. Local authorities shared their journey with us, and we have celebrated how they have transformed systems and devised whole family working through partnerships and adopted a multi-agency approach.

Independent Review of Children’s Social Care

The government’s manifesto in 2019 committed to reviewing the children’s social care system to make sure children and young people get the support they need. The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care led by Josh MacAlister and the final report was published in May 2022. The government published Stable Homes, Built on Love: Implementation Strategy and Consultation, in response to the review’s recommendations in February 2023.

The Care Review recommends significant reforms to children’s social care. It is based in part on the principles that Supporting Families has been advocating for and implementing over the last ten years. The Supporting Families national team is working closely with DfE on the design and implementation of the reforms. We will be using the Families First for Children Pathfinder areas to test the alignment of Supporting Families funding alongside options to inform how government funding can be simplified and aligned for local authorities going forward. This will inform future decisions on the programme in the next Spending Review period. The review provides a vision of how we can help families to overcome challenges at the earliest stage, keep children safe from significant harm, and make sure children in care have stable loving homes, long-term loving relationships, and opportunities for a good life.

Achieving better outcomes with families

In the last year, Supporting Families has changed the way we identify needs and measure outcomes for families. With an all-new outcomes framework launched in 2022, Supporting Families is now providing much more guidance to local areas about what a good outcome looks like for families facing a number of challenges, including a new focus on important outcomes such as good early years development, fostering good family relationships and families having secure housing.

We worked extensively across national and local government to develop the framework, making sure it covered a broad range of families’ needs and ensured the outcomes included reflected the positive outcomes we want to help families to achieve. It also gives much more guidance on what a good standard of evidence and data looks like for each outcome, with the view to improving the overall consistency of data identification and reporting of the problems families are facing.

All local authority areas are now implementing the new framework and using it in their practice with families. In order to support areas to do this, we held a number of events and provided supporting documentation and information. These included webinars, surgeries, one to one call, engagement with case management and data suppliers and a set of answers to frequently asked questions.

We are working closely with local authority areas on how this implementation is going and asking for regular feedback. This will help us identify areas of good practice and understand the breadth of data and evidence sources available to local authorities to understand issues faced by families and the positive outcomes they are achieving and sustaining.

We expect initial reporting of successful outcomes to begin being submitted between April and July 2023. The 2022 Data Survey shows that the majority of local authorities have embedded the outcomes framework in not only their case management systems, but also in the case work recorded by Family Hubs. Local authorities also report that almost half (49%) have integrated the framework to some degree in their children’s social care systems.

Additionally, as the framework requires areas to have data and evidence sources to understand family issues and outcomes, the survey shows an increase in those accessing missing children data, risk of child sexual and criminal exploitation data and housing and homelessness data. This suggests that the framework is driving better local partnership data sharing arrangements to help understand and support children and families.

Figure 1: Illustration of the family outcomes framework including the 10 outcomes

Alt text:

Central circle reads: Family outcomes framework
Ten smaller circles surrounding this are 10 outcomes, reading:
Getting a 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

Case study one: A family’s journey of improvement

This case study illustrates how whole family working helped mother and daughter access the specialised support they needed and to reconnect as a family.

Names and identifying features have been changed to preserve confidentiality.

Joanne 35 is mother to two children; Sophie 11 and Ben aged 7.

What problems did they face?

The family were referred for early help by Sophie’s school. Sophie had a diagnosis of ADHD and was struggling to manage her behaviour and emotions. This was having a negative impact on the whole family as well as her education.

Joanne’s mental health was suffering as this brought up experiences from her childhood. She was struggling to cope and took time off work as result. Ben could not understand what was happening with his sister and was unsure how to handle her changing behaviour.

Joanne had concerns regarding her finances, as she was reliant on her full-time job to provide for herself and her family.

What help did they receive?

A family support worker stepped in as the Lead Practitioner and opened a CAF (Child and Family Assessment) to coordinate support for the family. The Family Support Worker supported the whole family by arranging regular home visits to capture the entire family’s thoughts and emotions.

They facilitated a joint plan with Joanne and Sophie – bringing together what they would like to start happening in their lives. An interim school change was put in place, as Sophie had been at risk of permanent exclusion.

