Understanding Bradford’s Family Hub and Parenting Service Model: Oxfordshire County Council

This case study summarises a learning exchange between Bradford Children and Families Trust and Oxfordshire County Council . The discussion was initiated by Oxfordshire County Council, who were keen to learn from Bradford’s approach as they reflect on the future development of their own Best Start Family Hubs and parenting offer.

This conversation took place between Eve Remington (Evidence-Based Programmes Manager from Bradford Children & Families Trust) and Jaime O’Leary (Parenting Lead from Oxfordshire County Council), focusing on how Bradford structures, delivers, and evaluates its parenting and early help offer. Both local authorities deliver programmes developed by The Centre for Emotional Health [formerly Family Links], which hosted the session.

The discussion covers service and staffing arrangements across the district, programme delivery practices, and reflections on what makes data meaningful for managers, practitioners, and parents. Questions and responses have been lightly edited for brevity.

Eve: “We are part of the Bradford Children and Families Trust now, which is an arm of Bradford Council. We have four main Family Hubs and within those Hubs, each with a Service Manager who oversees family support and the Family Hub delivery. Family support works as expected, with family support workers and a couple of senior managers. The Family Hub work is led by our Family Hub Manager, and underneath them we have Family Navigators and Early Help Coordinators.

The Navigators do much of the handholding, building, and supporting of families who come into the centres, whereas the Early Help Coordinators go into schools and support them with early help assessments and wider early help work. It is all early help, but delivered differently, and all managed by the same person.

On the early help side of our structure there are evidence-based parenting programmes. I manage that service and I manage four teams of parenting coordinators and then underneath them parenting teams. So, there is one manager per area and then they have six full-time equivalent staff underneath them as well.”

Jaime: Can you talk about your programme offer and how programmes are delivered across the district?

Eve: “We currently run programmes like The Nurturing Programme and Talking Teens from The Centre for Emotional Health, and we’ve run Who’s in Charge, which is for child-parent violence. We’ve run Understanding Your Child from Togetherness [previously Solihull Approach], and we’ve run Freedom which is for victims of domestic abuse. We also run Time Out for Dads and currently run DICE which is a four-week programme for those at risk of exploitation, and we also run Baby Massage as well.

Our parenting staff are trained in almost all of those between them. We have a wide range of programmes and because of the Best Start Family Hubs new direction, we'll look at home learning programmes going forward as well.

Almost everyone’s trained in The Centre for Emotional Health’s Nurturing Programme because that’s our biggest and most popular programme; we get the most referrals for that. We run the most groups for Talking Teens. From 2023-2025, we’ve run 128 Talking Teens groups with 490 parents completing, so a completion rate of 84%. They’re well-attended. When parents come, they stay. It makes it easy that it’s a four-week course.”

We offer the full range of programmes to the parents, but it’s dependent on what referrals you get as to what you put on in each area that term. It varies each term as to what we run, but we run almost all programmes every term. For example, we’ve been asked by schools in one of our 4 areas to do Understanding Your Child, so they’ve got three. No one else in the other 3 areas has been asked for it, so no one else will run it next term. One size doesn’t fit all.

Some areas have more demand for virtual sessions. Some don’t get much demand for an evening programme, and some might not get much for a face-to-face. But there’s always a wide offer for both. We offer both because we know that we need both.

In terms of scheduling, we run Talking Teens during school holidays because parents of teenagers don’t tend to have childcare issues. That’s a general statement, but we find that people still attend. The other programmes don’t run in the holidays because it doesn’t work for them when children are home. We also don’t offer any childcare or crèche. The only time we might pay for a day of childcare is if it is an extremely serious case and we really need someone to attend, but those are rare.”

Jaime: How do referrals, planning, and waiting lists work within your team?

Eve: “We have a waiting list meeting that I hold at the end of every term, once parents have gone through a programme; we look at which parents and referrals are still on the lists and which programmes are needed. I had it recently to get ready for the January cohort. The meeting involves looking at what parents are asking for in the next term, which parents are on our referral forms, and what they want, such as preference for daytime sessions. Then we align them to a waiting list. In our last meeting, there were 42 parents on our virtual daytime waiting list, so we know we need to run 2-3 of those programmes. In this way, we’re dictated by our referrals.

Our referrals come in through two main points. First is through our Family & Young Peoples Information Service (FYI) and then they go off to each respective area depending on what’s required. The second is our internal staff - social workers and the help staff – which come in through our system LCS [Liquidlogic Children’s System; a casework management system]. So there’s only two referral ways in and they go straight to those parenting managers and then they’re allocated straight to the staff within two days. Contact is made within five days. Within that week, we know whether the family will need one-to-one, daytime, or evening support. Then, each area plans its own timetable.”

