Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what progress he has made on the roll out of family hubs.

The department is investing £301.75 million to transform ‘Start for Life’ and family support services in 75 local authorities. The programme is being delivered jointly by the Department for Education and the Department for Health and Social Care. An additional £28.7 million has been made available to these 75 local authorities to improve young children’s home learning environments, helping them to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Programme Guide has been published outlining what the department expects the 75 eligible local authorities to deliver, and local authorities are now in the process of signing up to the programme.

In addition to this funding, the department has launched a £12 million Family Hubs Transformation Fund to support 12 local authorities in England to move to a family hub model of service delivery and open family hubs. The fund will support the department to learn more about the process of local transformation, build our evidence base, and create valuable resources and learning for those local authorities moving to a family hub model in the future. The department announced the first seven successful local authorities onto this programme, on 23 May. These local authorities have now begun their transformation journey and have received their first tranche of funding. An announcement will be made in due course about the next five local authorities that have been offered a place on the programme.