Although initially reluctant Sophie engaged with targeted youth support, making new friends, and taking opportunities to explore her risk-taking behaviour in a safe environment.

Joanne was linked into an ADHD Parent Empowerment Programme to better understand Sophie’s condition. When talking to the Family Support Worker, she shared experiences from her childhood and expressed that she did not want the same cycle to repeat itself. The Family Support Worker arranged counselling via her employer’s assistance programme. Her employer also agreed to a phased return to full-time work.

This gave Joanne the space to reflect and to gain additional support to manage her mental health. A Supporting Families Employer Advisor (SFEA) also helped her to complete a financial assessment and benefit calculation.

What progress was made?

All parties agreed that Sophie would remain in full time education with a view to transitioning to a smaller school when she moved into Year 9. Sophie felt empowered as her voice had been listened to during the conversations around her education, and she continued to engage with East Lancashire Child and Adolescent Services (ELCAS) and  recognised the positive impact of taking her prescribed medication. Sophie’s risk-taking behaviour has reduced, as she tries new things in a safer way and grows in confidence.

Joanne said she has a better insight into her daughter’s condition, is better equipped to respond and has adopted more effective parenting strategies. Ben said his sister was nicer after the support and that she now spends time with him playing and baking.

The risk of financial exclusion was avoided. Joanne is receiving Disability Living Allowance alongside full-time employment. The family continue to access universal services and are aware of additional services which they can access in the future, as they need.

Message from the family

Joanne shared that although it was daunting to share her experiences as a child, she recognised that everyone needs support at some point in their lives and we should recognise that reflecting on yourself is the first step.

Getting the right help at the right time has made all the difference to the family.

Research and evaluation update

The 2019 publication of the national evaluation showed that the programme led to a reduction in children being taken into care, juvenile cautions and convictions and adult custodial sentences. Since then, research and evaluation work has been looking at what we can say are the most effective forms of practice with families and the most effective ways for local family services to be organised and delivered. Last year we published the results of qualitative research showing lessons from local authorities on effective forms of practice.

This year, we worked with What Works for Early Intervention and Children’s Social Care to review the current evidence around practice and delivery of the programme. Their Evidence Synthesis Report considers the evidence on what works on various aspects of family support such as identifying and engaging vulnerable families and building trusted relationships with families. It also reviews current evidence on specific approaches such as Signs of Safety, trauma informed care and parenting programmes. They have also completed feasibility studies considering options for testing psychologically informed approaches to practice with families.

Chapter 2 – Local service improvement

The national Supporting Families team continues to work closely with local authorities and their partners. This section outlines work that has been taken at national and local level to ensure service delivery continues to improve in England.

Early Help System Guide

In April 2022, following extensive co-production and consultation with local areas, a new Early Help System Guide (EHSG) was published. The new Guide provides a national vision and thirty-one descriptors for a mature early help system that is shared by DLUHC, DfE and across government. It has also been widely consulted upon across other government departments and is based on what is working around the country.

As a self-assessment document, it provides an ongoing framework for areas to understand their progress and prioritise next steps. Areas are asked to submit their current self-assessment on an annual basis. The first of these collections was during the summer of 2022. Feedback was provided to all areas. The scores and narrative provided in the self-assessments is being used to support areas to continue to develop their system maturity.

All areas also identified three of the thirty-one descriptors to prioritise during 2022-23. Areas with poorer data maturity were asked to prioritise descriptors relating to data maturity. Beyond these, the following were the most often identified:

• Family engagement: does the local authority have well established mechanisms to gather and act on feedback from families and engage people with lived experience in service design, governance, and quality assurance.

• Access to support: does the local authority have evidence that families say they know how to navigate local services and how to get help.

• Early help is understood and seen as everyone’s responsibility across the partnership of services working with children, adults, and families. Does the local authority have a shared culture and set of core principles that underpin the wider early help system.

• Does the local authority have a model of place-based or hub-based working in the community with a common footprint. Partners are integrated either virtually or physically in e.g., Family or Community Hubs. The model helps underpin the principles of whole family working.

