INTEGRATED – Integrated Parenting and Financial Wellbeing Support

Children from low-income households have an increased risk of poor health, social and educational outcomes. The INTEGRATED study examines whether combining financial wellbeing support with parenting support can improve children’s health and development. 

Background 

Early intervention services tend to focus on enhancing parent-child relationships and parenting skills. While these can be effective, evaluation results are often disappointing or equivocal. 

One avenue to enhance the effectiveness of such interventions is to improve families’ financial and material circumstances. Financial wellbeing support for parents potentially plays an important role here. However, we know little about its impact on families’ financial/material situation, parent health and well-being, parenting or child health and development, or if/how it can be integrated with parenting support. 

Because of this, we have investigated how financial wellbeing support and parenting support are combined, offered and delivered by Family Hubs across England. 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. 

What do we hope to do in the future?

Our long-term aim is to test whether combining parenting and financial well-being support is better than providing them separately. We will do this in Family Hubs, which are services based in the community and aimed at families of children aged 0 to 19 years. They are funded by the government. 

The INTEGRATED project Programme Development Grant (PDG) funded by The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) (March 2024 – February 2025) has given us time to investigate the following questions and begin to build an evidence base for our integrated programme. 

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 best be combined? 
4. Could information collected by Family Hubs from parents be used to test our idea? 

How did we do this?

The INTEGRATED Programme Development Grant had four work packages: 

Work Package 1: 

We learnt how Family Hubs deliver financial well-being and parenting support to families through a survey and interviews with Family Hub managers and commissioners. Our survey included participants from Family Hubs in 41 Local Authorities in England and we conducted follow-up interviews with 23 Family Hub managers and commissioners. The survey and interviews informed us about the varied financial wellbeing support on offer in Family Hubs, which organisations Family Hubs partner with to provide support, and who is delivering the support. The survey and interviews identified 7 different models of integrated financial wellbeing support within Family Hubs in England.  

Work Package 2: 

We held 2 focus groups with debt and welfare advisors and 2 focus groups with parenting practitioners, to understand their perspectives on the programmatic integration of financial wellbeing support and parenting support. We asked who would be best to deliver an integrated programme, what the potential barriers to this programmatic integration could be, as well as what parents might think of this idea. We found that the acceptability of integrating financial wellbeing support within a parenting programme was high but views on feasibility were mixed. 

Work Package 3: 

We searched scientific journals, asked experts and looked through website lists of parenting programmes for examples of programmes that included parenting and financial wellbeing support. We also talked to people who design or oversee the delivery of parenting programmes, to ask their perspective on integrating financial wellbeing support within their parenting programmes and parenting programmes in general. Across the world, we found 10 programmes which integrated financial wellbeing support and parenting support. We talked to designers of parenting programmes that are used across Family Hubs, who thought that it would be possible to integrate parenting support and financial wellbeing support, but would face challenges such as avoiding the stigma that parents might feel, integration of new content within existing programmes, and training practitioners to be experts in multiple topics. 

Work Package 4: 

We worked with Plymouth Family Hubs and their wider network to gain an understanding of the data that is likely to be collected in hubs across the country. This will support our understandings of whether routine data can be used to measure outcomes in a future trial. We found that it is not feasible to use solely routine data to measure effectiveness in a future trial, but routine data could support primary data. 

How were public members involvement in INTEGRATED?  

We worked with a group of seven public members throughout the project, called YIPPE (i.e., Your INTEGRATED Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement) group. The group consisted of parents who had experience of using Family Hubs and some who did not. The YIPPE group met once a month throughout the project. During each meeting an update on project progress was provided and public members were asked to share their views to shape the next steps of the project. We also sought feedback from the group throughout the project, so that we could learn and adapt our involvement approach to facilitate more meaningful involvement. We engaged with a range of local community groups and involved them at key points within the project. This enabled a greater diversity of perspective to shape the project as it progressed.  

We were committed to ensuring that parents involved in the project were informed about the impact that their input had on the project. Therefore, we created a flyer for the parents that summaries the impact that they had on the project and thanking them for this. We also returned in person to local community groups to verbally share the impact they their input had. 

What will the INTEGRATED project outcomes be? 

We have finished all research activity and have six planned outputs from this project. We will produce an academic article on each of the following: 

1. Patient and public involvement work with parents in Plymouth which helped us understand the kinds of service-based financial well-being support that parents would value. 
2. Findings from our systematic scoping review (Work Package 3). 
3. A theoretical outline of the different ways in which financial wellbeing support and parenting support can integrated, informed by global examples of integration from several sectors.
4. Findings from the survey and interview data identifying 7 methods of integrating parenting and financial wellbeing support within Family Hubs in England (Work Package 1). 
5. Findings from focus groups with debt and welfare advisors, parenting practitioners and parenting programme developers focused on their perspectives of integrating financial wellbeing support and parenting support primarily at a programmatic level (Work Packages 2 and 3). 
6. Findings from the survey and interview data will help to inform what the future of parenting support may look like for families (Work Package 2). 

Next Steps 

The findings from the INTEGRATED project have indicated that there is scope to develop a financial wellbeing support and parenting support intervention or optimise a current parenting programme by integrating financial wellbeing support. We will continue to work with those in the parenting programme space to do some intervention development and optimisation work. Alongside the findings from this PDG work this will inform the development of an NIHR Programme Grant for Applied Research study.