You are here: New report highlights the importance of Family Information Services in Wales
A wide range of services are important to families: childcare, children’s centres, play, sports and arts activities for children, youth clubs, parenting classes and so on. For parents and children to benefit from the range of services available locally, they need to know what is on offer. To meet this need, each local authority has a Family Information Service, whose role is set out in law, that provides a wide range of information about the key services that parents and children use.
Our new report on Family Information Services in Wales gives an insight into their work and examines how they have been coping with a period of intense change and budgetary pressure. The report found encouraging evidence of continued commitment to the work done by Family Information Services across Wales. This contrasts with our previous report (A survey of Family Information Services in England and Wales, December 2011) which found that spending cuts, as well as changes to the way that local authorities deliver information, were jeopardising the quality of Family Information Services. Because of the importance of the work done by Family Information Services– in particular their crucial role in a number of flagship social programmes in Wales –this continued commitment to their services is extremely important.
Despite budgetary pressures, our report found that Family Information Services in Wales have managed to maintain high levels of parental satisfaction and to protect the provision of services in a number of areas. Indeed, in some local authorities, there has been increased service provision in particular areas of Family Information Services’ work. This all suggests that local authorities in Wales are continuing to recognise the importance of Family Information Services and have been prioritising their services in budgets as a result.
The report recommends several areas for action that would improve the quality of Family Information Services in Wales. The first recommendations are concerned with the provision of information. In some cases, local authorities are not fulfilling the information duties as required by law. The report recommends that local authorities make sure that they are doing so – and that in cases where local authorities are not providing a high quality Family Information Service that conforms to statutory guidance, the Welsh Government should hold them to account.
The second area of recommendations concerns online information. The scope, quality and ease of use of online information provided by Family Information Services in Wales varied considerably. There was similar variation in the use of social media to reach families, with some yet to adopt social media, whereas others are providing extremely encouraging examples of good practice. The report calls on local authorities to take steps to improve the quality of online information available to parents and make use of Twitter and Facebook to reach families, ensuring best practice is replicated across Wales.
The third area of recommendations concerns work with other organisations. Family Information Services in Wales make wide use of collaboration with other services such as health visitors and libraries. The report found that most of this work is done on an ad hoc basis, which means that the arrangements can be hard to scale up or reproduce, and are liable to break down when staff change. The report therefore recommends that this important collaborative working is arranged formally.
The final area of recommendations covers the role of Family Information Services in a number of important programmes. A number of programmes introduced by the Welsh Government– Flying Start, Families First, Communities First and Integrated Family Support Services– are concerned with improving outcomes for children and families, especially the most vulnerable. Family Information Services occupy a unique position to help promote each of these schemes because of their role as a source of information and their work in reaching out to the most disadvantaged parents. Stronger coordination of these different schemes (and the funding attached to them) will allow for Family Information Services to provide even more of an impact and to help provide greater support to these vulnerable families.
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