“Going where the silence is”: How Local Authorities are reaching the children they need to reach

Nathan Hodson · September 2026

The families most in need of a Best Start Family Hub are the ones who will never walk through the door. Best Start in Life Local Plans differ sharply on whether that is a data problem, a trust problem, or a geography problem.

The national guidance requires every council to publish an outreach strategy for “families least likely to access services” before its first grant payment. Across all the published local plans, I found three quite different approaches the this challenge — and the most interesting plans give all three.

Naming the problem

Walsall uses an excellent phrase: a strand of its plan is called “Going Where the Silence Is”, and it describes children “not being noticed by the system (silent) until they start school, by which time their needs may have grown”. It uses “Was Not Brought” rates — the number of children not brought to appointments — as a key performance indicator. Croydon is “finding the missing 8%”, the children in no early years setting at all. Harrow will build “a functioning ‘watch list’ for children not meeting developmental milestones, including those not engaged with early years settings”. Waltham Forest states the principle in one sentence: “The council will not rely solely on families coming forward for support.” Luton is blunter still about the limits of a building: “A significant number of people will never access a hub… there is insufficient capacity within the BSFH to see and support every parent.”

Answer one: link the data

One way of finding the missing families is linking the data. Sutton is building a “localised statistical vulnerability definition” by linking health visiting, early years, social care and education records, and then running what it calls “intervention point analysis” — missed reviews, unclaimed Healthy Start vouchers, unclaimed two-year-old funding. Its operational measure is the share of two-year-olds not using services who have been reached by targeted outreach.

Oldham will map its 3,300 annual births against early years attendance to find the children in no provision, and notes a quirk that matters everywhere: “Many parents don’t realise they are eligible because EYPP (Early Years Pupil Premium) isn’t linked to FSM (Free School Meals) in early years.” Wirral wants antenatal data shared at 28 weeks because, at present, “live-birth data currently reaches services ~3 months post-birth”. Camden’s data-sharing agreement with its NHS trust gives “a live view of the local pregnancy to age five population”. Luton will “use maternity pathway data to target the 51.9% of pregnant people who are not accessing maternity care by 10 weeks”. The Isle of Wight will “use Sentinel insights to focus on priority neighbourhoods and seldom heard groups”. North East Lincolnshire commits that “every child who has 2–2.5 reviews and an identified development need or parental need has a plan and relationship with a key professional”.

Then there is the benefits list. Wokingham will contact families receiving Council Tax reductions. West Sussex, Havering and Sheffield use DWP lists of eligible two-year-olds who have not taken a place; Sheffield also phones every family at six months about childcare plans. Wolverhampton is piloting a “risk stratification tool” for children at risk of not achieving GLD; Lancashire describes a data lake with “predictive analytics”.

Answer two: stigmatising services vs trusted entrances

Bexley’s consultation annex records the barrier families named first: “Emotional: stigma and fear of judgement, worrying about social perceptions and involvement of social care.” Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea heard the same from schools — “some families are wary of services being collocated with Council Children’s Services” — and drew the logical conclusion: two of Westminster’s three hubs are run by a school and a nursery, not the council. Redcar and Cleveland’s parents “fear judgment as a ‘bad mother’”.

If that is the barrier, data alone is not the answer. Lewisham’s eight Family Navigators work in “coffee shops, supermarkets, parks, pharmacies, and barbers”; more than half the families who answered its survey asked for a navigator to contact them. Oldham commits to “door-knocking”. Knowsley runs “Baby Showers” as “a cross-demographic entry route into support”. Trafford found that, quite astoundingly, church-based play-and-stays alone reach “approximately 50% of families with a child aged 0–5”. Nottinghamshire will train faith-group playgroup volunteers in evidence-based home learning rather than compete with them. Calderdale has “local parents trained up as community researchers”. Cheshire West and Chester observes that “many of the trusted local places families turn to first are led by community and voluntary organisations rather than by council services”, and that a digital route lets families facing “stigmas” find help “quickly and privately”.

Answer three: put the hub where they are

The guidance’s requirement that 70% of hubs sit in the 30% most deprived areas is met by most plans. Bexley sited four hubs and twelve pop-ups by triangulating early years results with deprivation, social care involvement and free school meals to find “geographical clusters of need”. Barnet rated seven wards on a matrix. Swindon placed its single hub to give “high” proximity to 52% of its highest-deprivation neighbourhoods. Lewisham is honest that it only manages 62.5% of hubs in the 30% most deprived areas.

But who is actually missing?

Here the plans grapple with the reality of reaching families. The areas where they differ provide important insights. Croydon hypothesises that the 20% who miss the 2–2½ year review “may be working parents rather than the most deprived”. Walsall says take-up “does not neatly mirror deprivation”. Barking and Dagenham finds “not a strong correlation between IDACI scores and GLD” — because nearly every child in the borough lives in a deprived area.

Worcestershire’s thirteen priority neighbourhoods include several in deprivation deciles four to six. Merton notes that “our most attended sessions are universal and open sessions and generally there is lower take up across our more targeted programmes”. Norfolk reports “a 15% point difference in GLD attainment… between children accessing funded childcare and those who do not” — which makes its two-year-old take-up of 64.1% the number to move. And Newcastle makes the observation that should give every commissioner pause: “Some of our areas with lowest GLD achievement have the highest concentration of services.”

If the missing families are not simply those on lowest income, then a benefits list finds the wrong people, or a hub in the right ward, is necessary but not sufficient. The plans that pair a list with a trusted route in — a navigator in a barber’s, a hub run by a school, a baby shower — are making a different assumption compared with the plans that focus on a dashboard.

Overall, finding the ‘silent’ families is best approached by combining data factors, trust factors, and geographic factors. Newcastle’s approach illustrates how they interact: “Our communities are often hyper-local: facilities that look close on a map do not always feel accessible to people.” That is a story of demographics, trust, and distance.

The role of digital support will begin to become clear over the next three years. It will remain to be seen whether data driven approaches live up to their potential to track progress and intervene, in the way they have in school attainment. We will begin to see whether digital interventions accessed via schools and online provide a less stigmatised option for support. And we will see which families do well with digital support through virtual family hubs and apps like Pause, and which benefit more from the physical hub.