Mobile Family Centre Consultation

Overview

Surrey County Council is seeking views on our proposal to discontinue the Mobile Family Centre (bus).

Background

The Mobile Family Centre (bus) is run by Waverly Family Centre on behalf of Surrey County Council to deliver services to families with children aged 0-11 that have been identifed as needing extra support. The purpose of the Mobile Family Centre was originally to engage with rural communities, although this was expanded to include any families that were isolated for any reason regardless of where in Surrey they lived.

The Mobile Family Centre is available to all Family Centres in Surrey to use and has been regularly promoted to Family Centres by the Mobile Family Centres co-ordinator. However, since November 2019 only Waverly Family Centre have used the Mobile Family Centre due to declining interest in accessing the service. Overall, the number of visits conduct by the Mobile Family Centre have been declining and fell from thirteen a month in April 2018 to two by July 2019. This was partially due to the change in services that Family Centre’s deliver compared to the Children Centres that they replaced, as there was a move to delivering targeted interventions directly to families including in their own homes.

The Mobile Family Centre has not carried out any visits since the first national lockdown began in March 2020. 

Efforts were made to find alternative usages for the Mobile Family Centre as part of the council’s response to covid. Surrey County’s Children’s Services, Waverly Borough Council Housing Team, Home Start, Midwifery teams, and community health teams were all approached with an offer of using the mobile family centre. None of these services took up that offer.

Access to Education used the Mobile Family Centre between February 2021 and July 2021 to conduct sixty visits to children who were unable to access education in a mainstream setting. The Mobile Family Centre is still available to the Access to Education team for this but hasn’t been used for these visits since July 2021.

Proposal

Our proposal is to discontinue the mobile family centre which would provide a saving to Surrey County Council

Alternative options considered

1. Continuing the service as it is now
2. Finding an alternative use for the service
3. Investing additional resource in to promoting the service

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