Family support: from goal to lived reality across Europe. Blog by Elizabeth Gosme, COFACE Families Europe Director
Recent research of the Horizon Europe rEUsilience consortium indicates the priority for the EU and its Member States (MS) should be to put in place a good system of support for families which should operate to the highest standards regarding making full information available, creating a system of support that is easy to access and is person-centred. To achieve this, 15 principles were proposed, divided into three main overarching policy aims as a guide for countries and international institutions to achieve better resilience on the part of families:
- Better income support for families with children with a particular concern for low-resourced families.
- Closing the childcare gap, arising following the birth of a child, when well-paid parental leave has been exhausted, but access to state-supported full-time early childhood education and care (ECEC) is not yet available.
- Putting in place a comprehensive set of family support services.
The specific principles for each of these areas relate to coverage (endorsing a universal approach), adequacy (in terms of amount and sufficiency), inclusion (recognition of additional need) and the absence of gaps. The underlying thinking is that such policy principles set out guidelines or norms that countries should seek to achieve, starting from where they are and in accordance with their national social welfare traditions.
While policies for families (covered by these 15 principles) are included in different EU hard and soft law initiatives – such as action to boost sectors like long-term care and ECEC, promoting work-life balance measures and support to informal carers – one soft law initiative stands out as holding most potential for driving positive change through effective services for families and children at local level: the European Child Guarantee (CG). The CG National Action Plans and Biennial implementation reports submitted to the European Commission indicate a growing consensus on the need to invest in two-generation family support services and for effective coordination of local services around families as a mechanism to prevent and address poverty.
Cooperation between different administrations is requested in the 2021 CG Recommendation, which asks MS to “develop a framework for cooperation of educational establishments, local communities, social, health and child protection services, families and social economy actors […].” The 27 EU countries involved in this process are implementing the Child Guarantee according to their own national and sub-national contexts and capacities, with a mix of existing or new measures put forward, as well as reform of existing laws to facilitate its implementation.
Many countries indicate that they are approaching the CG from a holistic perspective, considering the family environment and developing family-centred approaches. It especially appears that countries are using existing child and family policies as levers for CG implementation. Some of these countries are piloting and implementing holistic support to families who have children in vulnerable situations or targeting entire families in vulnerable situations, in other words, through two-generation interventions which aim for the health and well-being of children and their parents or carers.
This is evident from the national reports submitted to the European Commission in a first phase (the National Action Plans) and from the Biennial implementation reports (which report on progress in implementing the CG). While many countries refer to family support in these reports, some specifically detail the models used for local outreach to families and show significant ambition. This is particularly the case for the following countries: Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Italy and Sweden. These countries prioritise family support centres in their reporting to the European Commission.
A number of these family support models are being studied closely by the European Observatory on Family Policy, namely those being rolled out in countries like Italy, Belgium, Germany, Finland and Estonia. The Observatory also published more detailed Insights into policy and service innovation in Italy (focusing on ECEC centres as community anchors, coordinating education, health, and social support), in Belgium (diving into the Flanders’ Huis van het Kind model, which are integrated service hubs to streamline access to support for families) and Germany (focusing on governance innovations to break silos in local prevention efforts in reaching out to families, through promotion of networking models).
With only five years left to implement the objectives of the CG, the time is right to deepen exchanges between the countries with integrated approaches to support children and their families through a structured peer exchange programme which examines the effectiveness, costs and coordination of local support services targeting families. The peer exchanges could focus, inter alia, on demonstrating whether more integrated systems of family support services (as detailed above) are indeed most (cost)-effective.
Some of these countries are also using the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) for rolling out these family centres, especially linked to CG implementation, and were studied in the rEUsilience Policy Lab. This is the case of Estonia, Germany and Italy. These examples are interesting because the three countries in question have shown coordinated approaches linking ESF+ action to an EU policy process (the European CG). These three countries also highlight a government commitment (through a dedicated ESF+ stream of action for families and children) to develop and consolidate these centres to support families through challenging times in order to prevent poverty and promote family well-being.
They all focus ESF+ programmes on family centres in different ways. In Estonia, the focus is on developing the family centres per se, building capacity to provide a wide range of local support services for families. In Italy, family centres were a clear focus in the last programming period, and the current focus is on experimenting with peer support tied to existing family centres, with a focus on families with disabilities. In Germany, the focus is on family centres working in partnership with a wide network of local providers of family support to better address the needs of families. These examples will hopefully inspire other countries to consider similar approaches under the current ESF+ programme, and to prepare a clear stream of family support for the ESF+ under the new 2028-2034 budget of the EU.
Leadership of the European Commission is essential in bridging research, policy, and practice, in order to identify scalable solutions which can help build resilient communities where families and children thrive. This should start by an official goal to support families under the European Pillar of Social Rights, linked to the current and future EU budgets, to create an official European stream of action on family support. COFACE Families Europe is ready to work closely with the EU institutions and key partners like Eurochild and ISSA to make this goal a reality, leading to tangible results for Europe’s families.
