Together for Children Project
Delivering economic wellbeing through children’s centres

CPAG has joined with Together for Children to pilot welfare benefits training for staff in Sure Start children’s centres.

We aim to identify the most effective way of delivering information on welfare benefits to staff who are not advisers, but whose job role is such that they would benefit from knowing more about the system.

Our overall aim is to improve economic wellbeing in families by raising benefit take-up. Children’s Centre staff, whether family support workers, managers, childcare workers or outreach staff, have the kind of in-depth conversations with families which reveal personal circumstances or issues that might make a claim for benefits relevant, or highlight where an entitlement has been missed.

Our training aims to help these staff make the most of such opportunities to help by equipping them with a better knowledge of what families can claim, and where to refer people for assistance to make claims, or deal with problems once they are on a benefit.

Pilot and results

The pilot is being run in three areas, the North East, West Midlands and London. The respective regional programmes leads for Together for Children have performed a crucial role in providing the link into local authorities in these areas.

We have focused on developing a face-to-face course with the assistance of Alison Markantonis, a freelance expert on delivering training to non advice workers. Between March and May 2010 we trained just over 200 staff across the three pilot regions.

The initial results have been encouraging. Of 198 participants who returned a questionnaire, 49 per cent rated the course as ‘excellent’, a further 47 per cent as ‘good’. 80 per cent said they felt it would help them to do a better job.

Next steps

Work on the face-to-face training will continue in the form of a full evaluation and revamp based on the outcomes from the first delivery phase. Alongside this we will working with CPAG’s training department to develop an electronic version of the course which can be delivered live over the internet to participants at external venues.

The project is due to run until April 2011.

For more information email project leader Nick Jones: njones@cpag.org.uk.