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To speak to an adviser, please call our free and confidential advice line 0808 801 0366 (Monday to Friday 9.30am to 3pm, excluding Bank Holidays). Or you can ask us a question via email using our advice enquiry form.
New funding partnership to support specialist advice for families
Family Rights Group is delighted to be a partner in the Improving Lives Through Advice funding programme, recently launched by The Access to Justice Foundation.
The Improving Lives Through Advice programme is funded by the National Lottery Community Fund, thanks to National Lottery players, and will support Family Rights Group’s ongoing work to improve the reach and accessibility of our specialist Advice and Advocacy Service over the next five years. More families across England, in critical need of advice and support, will benefit as a result.
Our service provides advice to parents, relatives, friends and kinship carers of children involved with children’s services or who need their support. It is free, independent and confidential. We help families to navigate complex law and child welfare processes and to understand their rights and options. Our advisers are experienced social workers, lawyers and family advocates.
Every year, around 700,000 people access our online advice tools, and we respond to over 7000 enquiries to our free telephone advice line and digital advice service.
The number of families who could benefit from contacting our Advice and Advocacy Service is at an all-time high. Just under 400,000 children in England (3%) are known to the social care system at any one time and there are 80,000 children in care. Our Advice and Advocacy aims to achieve the best results for children, keeping them safe at home with their parents or wider families where possible. Evaluation shows that by safely preventing crises from escalating and averting children from unnecessarily entering the care system, we achieve a return of £15.58 in public spending savings for every £1 invested.
Commenting on the new funding partnership, Savita Narain, Advice & Advocacy Service Director, said:
“Specialist advice, provided at the right time, can transform lives. The stresses and strains on families are growing, and so too is the need for our advice. The two most common underlying reasons for calls to our service are domestic abuse and parental mental ill-health. However, on current funding levels, we can only answer 4 in every 10 callers.
“This new investment, over the next 5 years, will help to sustain our critical service at a time of growing need. It will also allow us to improve the reach and accessibility of the service.
“We look forward to working with The Access to Justice Foundation, the National Lottery Community Fund, and other partners, to ensure more families can access our support and achieve the best outcomes for their children.”
See also
Our funding means we can currently only help 4 in 10 people
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