• There is a senior strategic group accountable for the early help system and the partnership infrastructure evidences a focus on early help, whole family and whole system working.

• Partners have agreed a shared set of measures at family, cohort, demand, and population level, including quality of whole family practice and family voice, which collectively represent the effectiveness of the early help system. The performance against these measures shows that outcomes for families are improving.

Peer support groups have been established to bring together areas focussing on the same descriptors to support one another.

Feedback has been sought from areas around how they have found using the EHSG to inform decisions about the process moving forward. As a result of the feedback additional resources will be made available to support this work including clearer guidance on the type of evidence which should be included. The team will also provide more detailed feedback. All areas will submit a refreshed self-assessment by 1 July in 2023 and 2024.

Earned Autonomy: a refreshed approach

In 2018, 14 local authorities were granted Earned Autonomy (EA) status after making a successful case through an application process that receiving all their funding upfront would accelerate their local transformation. Areas achieving EA transition from Payment by Results (PbR) to an upfront funding model and are recognised as areas with the greatest maturity in their early help system.

In April 2022, a new prospectus for EA was published following consultation which views EA as a progression from PbR for areas who have reached a defined standard of maturity with their early help system. The following markers underpin the criteria to become an EA area:

• Comfortably exceeding minimum numbers for successful family outcomes.
• Met the 2020-21 data milestones set out in the 2021-22 programme sign up conditions.
• Committed to work on being able to report on all issues and outcomes faced by all families supported in early help and Supporting Families during 2022-23.
• Strong evidence that whole family working is an essential element of practice.
• Strong evidence of family voice informing service delivery.

The Early Help System Guide (EHSG) self-assessment and an assurance process were used during 2022 to assess the existing EA areas and any new prospective EA areas. Prospective EA areas were identified using the scoring against nine of the descriptors in the EHSG self-assessment.

Following this process, the existing Earned Autonomy areas retained their status^{[footnote 1]} and one additional area, Lincolnshire, has gained the status. We have also published the Earned Autonomy prospectus for local authorities to demonstrate they have earned it for 2023/24.

Case study two: Partnership approach

Lincolnshire County Council

With the help of the Supporting Families programme, Lincolnshire County Council and partners have been on a journey since 2013 to change how the early help system works more effectively together to identify needs and provide whole family support. Lincolnshire moved from early help being delivered by a targeted team in the local authority to an embedded early help approach across the system, aligning working practices across the local partnership.

Families in Lincolnshire are supported by a team of appropriate professionals (team around the child (TAC) approach) and capacity for early help has been increased by including more partners in this approach.

Over 80% of TAC arrangements are now led by external partners such as schools, nurseries, and health, meaning families get the right support at the right time. “It feels like you been working with us, and we are deciding things together which I really like” - family

Partners are offered support and challenge by Early Help Consultants, and they value this approach. “Our conversation has helped me to reflect on how TAC can work better for children and their parents” – school “Speaking with my consultant has really helped build my confidence” – school

The impact of this coordinated and timely approach is the stable rate of children needing support from children’s social care across the county, remaining significantly below national rates. Using partners to increase capacity at early help means many more families are now being supported through non-statutory services, and the rate of escalation into social work has reduced each year since 2019. The number of looked after children also decreased each year between 2018 and 2020, bucking a national trend.

The Early Help Steering Group leads the local partnership and is chaired by a local nursery, with multi-agency structures that provide a common vision, purpose, and way of working and enable the alignment of resources to best help local families, demonstrating that supporting families is everyone’s responsibility.

Improving local practice

Continuing to drive improvement is at the heart of the Supporting Families programme. However, our efforts to improve good practice go further than the outcomes local authorities and families achieve. Throughout the last year we have established the following:

