The development process

The process started in August 2024 with a review of existing relevant outcomes approaches and frameworks, including across government Start for Life, early help, family and children’s social care policy, and London boroughs’ Family Hubs logic models and theories of change, observing that:

•       Where outcomes were referenced and included, they mostly reflected inputs, outputs and processes related to local action, services and systems

•       If outcome-related elements were included, they tended to relate to parents and carers, not babies, children and young people

We used the wider national Common Outcomes Framework, itself informed by an international review of over 20 outcomes frameworks, including Every Child Matters, and the review of Start for Life indicators led by University College London, as key starting points in co-designing an outline approach for family hubs that:

·       Focuses on outcomes across the Common Outcomes Framework’s five high level domains – safe, healthy, happy, learning and engaged

·       Takes a strengths-based focus on outcomes for babies, children and young people as its starting point, followed by outcomes for those with parental responsibility – as adults in their own right and as parents/carers - and then service/system-level cross-cutting indicators and metrics

·       Sought to focus on family hubs’ contribution to outcomes (through direct delivery and commissioning) and as a gateway to more targeted services and into the wider local offer

In its development, we resisted listing in the framework all of those who may require additional support or services to enable them to achieve the best possible outcomes.  It does not show the actions that are being or could/should be taken to deliver better/improved outcomes. Instead, it gives a framework through which local areas can capture a holistic, systemic overview of the current position, representing the reality of the lives of babies, children, young people, parents and carers. 

The intention is for the framework to act as the starting point for collaborative needs assessment, mapping, prioritisation, commissioning and service planning and tracking change and trends over time – highlighting issues, cohorts and localities of concern for further in-depth data gathering, engagement and analysis – and mapping and articulating the link between actions and their intended impacts.  The aim is to identify, through cycles of testing and refinement, where it makes sense to build a common core of outcomes, indicators and metrics, judged to be relevant to all/most places, around which additional elements would be identified to represent local circumstances and priorities – balancing consistency with place-specific flexibility.

In collaboration with a small working group, the initial version of the framework was tested within eight local areas in London from December 2024 – February 2025, exploring the strategic fit with key priorities, strategies and data/performance management cycles, mapping data collection using an accompanying spreadsheet created by Mark Mapstone at Merton Council (capturing what’s available, accessible, missing entirely and why) and reviewing how the current family hubs offer fits with the framework.

At the end of this initial testing phase in March 2025, the learning was pulled together, a further streamlined iteration of the shared framework produced and recommendations for the next stage of development put forward.  

This work was supported with funding from Westminster City Council until end July 2025 and is currently enabled through its strong connections with the Common Outcomes for Children and Young People Collaborative).