We made the decision to end the private beta phase of the family hubs digital service in April 2025. We will not move forward to a public beta and testing the service with more users.
Over the last few years, we worked to understand the challenges of connecting families and the practitioners supporting them with relevant services.
To do this we worked in partnership and researched with:
- local authorities (LAs)
- voluntary, community and faith sector organisations (VCFSs)
- parents and carers of children and young people as old as 18 years, or 25 with special educational needs and disabilities
Through this collaboration, we’ve:
- built and tested new services
- explored complex data problems
- gathered insight into the needs of parents and practitioners (such as early support workers)
The family hubs digital policy team will now focus on questions like how to improve the data infrastructure needed to support digital services in the future.
Why we started this work
The project began with the goal to help parents, carers, and young people find and access family support more easily.
We learned early on that finding help was often confusing and frustrating, due to inconsistent and fragmented information. Our goal was to design a simpler, more joined-up way for parents and practitioners to find and connect with local support services.
How the project evolved
The project had several phases where we improved our understanding of the problem and tested potential solutions.
2020 to 2021: early discovery (exploring the problem space)
During this phase, 2 separate teams explored different, yet related, challenges around accessing support, focussing on:
- family experience, understanding how parents, carers and young people find and navigate support
- information sharing, exploring how practitioners connect families to services and share information
In this phase, the teams’ work included:
- the family experience team mapping the local support offer from the perspective of parents and children
- the information sharing team exploring how data was shared and the potential for improving the way practitioners and services share information about families’ needs
- both teams collaborating with LAs and VCFSs to understand current systems and identify pain points
2022: alpha and early prototyping (creating an early version of services to test and refine ideas)
In this phase, the teams:
- prototyped a directory for parents and carers, later named ‘Find support for your family’ (Find)
- prototyped a service for practitioners, later known as ‘Connect families to support’ (Connect), and tested early service referral journeys
- explored technical and data challenges related to managing service listings at scale
- identified blockers to real-time information sharing between services, including LA data maturity and technical feasibility
- created early designs for a single backend dashboard to manage service data, called ‘Manage family support services and accounts’ (Manage)
2023 to 2025: private beta (limited user testing phase)
During this phase, the teams merged to form a single family hubs digital team. In this phase, the team:
- launched 3 products: Find (for parents and families), Connect (for practitioners), and Manage (for LAs)
- partnered directly with 11 LAs, and many others through our co-design group to test and iterate the service
- developed GOV.UK patterns and guidance for displaying family support services
- worked on validating our understanding of the needs of account managers, practitioners, and parents
- introduced a combined ‘single directory’ for families and professionals, that brought together Find and Connect
- published design histories to share our learning and thinking with future teams and external organisations
What we built
We developed a digital service to:
- help parents and carers find local services
- support practitioners in finding and connecting families to appropriate local support
- enable LAs and VCFSs to manage service listings, user accounts and access within their LAs
We also developed reusable designs, technical documentation and processes – such as those for collaborating with LAs. These will hopefully be valuable to future teams working on similar problems.
What we learned
Through research, design and development, we gained insight into:
- the local service landscape for families
- working directly with partner LAs and VCFSs to develop a digital and data project
- the needs of different users and identified areas where our service is not meeting them
- the challenges of acquiring and maintaining accurate, high quality service data
About parents and carers
We identified that parents and carers needed clear, reliable information about:
- what a service involves
- where it was and how to get access it
- who it was for, including age ranges
- when it was available
- how much it cost
- how to access or book it
- how to find out more information
Overall, factors like locality, cost and trustworthiness were key considerations when seeking information and support.
When using a digital directory service, parents wanted to scan quickly and assess services efficiently. If key information was missing or difficult to understand, they were likely to move on.
By the end of the project, many parents still struggled to find the information they needed. You can read more about this on our design history about researching with parents.
Many parents did not start their search for services online. Instead, they relied on trusted sources such as health visitors, teachers, other parents, or support services they were already using. Social media and local groups were also often preferred sources of information, over formal digital services.
In future, it may be valuable to explore a solution that better reflects how families currently access information. This may involve looking more at the trusted channels they currently rely on, while also considering opportunities provided by things like artificial intelligence.
About practitioners
Practitioners already had tools for finding and referring to services, but these were often informal and inconsistent. Many expressed an interest in a shared, centralised view of local services to improve visibility and coordination. However, a digital service would only be valuable for them if the information available was accurate and up to date.
You can read more about some research we did with practitioners.
About local authorities
Local authorities supported the principles behind the service, but faced practical challenges, including:
- existing directories and systems they had already invested in and prioritised
- the time-consuming manual process of inputting and keeping data up to date on the service
- additional steps involved in creating and approving VCFS accounts
- difficulties using a shared data standard, with adoption not always feasible
Why we are not moving to public beta
We set out to build a directory that would add value for users, LAs and VCFSs, while improving outcomes for families. To succeed, it would need:
- accurate, complete and trustworthy data
- a sustainable process for managing updates
- sufficient coverage across LAs in England to provide meaningful impact and results
- ways to ensure that we can provide a way for parents, carers and practitioners to easily search, sort and refine information about support services
At present, we cannot guarantee these conditions. The quality and availability of data from LAs and VCFSs vary too widely. We explored several options, but none would reliably support a scalable, sustainable service at this time.
Without a way to improve the underlying data quality and consistency, the service is neither scalable or sustainable and will not deliver value for users. Additionally, there are still broader questions about the directory’s overall value and real-world use, which we have yet to fully test or validate.
Next steps
The family hubs team will begin exploring approaches to address some of the underlying challenges identified during this project.
Their next steps will focus how we can best help parents and carers find reliable, high-quality advice and support nationally. At the same time, they will also work with LAs to improve the quality, consistency and usability of their service data.