• Good Practice Projects - this year we have launched four national good practice projects:
  • Supporting Families Employment Advisors - this project is supporting delivery of good practice and collation of evidence of impact to give clearer guidance to all areas to maximise the impact of this role and measure success consistently.
  • Connecting the Early Help and Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) systems - This project has been developed to test ways of better aligning the SEND and Early Help pathways and will fund 5-7 local authorities to test new approaches.
  • Connecting the Early Help and Mental Health systems - This project has been developed to test ways of better aligning mental health and early help pathways and will fund 5-7 local authorities to test new approaches.
  • Rebalancing the system - The aim of this project is to understand what progress is being made in local areas to shift their child and family support systems towards earlier, whole family help, what is getting in their way of achieving that vision and what could be done to help.
• Local authority expertise and capacity - this year we have invited local authorities to apply for a grant to provide expertise and capacity to deliver key projects and activities for the Supporting Families programme. This is in recognition that the majority of expertise around delivery of the programme and improving whole family working sits with local authorities and their partners, and not within central government. The various projects offered include data maturity and system maturity support to other local areas as well as the delivery of a range of the good practice projects.
• Early Help Peer Review - we have asked the Local Government Association (LGA) to work with us, DfE and local authorities to co-design and pilot a new Early Help Peer Challenge. Two areas will test out how effective this can be in improving their local early help system.
• Early help data collection & Family Voice - we have continued feasibility and planning work on improving data collection from local services and establishing good practice for local services in using the voice of the family in service design and delivery.

Data Survey

The Supporting Families programme has always promoted the use of data as an enabler to help local services to identify, understand and better support children and families at the right time, to prevent them reaching crisis point. In order to understand the maturity of local authorities’ data systems we run a data survey every year. The Supporting Families Data Survey ran for its fourth year in 2022. This is a comprehensive survey on local data maturity, systems, reporting and analytics. The response rate is extremely high, with 100% of local authorities responding in 2022.

Sharing data between agencies is the first building block of any mature data system. Compared to 2021, overall, the levels of data sharing across local authority area partnerships have improved. 43% of local authorities said data sharing had improved over the last twelve months (compared to 22% in 2021).

Data sharing	2020	2021
Improved	22%	43%
Stayed the same	74%	54%
Got worse	4%	3%

• Internal local authority data (such as children’s social care, education, and youth offending data) continue to be the most often shared. Compared to 2021, the survey shows some increases across these datasets, particularly in missing child data and data on children who are at risk of sexual exploitation. These increases are likely to be due to the data and evidence sources required by the new Supporting Families Outcomes Framework.
• For the first time we have asked if local authorities are accessing data on children at risk of criminal exploitation, 61% of local authorities reported that they are accessing these data.
• Whilst there has been a slight increase in those accessing adult offending data, and a slight decrease in those accessing youth offending data, both continue to be slightly under 50%, demonstrating there is still significant work to do to promote sharing data between police and local authorities.
• There have been increases in access to housing and homelessness data. 42% are accessing housing data (an increase of 6 percentage points) and 46% are accessing homelessness data (an increase of 13 percentage points).
• There continues to be low levels of data sharing with health partners at a local level.

There has been a significant increase in the number of local authorities who now have the programme’s new outcome measures integrated into their case management systems. In total 86% have them integrated in some way, and 54% have all outcomes and issues integrated. 49% have integrated the outcomes framework into their children’s social care system. This allows for quantitative reporting across all cases and therefore understanding of what issues families are facing and outcomes families are achieving across the continuum of family support.

Overall, there have been increases in many aspects of data maturity, including the use of data warehouses and data lakes. There are still challenges to improve the connectivity between systems, data, and partners. However, when local authorities were asked to categorise their data maturity into 1 of 6 models^{[footnote 2]}, the results show significant improvement in the maturity of areas. The proportion of areas reporting their data system as ‘basic’ or ‘manual’ has decreased from 47% to 33%, with those areas moving up the scale of maturity. This suggests that the support we have provided over the last year, the introduction of the Supporting Families Outcomes Framework and the hard work of local authorities is paying dividends to increase maturity and enable local authorities and partners to better use data to provide support to families.

Figure 2: Percentage of local authorities on a 6-point scale of data maturity

Data maturity	2019	2020	2021	2022
Advanced	0%	3%	3%	2%
Mature	3%	1%	2%	3%
Early maturing	13%	16%	16%	21%
Building blocks	33%	32%	32%	41%
Basic	48%	47%	42%	31%
Manual	2%	2%	5%	2%

Case study three: Local data improvement

Nottingham City Council

Nottingham City Council has been working on an improved data maturity model that allows them to pull together data from multiple sources to understand individuals and families within the city.

