Nottingham’s Family Mentor service – making a real difference

Kevin Banfield, Quality and Performance Manager in the Small Steps Big Changes (SSBC) Family Mentor Team, discusses the support provided to families in the city.

I’ve had the great privilege to be part of the Nottingham Family Mentor Service for the last five years, providing support to families in some of the city’s most underserved communities. During this time, and since its inception in 2015, the Family Mentor Service has made a significant impact in improving the lives and life chances of several thousand children and their families.

Based on a tried and trusted evidenced-based model, informed by and co-designed with parents themselves, the Small Steps at Home (SS@H) support package that is delivered in the home by Family Mentors, who are all parents or grandparents themselves, has provided families with invaluable help. This is particularly true during the critical first 1,001 days of a baby’s life.

Figure 1 provides a snapshot of the scale and reach of the Family Mentor Service over the last 9 years. Family Mentors have supported over 4,000 children, almost three quarters of whom live in some of the most deprived areas in the country.

Over the course of the Family Mentor Service, much attention has been placed on ensuring how we measure what impact we have made. To this end, from early in the Family Mentor Service, Nottingham Trent University (NTU), who have a proven track record in evaluating impact, have supported us as our evaluation partner. Their independent input, alongside national data and our own well-developed systems for gathering feedback from families, have enabled us to build a comprehensive picture of the wide-ranging impact of the Family Mentor Service. Everyone connected with the service is very proud of this.

Our recently published report “Making a real difference” is a compelling read and sets out in detail the impact that the Family Mentor Service has had in practice. The paragraphs below provide a snapshot of some of the key headlines, crucially including a case study and direct quotes from some of the families who have benefited the most.

Figure 2 provides a summary of the headline impact areas of the Family Mentor service. As can be seen these include: improvements in children’s development, health, learning, and safety; positive impacts on family life, connectivity and value; and wider benefits in relation to reducing the costs of the wider children’s system.

Beneath these headlines lies clear evidence of the difference that the Family Mentor service has made, namely in the words and experiences of families themselves. The above-mentioned report contains just two of the many available case studies evidencing this.

One study tells Joanne’s story. In 2017, Joanne had six children and a seventh on the way. She was heavily in debt, wholly untrusting of professionals, and in her own words “very difficult to engage with.” Her life has been transformed thanks to Family Mentor support spanning 6 years, including direct SS@H support to Joanne’s three youngest children. Joanne’s view is that without Family Mentor support she would “probably still be in a hostel, with my children in care”. This speaks volumes for the impact of this truly life-changing service.

Similarly to Joanne, feedback from other families, whether directly to Family Mentors, drawn from our own surveys, or from the work of NTU, is consistently positive about the impact that Family Mentors have made. Parents and carers repeatedly use the words “brilliant” and “amazing” to describe their Family Mentor. When asked how things might have been without Family Mentor support, just like Joanne, they have said things are likely to have been very different in the following ways:

“I’d have probably lost my marbles”
“I wouldn’t be the parent I am today”
“Helpless”.

Funding from The National Lottery Community Fund for the Family Mentor service as it currently exists comes to an end within the next 12 months. We are therefore working hard internally and with local and national partners and other organisations to identify potential alternative funding streams to ensure that this fantastic, high-impact service continues for future generations of children and families in Nottingham, ideally across all parts of Nottingham city.

We are keeping everything crossed that we succeed!

For further information or to request a copy of the impact report “Making a real difference” please contact me at kevin.banfield@hsn.org.uk

About A Better Start

A Better Start is a ten-year (2015-2025), £215 million programme set-up by The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK.

Five A Better Start partnerships based in Blackpool, Bradford, Lambeth, Nottingham and Southend are supporting families to give their babies and very young children the best possible start in life. Working with local parents, the A Better Start partnerships are developing and testing ways to improve their children’s diet and nutrition, social and emotional development, and speech, language and communication.

The work of the programme is grounded in scientific evidence and research. A Better Start is place-based and enabling systems change. It aims to improve the way that organisations work together and with families to shift attitudes and spending towards preventing problems that can start in early life. It is one of five major programmes set up by The National Lottery Community Fund to test and learn from new approaches to designing services which aim to make people’s lives healthier and happier

The National Children’s Bureau is coordinating an ambitious programme of shared learning for A Better Start, disseminating the partnerships’ experiences in creating innovative services far and wide, so that others working in early childhood development or place-based systems change can benefit.

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Visit the A Better Start website to find out more.