The mayor of Middlesbrough has said children from troubled families should be targeted "in the womb" to stop problems in later life. Echoing Tony B...
A government programme to help get people back into work and tackle problems such as anti-social behaviour is ahead of schedule at the end of its firs...
When the wider provision of support for vulnerable children and families is under systemic assault from the decimation of central and local government budgets, some old recycled statistics and 16 isolated families do not merit a reason to be cheerful.
The troubled families programme is a major government initiative and one of its most prominent aims is to tackle problems with truancy and exclusion children of troubled families often have.
We don't currently live in a country that practices population control, and the poor children that the government seeks to punish simply for existing are already here and a part of our society. We can't send them back, nor should we wish them away.
Are children who don't attend school really troubled as the government would have us believe? Or is there more going on behind closed doors which impacts on their ability to do well in school?
A report into England's most troubled families has painted a grim picture of sexual abuse and welfare dependency going back generations as part of a "...
Problem families are destroying their own lives and those of their children, Eric Pickles said as he welcomed an expansion of a government scheme to h...
The third sector is able to reach out to troubled families in a way that works. It works because families are not suspicious of us, they are not intimidated by our services and they are able to trust us.
I watched intently yesterday as David Cameron announced a £450m plan to tackle Britain's worst 120,000 families. According to the Prime Minister, these families and their truancy, joblessness and anti-social behaviour cost Britain £9bn a year, and what we really need is someone to coordinate all the agencies that work with them to make them be less Shameless, more Waltons.
Given the wider economic and social pressures in the current era of austerity the task now is even harder than when Labour tried to tackle the same problem. And at the same time there will be more families falling into crisis who have yet to be identified by government.
