the added value we bring

Learning (Children’s Centre Management) - As a national provider of children’s centres Spurgeons brings expertise and learning from the delivery and management of children’s centres from across the country (including urban and rural settings – e.g.: Birmingham, Oxfordshire) and the achievement of ‘outstanding’ status for our core offer and OFSTED early years provision (most recently in Bedfordshire and Warwickshire).

Funding - As a national children’s charity we have the ability to make funding applications to trusts and foundations to enhance the services we are providing. For example, in West Sussex we have a £70k grant from Comic Relief and the Princes Royal Trust for Carers which supplements our statutory contract and enables us to deliver an innovative befriending programme over and above the respite care funded by the local authority. We have a national fundraising and marketing team that supports professional applications and marketing campaigns to promote our work and financial donations and access Children’s Fund monies and donations nationally to provide additional services.

Quality - Spurgeons Department of Quality leads on identifying best practice within our organisation and externally. This department leads our National Children’s Centre Strategic Development Group to develop our core practice and evidence based work in children’s centres.

Safeguarding – Spurgeons have a national lead for safeguarding, providing a national strategy, child protection advice and support for front line services and a safeguarding panel to review incidents and near misses.

Virtual children’s centre – we can create ‘virtual’ centres to overcome issues of geographical remoteness to a physical centre. This online resource would include directory of our latest children’s centre activities, downloadable e-learning parenting resources (e.g. behaviour charts), newsletters and interactive forums for parents.

Participation – we are committed to user participation and the co-design of services with partners and parents. We have a national post that provides support and advice on participation practice. We are implementing the Hear By Right Participation Framework.

Residential activity – an intensive weekend of focussed activity for young parents (across centres) to build peer support, offer opportunities to reflect on family life, provide significant memories and develop personal confidence. We have been running this programme in West Sussex for 5 years and have achieved strong outcomes from this work.

Research Work – We undertake research work through our centres to identify unmet needs and ‘soft’ outcomes. With Warwickshire and Coventry Universities we undertook work with women with post-natal illness and women with BMI of 25 plus and implemented our learning into service delivery methods. This will be built upon in Hampshire.

Learning Circles Toolkit – Using National Occupational Standards (NOS) for Work with Parents our ‘learning circles’ provide a framework to facilitate reflective learning between practitioners and parents by sharing experiences, expectations and open discussion. Building on our experience in other centres we will run an ‘early years learning circle’ for our own staff and involve staff from other agencies to encourage integrated learning and development.

Volunteering - We will develop a volunteering programme with hours allocated across centres that will promote and create pathways for parents to gain work related skills, build confidence and help toward future employment opportunities.

Domestic Abuse Support - We have a license for train the trainer to provide the Freedom Programme, which we are running in many of our children’s centres and seeing strong outcomes from the programme.

Social Work Placements - Spurgeons can provide social work students with practice placements within the services that we run in a hub area.

Managing Change - We have extensive experience in managing change/transitions amongst our workforce. The HR management team at Spurgeons has 15 years experience of managing TUPE matters. In the last 3 years Spurgeons has managed a total of 44 TUPE processes in/out of the organisation. We have undertaken TUPE transfers with public sector bodies, voluntary and private sector organisations.