Transformation roundtable - Driving system transformation through family, 4 November 2025

Georgia Rudin, Adviser, LGA

This roundtable is in partnership with the National Centre for Family Hubs hopes to align with the national strategy to improve outcomes for children and families, emphasising the move from separate services to integrated, local support. It was noted that implementing family hubs requires major changes across service models, workforce, data sharing, and community engagement.

Rachael Parker, Strategic Manager, Head of Public Health Nursing Public Health, and Laura Annandale, Strategic Commissioner, Somerset Council

• Rachael Parker (RP) and Laura Annandale (LA) set out Somerset’s starting point as a large rural county with pockets of deep deprivation, poor transport and no existing children’s centre or family hubs estate, moving to a new unitary structure with reforming health and early years systems.
• Connect Somerset is a partnership “way of working” across the council, NHS, VCSE and education, organised through shared neighbourhoods and locality geographies and anchored by 12 community champions who connect services with local priorities and assets.
• To address distance and access, Somerset is creating a distributed network of around 100 community hubs in existing venues, showed by the King’s Arms Hub in Wellington, where multi agency activity rapidly built a full weekly offer for children, families and older residents.
• The Forest programme provides enhanced parenting support from pregnancy onwards, targeting families with higher levels of need through home visiting and group offers, and reframing baby clinics as inclusive sessions that combine health advice, social connection and wider support.
• Transform Family View gives practitioners a single, multi-agency view of early help by drawing data from partners into a shared system, saving thousands of hours of staff time and enabling more informed, earlier and better targeted support.
• Connect Somerset, Forest and Transform Family View together form the infrastructure for Somerset’s Best Start in Life family hubs, underpinned by robust health visiting data and a developing dashboard to shape targeted interventions through the hub network.

How do the new localities and neighbourhoods relate to previous district council boundaries?

Somerset moved to a unitary structure in 2024, with the former district councils now brought together under a single authority. The 12 neighbourhoods and 6 localities used for Connect Somerset and family hubs are aligned to primary care networks rather than the old district boundaries. The local government restructure provided an opportunity to formalise this alignment and bring the workforce together around a consistent set of geographies that make sense for health and care partners and are unlikely to change.

What timescale has Somerset worked to for Connect Somerset and locality working?

Connect Somerset formally began in April 2023 but builds on long standing relationships and commissions such as the village agent service and sports and activity partnerships. The early help transformation has therefore been an evolution rather than a fresh start, with the formal programme giving a framework and visibility to work that was already under way. Locality and neighbourhood alignment has progressed alongside the move to a unitary council, with teams using national family hubs and local government reform as levers to embed new ways of working.

How long did it take to develop Transform Family View and what resourcing did it require?

Transform Family View is now approaching four years of development. Somerset secured significant funding from the Department for Education as a trailblazer authority and allocated a substantial portion of its Supporting Families grant to the platform. A small core team within the commissioning team oversees programme management, while around six staff in the digital and business intelligence team lead technical development and maintenance. The experience locally is that the breadth and impact of the system is directly related to the level of sustained investment and partnership engagement.