Westminster and– Refreshing the Early Help Strategy around shared outcomes
In Westminster, family hubs sit on top of a decade of early help system-building. There’s a strong culture of partnership, shared strategy and multi-agency working but, as in many places, the measurement landscape had become cluttered: lots of services, lots of KPIs, not much clarity about shared outcomes.
The Common Outcomes Framework and London shared outcomes framework arrived at exactly the right moment, as the borough moved to refresh its Early Help Strategy. Rather than start with services, the team used the Common Outcomes Framework’s five domains – Safe, Healthy, Happy, Learning, Engaged – as a starting point and asked:
What do we want it to look like for a child or young person in Westminster to be Safe? Healthy? Happy? Learning? Engaged?
Which of these outcomes should be our shared priorities over the next 3–4 years?
In Westminster, partnership workshops with the Early Help Partnership Board, the Young Westminster Foundation and other agencies used the Common Outcomes Framework as the starting point. Partners were invited to locate their existing work within the Framework and identify where they felt they could contribute more. Out of that came a draft set of headline priority outcomes for the new strategy, each mapped directly to outcome domains, rather than to isolated programme targets.
Alongside this, the team started to use the detailed shared outcomes framework co-produced in London’s structure of outcomes, indicators and metrics to think about measurement: if we say we want more children to be “Happy” and “Engaged”, what indicators and metrics (e.g. participation in youth activities, self-reported wellbeing) and measurement tools (surveys, participation rates, qualitative feedback) make sense? And how do we distinguish those from system outcomes (e.g. stronger integration, fewer handoffs, smoother pathways)? The shared outcomes framework brought “tightness”: a way of holding together children’s outcomes, parental outcomes, and system change within a shared single, intelligible structure.
Upon establishing our five headline priorities, we then aligned each of them to the relevant outcome domains—for example, Supporting Young People’s Futures and Strengthening Family Economic Stability aligns with the Safe, Engaged and Learning domains. This alignment enabled us to think more critically about how best to assess these needs, identify the key actions required to drive improvement within each outcome area, and consider the wider system conditions needed to demonstrate meaningful impact. i.e evidence of reduction in NEETS across the borough. Overall, using the outcomes framework significantly supported us throughout the development of our new priorities, from start to finish. Initially, it provided a clear and systematic starting point for our joint review of data and for evaluating the success of the previous strategy. It then played a central role in guiding the middle stage of the process, enabling a more rigorous assessment of gaps, supporting structured dialogue among partners, and ensuring that emerging priorities were considered in the context of national policy and local need. Finally, it offered a consistent and comprehensive structure for establishing our next set of priority areas and clearly outlining how we intend to take these forward.
The family hubs – located in very different neighbourhoods across the borough – became the natural place to test this out in practice. Using the shared framework as a consistent starting point has helped the team begin to:
Shine a light on locality variation in outcomes, not just in service use; and
Ask whether hub resources and partnerships are configured in the right way to shift outcomes in each area.