The earliest years make the biggest impact, Home-Start makes sure those years count.

Our volunteers provide peer-to-peer, relationship based support to families. We use our experience and local knowledge to ensure that support is shaped by parents to get the best results for children.

Children's essential social, emotional and life skills are developed when they are babies and young children.  Those who have stable, loving, consistent, fun childhoods have a greater chance of developing into healthy teenagers and happier adults, with better job prospects, healthy relationships and improved mental and physical health.

We believe that it is crucial to spend time with parents and their young children. 

Home-Start's approach means that families who haven’t felt comfortable engaging with other services feel able to work with our volunteers.

To us, it makes more sense to spend £1,500 to support a family with young children for a year - before their problems escalate. The alternative is to to keep on spending " £17 billion per year on addressing damaging problems that affect children and young people such as mental health problems, going into care, dropping out of school, unemployment and youth crime". (Source: Early Intervention Foundation). 

Graham Allen MP said:

A central component of Home-Start’s service is to provide support early, before family problems or pressures evolve into deeper and more challenging forms of family crisis. This early intervention approach enables families to strengthen their own capabilities and gives them a vital source of sustained support.  Given the difficult social and economic forces that are currently affecting families across the country, it is my hope that Home-Start will continue to steadfastly support vulnerable families.

Professor Tanya Byron said:

There are lots of people who might have come to us [Child and Adult Mental Health Services], but who didn’t because they had input from you [Home-Start].

Read more about the impact that Home-Start's work has here.