In the waiting list meeting, we also see who has capacity. For example, if someone has just come back from sick leave, they might be able to take a one-to-one quickly. We rarely have extra capacity, but we’ve had two new starters recently. They will start with one-to-ones because we are in the middle of groups, so there is no point in them leading a group right now. They can shadow, but the one-to-ones help clear the waiting list. It’s all about the planning. We have to plan what is needed and then work out who can do what and how they are placed.

Sometimes people do wait half a term or longer, especially if they were referred right after a group started. One thing we used to have was [information about key elements of The Nurturing Programme] from The Centre for Emotional Health that parents could read online through NetMums while they were waiting, which we miss. What we brought in last year instead was the Togetherness platform’s [Solihull] Understanding Your Child online course, so parents can work through that while they wait. Freedom is also available online. That way they are not left without support while waiting.”

Jaime: It sounds like Bradford has a well-defined specialist service, and I’m thinking about what that means for us in Oxfordshire. We no longer have children’s centres, and although we developed children and family centres to take on early intervention and hub-style work, post-COVID we have mostly become casework-driven. My hope is that once Family Hubs are properly embedded, staff within them will take on most of the parenting delivery, instead of it sitting on top of casework.

Eve: “That is the problem. You’ll always run into it if it isn’t someone’s dedicated role or if there’s no time. And if there’s no time, you can’t evidence your impact. We used to be in the same position. We didn’t always have parenting work as a standalone area. We had workers doing exactly what you’re describing: a mix of family support, outreach, and related roles at the time. But it didn’t work, because when something new is given to staff on top of everything else they’re already doing, there just isn’t enough time in the day to do it properly. You lose the quality.

We observe all our groups once a term, sometimes we observe all programmes of a type if there is an increased drop out, or we want to improve practice or put a spotlight on a theme, to see what is going well and what we could improve. We also do case audits. All of that must be done to make sure we are delivering a good quality service. There’s no point just turning up and delivering a parenting programme and hoping for the best because you need to be evidencing that it’s worked.”

Jaime: So you’ve got a separate team that are just delivering your parenting programmes? Are many of the community partners trained in any of these programmes and do they deliver, or is it just your team that manage parenting for the whole of Bradford district?

Eve: “Yes, for those programmes – it’s just us. We do Incredible Years through Barnardo’s but that’s funded from Best Start in Life for 2-3 years. I don’t know whether they will continue that next year.

We have a baseline offer and if anything is added in, anyone can go for it. For Incredible Years, the funding runs out in March to my knowledge. Someone emailed me this morning asking if it’s going to continue. I don’t know because we don’t run like that; we are quite responsive and funded from base budget.
The problem is managing all the referrals and pathways and people understanding what the programme is, what it does, and having too much choice.
When another programme gets put in, I sometimes think the other programmes already do that. So why do we need two to do the same thing if the outcomes are similar?” But that’s often grant-funded.

We also have The Circle of Security that’s done by Little Mind Matters, which is like an antenatal and perinatal service, and they run that as well regularly. Anyone can access that.”

Jaime: How did you explain the need to have a dedicated parenting team, so that it’s not diluted because they’re being drawn away to casework or other things?

Eve: “I can’t take credit for it. It wasn’t working previously and in 2018 when they disbanded the children’s centres, they decided that the family support and the parenting team should be separate. That was decided by our directors at the time that came from Leeds and thought that their model worked. They tried it in Bradford, and it did work. And so it's just been kept separate ever since. The only thing we're having now is name changes because our new director likes evidence-based programmes titles. Everything’s moving towards that title, soon everyone will be called “evidence-based lead”. So we’re moving more towards programmes instead of parenting, but parenting still sits within that for me.

We have a lot of language barriers. We run The Nurturing Programme, Freedom and Who's in Charge in Urdu but we've obviously only got so many staff that speak the language. We don't have anyone else that speaks any other languages. So if it's any other language, they're on our waiting list for one-to-one with a translator, but the groups take precedent.”

Jaime: How do you market and promote programmes to families usually?

Eve: “So truthfully, we don’t market them very much. Most of the parents that come on are referred in. And my instruction yesterday was around looking at how we can do better with promoting. All the Family Hubs have Facebook pages and so they can promote on there. We do lots of local events so our staff can market that.

We also promote through the Early Help Coordinators in school, and we also promote through the family navigators. If a parent comes in and needs support, they’ll obviously refer that. So we have a variety of different mechanisms, but I feel that we could get even more families. It’s tricky, I sometimes deliberately oversubscribe groups because there will always be drop-offs - sometimes they’ll try to recruit 15 onto a group and only 7 come.
We get parent feedback, and we do case studies, two per group as well. Case studies aren’t the same as parent feedback. They all do something different for me.”