In order to achieve this Nottingham City moved from manual methods of processing and matching to a data warehouse solution. They created a Spinal ID which imports all key identifiers into their Internal server system. This Spinal ID provides information from Children’s services, Housing Aid, Police, Youth Justice, and Education to form a Single Person ID and enables them to build a comprehensive overview of family needs to target early intervention and service provision.

They were keen to ensure that they were working within a strong information governance and ethical framework and so they worked with the Information Compliance Board on data sharing arrangements and adopted a 2-step approval process - once at the start and again at the end to report back on findings.

Nottingham City Council worked with the University of Nottingham to build the model using Python to allow for collaborative learning. The model is able to identify those who might benefit from support at the earliest possible point.

Nottingham City Council’s work highlights how building a mature data system can allow for strong analytics to be developed which help to offer support to children and families at the earliest possible point.

Data Accelerator Fund

The Local Data Accelerator Fund is a £7.9 million innovation fund from 2021-2023. It aims to improve services for children and families by improving the local use of data. This funding is provided by HM Treasury’s £200m Shared Outcomes Fund and is part of a wider Data Improvement Across Government programme that was announced in 2020. Ten projects were awarded funding for the 2 years. The ten projects are in their second year of delivery. Projects are working towards their project deliverables. DLUHC plans to share good practice and learning from the projects. The latest monitoring form shows that all projects are rated green or amber for delivery. An independent evaluation of the fund is underway.

Chapter 3 - Successful Family Outcomes 2022-23

Successful family outcomes are the way the programme records positive sustainable change at a family level. In most local authorities successful family outcomes can be claimed through a Payment by Results claim. Fourteen local authorities have Earned Autonomy status and Greater Manchester has a devolution deal with the government. These local authorities receive all their funding up front and do not make Payment by Results claims, however, they continue to track and report successful family outcomes. The figures in this report combine the Payment by Results outcomes and the successful outcomes from Earned Autonomy local authorities and Greater Manchester.

The latest figures submitted up to 5 January 2023 show that a total of 50,860 families have achieved successful family outcomes in 2022-23. This represents 78% of the national allocation of outcomes for the year with three months to go. The number of outcomes achieved is expected to rise in year two and three, in line with the increased annual allocations of funded successful family outcomes.

This means that since April 2015 Supporting Families (previously known as the Troubled Families Programme) has funded local areas to help 534,961 families with multiple and complex needs to make significant positive changes to their lives.

Figure 3: Number of successful family outcomes achieved through Supporting Families from April 2022 up to 5 January 2023

Validation of claims

The validation process makes sure that local programmes are meeting the national programme requirements. It is also referred to as the assurance or ‘spot check’ process.

The assurance process seeks to ensure outcomes meet the criteria set out in guidance and in a local authority’s own local outcomes plan. There is also a review of how local authorities use their case management and data systems and how they are progressing against the sign-up conditions^{[footnote 3]}. On an assurance visit, the team meet with keyworkers and partners to understand how whole family working is being embedded within the local authority and how early help is being delivered. The team offer support and guidance to the local authority. Increasingly population level data is used to support the conversations.

This year, as in previous years, the national team took a risk-based approach to assurance of the programme. This approach enabled support to be directed where it was most needed. Indicators used to determine local authorities that might benefit from an assurance visit included:

• An unexpected number of family outcomes.
• Issues identified during a previous engagement.
• No engagement for a significant length of time.
• A local authority identified as needing performance improvement support.

These indicators are not exhaustive and are not looked at in isolation.

As of the end of January 2023, 8 assurance visits had been conducted in 2022-23. 82.5% of claims have been found to be valid, with invalid claims removed from the claims total^{[footnote 4]}.

