The Together for Families programme aims to turn around the lives of troubled families through dedicated support. Troubled families are defined as those involved in crime or antisocial behavior and have children not attending school or excluded from school. The programme provides hands-on support to address a family's wide range of problems. For the Smith family, a dedicated lead professional is working with the whole family and providing assertive yet supportive intervention to improve school attendance, establish household boundaries, and reduce antisocial behavior and criminal activity. The programme has identified over 400 families so far and aims to embed long-term support through public sector commitment and a community budget model.

1. Together for Families
Alison Smith – Together for Families Lead Officer
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2. Together for Families
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A national programme to ‘Turn around’ the lives of troubled
families
Troubled families are defined as those who:
o Are involved in crime or anti social behaviour
o Have children who don’t attend school or are often
excluded
o Have been long term unemployed
These families often have a wide range of other problems
which lead to their children repeating the cycle of
disadvantage
These families often require regular input from public
services and often with little changing as a result
Target for Cambridgeshire – 805 families

3. The Smith family
 Long history of offending including violence – mother recently in
prison for assault.
 9 children aged between 2 and 20
 Oldest 2 children both have had episodes in prison
 Children attending 4 different schools and all with poor attendance
 One child in alternative specialist educational provision and two
children on Pastoral Support Plans for poor behaviour
 Lack of boundaries in the family home
 Anti social behaviour in the community including intimidation,
harassment and noise
 Health appointments regularly not met
 High level of rent arrears / not able to manage finances
 Long history of agency involvement with no improvement

4. How did they arrive in
this situation?
 Mother experienced a poor upbringing with no stability and violence
was a regular part of her childhood
 The children have 4 different fathers, three of whom were violent to
mother.
 Much of the domestic abuse witnessed by the children
 Mother had a poor experience of support services and perceived
she was always told what to do and felt heavily judged
 Mother had no wider support network, the anti social behaviour had
alienated neighbours and friends which led to her feeling more and
more defensive and unwilling to accept support
 House size inadequate for the size of the family making it difficult for
mother to put in any boundaries

5. What can we do?
 A dedicated worker, dedicated to the family – the Lead
Professional
 Working with the family as a whole
 Delivering hands on and practical support
 Being assertive, persistent and challenging
 A common purpose and agreed action with all other agencies

6. Outcomes for the Smith family
 The family have a stable tenancy and there has been no
further anti social behaviour in the last 6 months
 All children are attending school full time and behaviour
in school has improved
 Mother has clear boundaries for the children and clear
routines which the children stick to
 Mother takes responsibility to respond to issues such as
health needs as they arise
 There is a clear budget plan, with debts steadily being
paid off
 There have been no further police call outs to the home
 Mother works proactively with professionals

7. What has been achieved?
 Identifying families
 We have identified 413 families
 We have started working with 390 of them
 Supporting lead professionals
 Training
 Ongoing supervision and coaching
 Flexible budget to support family needs
 Outcomes
 Evaluation underway
 Cost benefit analysis for most complex families

8. Long term?
 There is commitment from all public sector partners in
Cambridgeshire to embed this approach beyond the
initial group of families
 The ‘Community Budget’ model will provide a framework
for all services working with families to formally commit
to working with this common model