Recognising the achievements of Family Information Services

Last week, we hosted the annual NAFIS Conference, and we closed the conference with the NAFIS Awards. These awards provide the opportunity to celebrate some of the excellent work taking place across the country, and they allow FISs to learn from each other to think about things that they could do differently locally.

The first award we announced was the Best Directory. Family Directories are a pillar of the FIS service – they enable families to quickly and easily access the information they need themselves. Most families want to self serve when looking for information, and the ability to do this is reliant on a high quality directory.

Islington FIS won this award, recognising how they had worked in partnership with teams inside the council and with voluntary sector organisations to make sure that their information offer is high quality. The directory was redesigned and renamed in the summer, and this was driven by feedback from parents to make sure that it worked for them.

The directory is the go-to resource to find out about childcare within the borough – Users can filter and narrow their search to specific areas and map out their journey from home to their childcare and on to work. This FIS have been persistent in working with their IT supplier to make sure that these filter functions are working well and support the needs of the parent.

Our next award was for the best Local Offer. Families with disabled children are often even more time poor and sleep deprived that other families and so it is even more important to have high quality, easily accessible information.

Buckinghamshire FIS won this award for their new website and directory that was launched after extensive research and user testing with local parents, carers and young people. This helped to inform the whole structure of the website to try to make it intuitive for users.

Content was also rewritten to make it easier to understand for families, and professional content was moved to a new site. The new directory was built to open referral UK data standards which means that the publicly available information could be re-used across multiple platforms.

The team also recognise that the website alone is not enough and the online offer is supported by information and outreach officers who can be reached by phone, email or post and go out and about in local community. They have a YouTube channel following feedback from local young people, and young inspectors review local services and activities in the community to help services to improve and young people to know what’s out there.

The next award was for the best promotion of the two year old offer. We saw significant drops in take up rates for the funded early education entitlements during the pandemic and so FIS teams have faced an even bigger challenge than usual to help families know about and understand the benefits of the two year old offer.

West Sussex FIS really impressed the judges with their work to promote the offer – particularly that they manage to consistently hit take up rates of 85 per cent compared to a national average of 72 per cent. They match the data that they get from DWP about potentially eligible children with their own data sources, so that they can contact families repeatedly by phone and post and support them to remove any barriers to take up. They combine their promotion of the two year old offer with Tax Free Childcare and the three and four year old entitlements to increase take up of all the childcare offers. They also worked closely with the accommodation team to find the families with no recourse to public funds who had recently become eligible for two year old funding.

The final award of the day was for best community engagement. Working in partnership with the wider community adds real value to the work of the FIS – it helps to reach a wider range of families so that they are aware of the services offered by the FIS.

Community engagement is at the very heart of Reading FIS’s approach to providing a high quality information service, where they work together with local services to meet local family needs. Their FIS and Local Offer directory holds over 3,000 records. By working closely with the local services listed on the directory, these organisations value and use the platform and so ensure their information is up to date and accurate. They work in partnership to meet emerging needs, such as working with six local charities to signpost to food and uniform support, working as part of the multidisciplinary team supporting Ukrainian families, or working with grassroots organisations to help them meet local needs.

A huge congratulations to all this year’s winners and nominees! I really enjoyed reading all the nominations and was hugely impressed by the hard work and innovation that FIS are putting into making sure that families can access the information they want and need.