In March 2025, the NSPCC published its developmental evaluation of Together for Childhood, a place-based programme focused on the prevention of child abuse and neglect through collaborative community action.
In the same month, the Department for Education released The Families First Partnership programme guide, setting out a vision for transforming family support and delivery expectations for safeguarding partners in England.
The Families First Partnerships model shares many of the key design features of Together for Childhood, including a focus on early help and intervention to ensure everyone gets the support they need, establishing multi-agency (e.g., police, health, education and voluntary) partnerships to ensure a coordinated approach to safeguarding, and taking a place-based approach that is sensitive to local context and centres the strengths and needs of the local community.
The parallels and shared objectives mean that the findings from the Together for Childhood evaluation can provide timely learning for the Families First Partnership Programme.
How the Together for Childhood approach supports child abuse prevention in four UK towns and cities
The developmental evaluation of Together for Childhood used a systems thinking framework focusing on real-time learning and continuous improvement. Our findings have been published and are available on NSPCC Learning.
Research conducted with local partners, community members and Together for Childhood staff found evidence that Together for Childhood has contributed towards improved outcomes for local families and the wider systems change that builds and sustains safer communities for children.
The evaluation identified the ‘active ingredients’ of Together for Childhood– the principles, practices and features that drive improvements in how communities work together to prevent child abuse and neglect. These active ingredients are outlined in the diagram below:
Building safer communities for children: the 'ingredients' for strengthening family support at a systemic level
To build safer communities and protect children from abuse, a comprehensive system-wide approach is essential. The active ingredients identified contribute important lessons for the implementation of the Families First Partnership guide:
- Embedding local ownership through a bottom-up approach – Together for Childhood is founded on the belief that local people are crucial in driving meaningful change within their communities. The new approach will need to maintain strong community presence to build trust, confidence, and ensure that priorities are aligned.
- Collaboration through collective action –Our evaluation has shown that this collective action involves fostering relationships and collaboration through both formal and informal partnerships. This is essential for building support around the whole family at the earliest opportunity.
- Building a culture of continuous learning and improvement grounded in evidence and focused on sustainability – A culture of continuous learning is crucial for long-term programmes to be responsive to changes in local need and the evolving evidence underpinning best-practice. Ongoing learning from the implementation of Families First Partnerships Programme can help shape development and inform understanding of what is effective.
- Taking a trauma-informed approach to build compassionate and relational systems – In practice this means involving local people in decision-making processes and being sensitive to the diverse experiences of families in need, working towards empowering them to access support without stigmatisation. For example, giving parents and carers choice about what support they need and how they get it.
'I think a real strength of [Together for Childhood] is that it’s not just focused on leaders or focused on the people in the workforce, it’s focused on everybody, communities, individuals, professionals, leaders and I think that’s a real strength of it. I think it’s really innovative.'
Local partner, Plymouth
Opportunities and challenges
While our evaluation has shown positive outcomes, it also identified the challenges that must be addressed to strengthen the sustainability of multi-sector initiatives like Together for Childhood and the Families First Partnership:
- Capacity issues, resource constraints, and competing priorities – sustaining engagement overtime requires supportive, coordinated partnership infrastructure.
- Evidencing long-term outcomes is complex – investing in evaluation that is flexible and responsive to the programme is necessary to track long-term impact.
- Building capacity within the local workforce, given a national context of austerity – local and national policy changes that address systemic issues impacting on the prevention of abuse are crucial to proactive, rather than reactive support.
The developmental evaluation has shown how preventative communities can be made possible through systemic change and whole-community support, empowered by the active ingredients detailed above. By embedding these findings into policy and practice, multi-agency partners can work towards building safer communities for children.