Annex A – Table of successful family outcomes by local authority

Local authority	Maximum funded successful family outcomes 2022-23	Number of families achieving significant and sustained outcomes up to 05 January 2023	Number of families achieving continuous employment outcomes up to 05 January 2023	Total successful family outcomes achieved up to 05 January 2023**	Total successful family outcomes achieved up to 05 January 2023
Barking and Dagenham*	507	329	77	406	80%
Barnet	344	264	1	265	77%
Barnsley	368	283	85	368	100%
Bath and North East Somerset	102	102	0	102	100%
BCP	349	349	0	349	100%
Bedford	208	193	0	193	93%
Bexley	232	172	0	172	74%
Birmingham	2,435	1,270	6	1,276	52%
Blackburn with Darwen	312	238	0	238	76%
Blackpool	312	233	8	241	77%
Bracknell Forest	74	50	2	52	70%
Bradford	1,090	841	1	842	77%
Brent	472	303	13	316	67%
Brighton and Hove*	275	271	4	275	100%
Bristol*	611	497	114	611	100%
Bromley	271	116	0	116	43%
Buckinghamshire	310	171	0	171	55%
Calderdale	262	190	10	200	76%
Cambridgeshire	516	432	5	437	85%
Camden*	256	250	6	256	100%
Central Bedfordshire	204	151	2	153	75%
Cheshire East	297	297	0	297	100%
Cheshire West and Chester*	338	251	19	270	80%
Cornwall	607	519	70	589	97%
Coventry	485	441	12	453	93%
Croydon	507	452	0	452	89%
Cumbria	431	431	0	431	100%
Darlington	121	84	1	85	70%
Derby	399	259	0	259	65%
Derbyshire	786	566	83	649	83%
Devon	620	507	0	507	82%
Doncaster	513	322	89	411	80%
Dorset	262	213	10	223	85%
Dudley	407	407	0	407	100%
Durham*	760	685	75	760	100%
Ealing*	468	347	70	417	89%
East Riding of Yorkshire	262	197	7	204	78%
East Sussex	500	500	0	500	100%
Enfield	559	517	0	517	92%
Essex	1,402	792	0	792	56%
Gateshead	275	189	0	189	69%
Gloucestershire	487	336	0	336	69%
Greater Manchester*	4,511	2,120	0	2,120	47%
Greenwich	416	401	1	402	97%
Hackney	448	350	20	370	83%
Halton	219	155	4	159	73%
Hammersmith and Fulham	197	140	6	146	74%
Hampshire	888	669	13	682	77%
Haringey	416	400	16	416	100%
Harrow	197	166	0	166	84%
Hartlepool	156	77	22	99	63%
Havering	223	223	0	223	100%
Herefordshire	160	91	16	107	67%
Hertfordshire	916	719	0	719	78%
Hillingdon	329	287	7	294	89%
Hounslow	396	395	1	396	100%
Isle of Wight	139	77	19	96	69%
Islington*	292	256	17	273	93%
Kensington and Chelsea	160	108	12	120	75%
Kent*	1,701	1,262	9	1,271	75%
Kingston upon Hull	570	362	161	523	92%
Kingston upon Thames	123	123	0	123	100%
Kirklees	602	589	13	602	100%
Knowsley	357	354	3	357	100%
Lambeth	390	389	1	390	100%
Lancashire	1,586	1,581	5	1,586	100%
Leeds*	1,270	1,270	0	1,270	100%
Leicester	615	600	15	615	100%
Leicestershire	464	154	0	154	33%
Lewisham	550	355	0	355	65%
Lincolnshire	804	798	6	804	100%
Liverpool*	1,077	1,077	0	1,077	100%
Luton	321	231	0	231	72%
Medway Towns	327	313	14	327	100%
Merton	154	114	0	114	74%
Middlesbrough	331	326	5	331	100%
Milton Keynes	253	191	0	191	75%
Newcastle upon Tyne	418	327	0	327	78%
Newham	600	519	0	519	87%
Norfolk	919	760	38	798	87%
North East Lincolnshire	264	207	16	223	84%
North Lincolnshire	184	157	2	159	86%
North Somerset	162	81	4	85	52%
North Tyneside	227	218	9	227	100%
North Yorkshire	470	470	0	470	100%
North Northamptonshire	780	586	0	586	75%
Northumberland	347	223	19	242	70%
Nottingham	570	501	69	570	100%
Nottinghamshire	880	796	35	831	94%
Oxfordshire	438	100	0	100	23%
Peterborough	316	177	25	202	64%
Plymouth	353	297	1	298	84%
Portsmouth	295	198	8	206	70%
Reading	171	107	0	107	63%
Redbridge	325	162	0	162	50%
Redcar and Cleveland	191	127	0	127	66%
Richmond upon Thames	108	108	0	108	100%
Rotherham	425	323	0	323	76%
Rutland	15	6	0	6	40%
Sandwell	641	420	49	469	73%
Sefton	331	264	0	264	80%
Sheffield*	825	570	0	570	69%
Shropshire	264	103	8	111	42%
Slough	230	177	0	177	77%
Solihull	184	114	5	119	65%
Somerset	518	451	67	518	100%
South Gloucestershire	171	148	0	148	87%
South Tyneside	260	197	3	200	77%
Southampton	329	306	1	307	93%
Southend-on-Sea	199	120	0	120	60%
Southwark	418	314	0	314	75%
St. Helens	277	218	1	219	79%
Staffordshire*	797	797	0	797	100%
Stockton-on-Tees	312	159	7	166	53%
Stoke-on-Trent	496	339	35	374	75%
Suffolk	711	290	264	554	78%
Sunderland	427	327	1	328	77%
Surrey	680	679	1	680	100%
Sutton	167	119	0	119	71%
Swindon	236	86	7	93	39%
Telford and Wrekin	232	118	0	118	51%
Thurrock	223	151	5	156	70%
Torbay	178	106	0	106	60%
Tower Hamlets	431	428	3	431	100%
Wakefield	557	490	0	490	88%
Walsall	468	303	0	303	65%
Waltham Forest	438	244	0	244	56%
Wandsworth	277	268	0	268	97%
Warrington	212	70	16	86	41%
Warwickshire	457	286	0	286	63%
West Berkshire	87	39	38	77	89%
West Sussex	641	467	0	467	73%
Westminster*	188	134	24	158	84%
Wiltshire	336	290	3	293	87%
Windsor and Maidenhead	69	55	2	57	83%
Wirral	513	411	0	411	80%
Wokingham	52	42	1	43	83%
Wolverhampton	453	1	6	7	2%
Worcestershire	576	545	0	545	95%
York	117	95	0	95	81%
Total	64,990	48,931	1,929	50,860	78%