Jaime: Can you expand on how you use case studies strategically in Bradford?

Eve: “I want practitioners to create the case studies fresh so that they can remember everything. So they work on them before the group is fully closed. It’s part of what they’ll be talking about in supervision – which parents would you do a case study on and why?

I share them with directors and managers above me that might find it useful to see the impact of what we do beyond a data format. So I share that for them to showcase, but I don’t think we do enough with them. We don't showcase them enough because the impact obviously is huge for some people. We capture them and we have a whole folder with them, but people don't ask for them as much as I wish they would. Parent quotes and feedback are often read more quickly. So yeah, we have loads of those, but we don’t use them enough. It is a shame and I think we could shout about them a little more.

For a case study, I think the audience is management. Parents would like the quotes and the parent feedback, things I have seen like “I enjoyed meeting parents in similar situations as me, I’m know I’m not alone,” or “The programme has helped me a lot with my patience toward my son. I used to get panic attacks and anxiety. I feel a lot calmer now and I remember he’s only a child. I used to raise my voice but now I’m not going to do that,” or “I’m using more positive language at home,” or “I started to make time for myself, even if it’s two to three hours. And after this, I feel less stressed and I don’t take it out on him and I feel less stressed.”

Most parents think: I feel anxious, I feel stressed, I shout at my kids; how do I not do those things? The programmes help them with that. I think a parent would find this feedback from other parents more helpful. Managers would enjoy reading those quotes, but it wouldn’t change their work. What they find impactful is the kind of case summary that shows something like: one parent, two children, one was removed, one wasn’t, and what happened next. That is the type of case study managers love.”

That part of it is what they've chosen to spend their funding on, but we naturally have what I would class as a Best Start parent on almost all our groups. We are universal, even though we work across all four tiers of need. We get parents that self-refer, we get parents who were having the children removed or getting them back or whatever that might look like edge of care and everything in between. Most of our referrals are self-referral, early health or social work. It’s hard to get any referrals from schools; they ask us to come and deliver in the schools instead.”

Jaime: How do you monitor retention and ensure programme quality?

Eve: “It depends on who is delivering the programme. That affects our drop-out rate, and I do observe those groups. We observe a set number of programmes each term, as well as any worker we are worried about. For example, if someone had ten parents and only two left by week three, that worker is observed the next term. We wouldn’t parachute in mid-term because that would be unhelpful, but they go on the watch list for the next cycle. All parents get support calls and complete their pre- and post-measures, and we track it closely.

If it’s a specific programme, we observe every programme cohort that term and see if we come up with any themes with dropouts. So if we start with ten parents and only five complete, the five that drop out will get what a customer service call. So the managers of each area have started to do their own and found it quite helpful because you get comments that the parents would not say to the staff delivering. And if they don’t answer, we send them out a letter - an anonymous feedback form. We ask questions like “Is there anything we could have done?” The things that come out in those are things like “The worker looked miserable”, “I was cold. She told me to just put my coat on”, the kinds of issues parents are unlikely to raise directly to staff delivering. One of them was like “Oh, it was more like a talking group than it was led.” So all those things just add to how we will then further quality-assure those workers or that group. So yes, I like to feel we’re all over that, but our completion rates are high. You know they’re always over 70% and they’re mostly in the 80s.”

Jaime: Do you see a lot of dads coming onto your programmes?

Eve: “I wouldn’t want to say we get lots, but we get some. Not as many as I would like and nothing compared to the females obviously, but we have the Time Out for Dads group, which we now started running at Bradford City Ground and they love that. It’s in the evening and we do it face-to-face. We get pizzas and we do it at a football ground.
But parents are invited and welcome to come. Lots of them do it. They like the virtual sessions mainly because a lot of them are at night. Some of it's about the timing of the programme, rather than unwillingness to engage. And sometimes they do it together, and sometimes if they're not together, we ask them to do it separately, if it's not appropriate. We have some situations where the mum does it first and the dad comes on the next one because they sell it to them. They see the changes at home and then they come. We have that, which I love.”

This Q&A highlights the practical learning that can emerge when local authorities share experiences openly, offering insight into how Family Hub and parenting service models are being shaped and refined in practice through shared reflection.

Eve Remington - Evidence-Based Programmes Manager, Bradford Children and Families Trust
Email: [email protected]
Jaime O’Leary - Parenting Lead, Oxfordshire County Council
Email: Jaime.O'[email protected]