INTEGRATED – Integrated Parenting and Financial Wellbeing Support

Children growing up in low-income households face a higher risk of poor health, social and educational outcomes. The INTEGRATED study explores whether combining financial wellbeing support with parenting support can improve children’s health and development.

Background

Early intervention services often focus on strengthening parent-child relationships and parenting skills. While these approaches can be beneficial, evaluation results are often disappointing or equivocal.

One avenue to enhance effectiveness is by addressing families’ financial and material circumstances. Financial wellbeing support may help reduce stress and improve family wellbeing. However, little is known about how this type of support affects families’ financial/material situations, parents’ health and wellbeing, parenting, or children’s outcomes, or if/how it can be integrated with parenting support. To build this evidence, we examined how Family Hubs across England current combine, offer, and deliver financial wellbeing and parenting support.

Financial wellbeing support includes cash, vouchers or free or discounted goods and services, as well as debt and benefits advice and money management assistance. Parenting support includes training and information to help parents with their children’s health, behaviour and learning.

Looking Ahead

Our long-term goal is to test whether combining parenting and financial wellbeing support is more effective than delivering them separately. This will be done through Family Hubs- community-based, government-funded services supporting families with children aged 0-19 years.

The INTEGRATED project Programme Development Grant (PDG) funded by The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) (March 2024 – February 2025) has allowed us to build an evidence base for our integrated programme by addressing key questions:

1. How do Family Hubs currently deliver parenting and financial well-being support?
2. Who is best placed to deliver financial support to families?
3. How can financial and parenting support be most effectively combined?
4. Could routinely collected Family Hubs data help us to test this approach in a future trial?

How We Did This

The INTEGRATED PDG included four work packages:

Work Package 1: Mapping Practice

We conducted a national survey with Family Hub managers and commissioners from 41 Local Authorities across England, followed by 23 in-depth interviews. This provided insight into the types of financial wellbeing support offered, who delivers it, and how Family Hubs work with partner organisations to provide it.

The findings revealed substantial variation across England and led to the identification of seven distinct models of integrated financial wellbeing support within Family Hubs.

Work Package 2: Practitioner Perspectives

We ran two focus groups with debt and welfare advisors and two with parenting practitioners to explore their views on integrating financial wellbeing support and parenting support. We discussed who might be best placed to deliver this kind of programme, what challenges it might face, and how parents might perceive it

Participants were generally supportive of integration, seeing it as valuable and accepting to families. However, there were mixed views about feasibility, particularly around training needs, time pressures, and the risk of over-burdening practitioners.

Work Package 3: Evidence Review

We searched academic and grey literature, consulted experts, and reviewed lists of parenting programmes to identify examples that already combined parenting and financial wellbeing support.

We found ten programmes worldwide with this integrated approach. We also spoke to designers of established parenting programmes used in Family Hubs, who agreed integration was possible but highlighted key challenges such as avoiding stigma, embedding new content without overwhelming parents, and ensuring practitioners are confident in both areas.

Work Package 4: Data Feasibility

Working with Plymouth Family Hubs and their wider network, we reviewed the kinds of data routinely collected across Hubs to assess whether these could be used to measure outcomes in a future trial. We concluded that while routine data would be useful to supplement new data collection, it would not be sufficient on its own to evaluate the effectiveness of an integrated programme.

Public Involvement

Public involvement was central to INTEGRATED. We worked closely with a group of seven parent representatives through our YIPPE (Your INTEGRATED Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement) group. Some members had direct experience of using Family Hubs, while others did not, allowing a range of perspectives to shape the research.

The YIPPE group met monthly throughout the project. At each meeting, researchers shared project updates and invited feedback to guide the next stages of work. The group’s input directly influenced the design of research tools, the interpretation of findings, and decisions about how results should be communicated.

We also engaged with a range of community groups, involving them at key points to ensure diverse perspectives informed the research. This enriched our understanding of what different families value in financial and wellbeing support.

Importantly, we prioritised closing the feedback loop. We produced accessible summaries and flyers showing how parents input had shaped the project, and researchers returned to community groups in person to share these impacts directly.

Our ongoing reflection with the YIPPE group also helped us refine our approach to involvement, ensuring that participation remained meaningful and mutually beneficial.

Outcomes

All research activities are now complete, with six planned outputs:

1. Insights from PPIE work in Plymouth on the financial well-being support parents value.
2. Findings from the systematic scoping review (Work Package 3).
3. A theoretical framework outlining models of integration between financial and parenting support, informed by global examples.
4. Survey and interview findings identifying seven models of integrated parenting and financial wellbeing support in Family Hubs (Work Package 1).
5. Practitioner perspectives on opportunities and challenges of integration at a programmatic level (Work Packages 2 and 3).
6. Insights from the survey and interview data on how integrated approaches might shape the future of parenting support (Work Package 1).

Next Steps

Our findings show clear potential to develop or adapt parenting programmes by integrating financial wellbeing support. We will continue to work with parenting programme developers and Family Hubs to co-design and refine an integrated intervention. This work will inform the foundation for a future NIHR Programme Grant for Applied Research application.