Toolkit

The National Centre for Family Hubs toolkit is designed to help you navigate and support all LA's and their strategic partners.

The National Centre for Family Hubs toolkit is designed to help you navigate and support all LA's and their strategic partners.The National Centre for Family Hubs Toolkit brings together evidence, guidance, and practical tools for local authorities, practitioners, and strategic partners. It is designed to support planning, delivering, and embedding high‑quality services—from parenting and home‑learning support to data governance, father engagement, and parent‑carer panels.

Who is it for?
This resource is aimed at practitioners across Family Hubs, health services, the voluntary and community sector (VCF), and education—helping everyone work together to build joined‑up, family‑centred support that improves outcomes for children and families.

Best Start Family Hubs and Healthy Babies Guidance April 2026 – March 2029

Best Start Family Hubs and Healthy Babies: wider services expectations

Guidance for Delivery Plan Completion for Local Authorities

In this section:

Parenting and Home Learning Environment

This toolkit is designed to support practitioners and leaders in Family Hubs to strengthen their work on parenting and the home learning environment (HLE). It brings together evidence, practical guidance, and adaptable tools to help you plan, deliver, and embed high-quality support for families. Whether you are shaping strategy, coordinating services, or working directly with parents and carers, this toolkit provides a clear foundation for developing effective, joined-up approaches that improve outcomes for children.

Data Governance and Effective Data Sharing

This toolkit provides essential guidance for Family Hubs navigating multi-agency data sharing. Drawing on research, real-world case studies, and expert resources, it equips practitioners and leaders with the knowledge to share information effectively while protecting family privacy and building trust.

Giving every child the best start in life

From April 2026, a new government initiative to support families comes to every Local Authority with Best Start in Life Family Hubs. These Family Hubs will provide essential services including parenting support, healthcare, and early education under one roof. The goal is to improve child development outcomes and reduce disparities, particularly for disadvantaged families, by making support more accessible and coordinated across local services.

Start for Life including Perinatal Mental Health

Information on perinatal mental health support through the Start for Life programme. Discover services for expectant and new parents including mental health screening, parent-infant relationship support, and integrated care delivered through Family Hubs during pregnancy and the first two years. Includes case studies and practical examples.

Establishing Effective Parent/Carer Panels

Family hubs are most effective when they're truly family-led—not just in principle, but in practice. This toolkit provides evidence-based guidance, practical tools and real examples to help you embed meaningful parent voice throughout your family hub model, from strategic planning and commissioning decisions through to day-to-day service delivery.

Father Inclusive Family Hubs

Engaging fathers isn't about ticking boxes—it's about fundamentally transforming how we design, deliver, and think about family support. This toolkit provides the evidence, strategies, and practical tools you need to move fathers from the margins to the centre of your family hub services.

Services for young people and Family Hubs

Support doesn’t end at age 5. Considering how to use family hub and community venues flexibly, and enabling young people (10–19, up to 25 with SEND) and their families to access timely interventions is key. This toolkit translates national policy into practical steps on governance, commissioning, workforce, participation and data sharing. It includes resources, webinars and case studies to help you start, scale and sustain integrated offers.

Best Start in Life: A Family Hubs Good Practice Toolkit

This toolkit equips local areas with practical guidance, evidence‑based resources and examples of good practice to support the development and delivery of high‑quality Family Hubs aligned with national Best Start in Life expectations.

Achieving GLD: A Family Hubs Toolkit for Strengthening School Readiness

School readiness reflects how confidently and independently a child can step into the classroom—drawing on their social, emotional, physical and cognitive development as a foundation for learning. The Good Level of Development (GLD) captures this readiness by assessing whether children have reached expected milestones across key early learning areas with the national benchmark set for 75% GLD in 2028.

The Effective Toddler Group Guide

Toddler groups play a crucial role in early childhood by offering families a warm, trusted space where parents can build friendships, reduce isolation, and access informal support that strengthens wellbeing. They also provide young children with rich opportunities for social interaction, early communication, and routine, contributing to improved confidence, social skills, and early development.

Supporting Military Families through Family Hubs

This toolkit brings together research, national policy and practical resources to help Family Hubs understand and respond to the unique experiences of military‑connected children and families. It supports professionals to deliver inclusive, military‑aware services that strengthen resilience, improve transitions and ensure families affected by service life receive timely, joined‑up support.

Tackling Poverty for the Best Start in Life

This toolkit explains how poverty affects families and shares practical ways Family Hubs can help. It is designed to support councils and partners to provide joined‑up, accessible support that reduces pressure on families and improves outcomes for young children.

Inclusive Best Start and Family Hub Delivery

This toolkit aims to support BSIL and FH delivery to ensure an inclusive approach is central throughout. It provides examples and resources from a range of partners who are delivering key elements of activity that support inclusive excellence, and include strategically embedded and operational approaches. Our aim is to join the dots and collectively pool resources into one toolkit to support areas to take a systematic and systemic approach to ensuring inclusion.

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