* Earned Autonomy local authorities and Greater Manchester (which delivers the programme under a devolution agreement) no longer submit numbers of family outcomes for Payment by Results purposes. Instead, they report successful family outcomes on a quarterly basis.

** All results are subject to assurance check.

1. Barking and Dagenham, Brighton and Hove, Bristol, Camden, Cheshire West and Chester, Durham, Ealing, Islington, Kent, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Staffordshire, and Westminster. ↩

2. Manual – Receiving data from other partners which is stored in separate files, and which is unmatched to case management systems. The local authority Supporting Families Outcome Plan is not quantified and there is no reporting from the case management system to keyworkers. 
   Basic – Some data sources are brought together in basic data software, which is used to match and store data, identify families who may need support and to monitor progress. The Supporting Families Outcomes Plan is embedded in the case management system and receives manually inputted reports on outcomes and key indicators.
   Building blocks – Bringing most data sources together including early help case management data. The data is visible to keyworkers in a spreadsheet or form which is only provided once or twice during a case.
   Early maturity – Using a data warehouse or data lake where data is accessible to workers automatically in the case management system and which is updated when new feeds are received. More advanced data system software is used with automated matching and calculation of whether Payment by Results outcomes are met is built in. There are likely to be some open feeds. 
    Mature – Data warehouse or data lake model as in the early maturity model but where primarily open feeds are used and where data is used to conduct needs analysis.
   Advanced – Sophisticated data model with open feeds as in the mature model, but where the system has been expanded beyond Supporting Families services and includes whole children’s services or whole of council solutions.   ↩

3. As a condition of the programme, local authorities must meet some basic conditions for delivery. Further information on these are in the Supporting Families Programme Guidance (PDF, 483 KB). ↩

4. Validation claims percentage is subject to change due to ongoing work with local authorities on validations. ↩