INTEGRATED – Integrated Parenting and Financial Wellbeing Support

Growing up in poverty can be negative for a child’s health and wellbeing. The INTEGRATED study wants to examine whether combining financial wellbeing support with parenting support can improve children’s health and development. To do this, we’re investigating whether, and if so how, these two types of support are offered and delivered by Family Hubs across England.

Background

Early intervention services tend to focus on enhancing parent-child relationships and parenting skills and whilst 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 targeting parents potentially plays an important role here. However, we know little about its impact on financial/material, parent health and well-being, parenting or child health and development outcomes, or if/how it can be integrated with parenting support.

Because of this, we will investigate how financial wellbeing support and parenting support are combined, offered and delivered by Family Hubs across England. We will understand financial wellbeing support as cash, vouchers or free or discounted goods and services, and can also include debts and benefits advice and assistance. Parenting support will include training and information to help parents with their children’s health, behaviour and learning.

What are we hoping to do?

Our long-term aim is to test whether combining parenting and financial 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.

Before we can test this, we need to understand four things:

1. How do Family Hubs currently deliver parenting and financial 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 will we do it?

The INTEGRATED programme development grant will include four work packages:

1. We will establish how Family Hubs deliver financial and parenting support. We will send a survey to Family Hubs across England and interview 25-30 Family Hub managers and commissioners.
2. We will hold 2-4 discussion groups with Family Hub staff and debt and welfare advisors to gather their views on linking parenting and financial support together, and who they think should deliver such a service.
3. We will search for evaluations of parenting support courses that include financial support to learn how they did it and if it worked.
4. We will survey all Family Hubs and do one case study in Plymouth to understand what information they collect on family income, employment, parenting, parent health and child development. We will examine if this can be linked to information held by debt and welfare advice services.

What might the outcomes be?

We hope to understand the day-to-day activity of family hubs, and the provision of their financial wellbeing support and parenting support. We will be able to compare this to the literature, and have a body of evidence on the gold-standard of integration of financial wellbeing support and parenting support. We also aim to create a theoretical paper about various models of integration that are used in services internationally.

Next Steps

The main outcome of this development work is to inform the development of a NIHR full programme grant study.