Home Start provides Smart Solutions in Tough Times
Home Start's support for for familes makes a real difference in tough economic times.
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Pauline's story
Reason for referral
Pauline has 3 children aged 6, 3 and 2 years. The family was referred to Home-Star by Social Services. A number of concerns were raised by the referrer in relation to the family including poor living conditions, ill health and difficulties managing the children’s behaviour.
Pauline and her husband John said that they would like a Home-Start volunteer to help with the practical tasks of caring for the children while they shopped and got on with the other things they were unable to do.
In March 2010 a meeting was arranged by the Head Mistress of the eldest child’s school to discuss concerns relating to poor school attendance, lack of supervision and unsuitable television viewing.
Input from Home-Start
A volunteer with a wealth of experience in parenting was introduced to the family. The volunteer had been a primary school teacher for the past ten years She was also a parent herself.
The Home-Start scheme and the health visitor worked together to support the family. At review, the family gave very positive feedback stating that they felt that the volunteer had already made a difference to family life. The children’s school attendance had improved. The volunteer played with the children while the parents went shopping, and assisted the eldest child with his homework, setting regular school work programmes for the coming weeks. Given the volunteer’s experience in supporting children with special needs, she has been able to exchange her skills with the family, allowing them to take a more pro-active role in their children’s school/nursery school life.
Subsequent changes for the family:
- Volunteer’s positive role model for the family
- Children have been helped to develop socially and emotionally
- Reduction in anti-social behaviour
- Parents have been helped to ensure their children are healthy
- Both the children and their parents were informed about key risks and how to deal with them
- Steps taken to provide a safe environment
- Steps taken to minimise the incidence of neglect
- Children have been encouraged to attend and enjoy school/nursery school
- Children have been supported to develop personally and academically
Families are referred to Home-Start because of difficulties or problems to do with:
- child protection
- mental health
- disabilities
- drug and alcohol misuse
- multiple births
- deprivation and hardship
- domestic violence
Home-Start works to support families across the 4 levels of need within the family support model:
Level 1 – Universal services to all children
Level 2 – Support services for children in need
Level 3 – Intervention services for children whose health or development is impaired.
Level 4 – Safeguarding for children experiencing significant harm or where there is a likelihood of significant harm/children at risk of removal from home.
We make a difference
- Home-Start turns fragile families into strong families and lets vulnerable children become happy, safe children. If families crumble, communities disintegrate and children suffer.
- We give children the opportunity to thrive through learning and achieving
- We make better parents for tomorrow by supporting families to make better use of local services so they feel less isolated and have wider horizons
- We work with families who, for whatever reason, aren’t getting the help they need. Very often we’re the last chance they have.
- The earlier we can intervene in a child’s life the better their chances of growing up happy and healthy
- We make a difference in local communities ensuring that all families who need our support have access to the services
- Over 90% of referrals to Home-Start come from Health Professionals
- Over 3,000 children in Northern Ireland receive Home-Start support each year
Over 90% of the families we support tell us that Home-Start makes a difference
Why fund or support Home-Start?
- To give a child a home start by giving them the best start in life and preventing problems later on.
- To put a Home-Start service into every community and give the most needy families access to trained, experienced and sympathetic volunteers
The cost of Home-Start support
- It is economically more cost effective to use Home-Start to provide
support early on than to offer more costly services at later stage-it costs £1134 to provide Home-Start support to a family for a year
- Every £1 spent on Home-Start UK is through leverage of funding turned into £10 of local funding to help schemes work to support families
- Over 900 Home-Start volunteers give more than £2million pounds worth of work to the Northern Ireland economy each year
- Home-Start can support 40 children living at home for the cost of taking one child into care
Heather Knox, Director in Northern Ireland
August 2010
