Turning the Families First Partnership Programme into a safe, sustainable operating model.
The Families First Partnership is not simply a new programme to implement. It requires local partnerships to redesign how children and families are supported, how partnerships work together and how resources are deployed across the whole system to improve outcomes.
Mutual Ventures helps partnerships turn the ambition of the Families First reforms into an operational and sustainable model of delivery.
We work alongside local authorities, police, health, education and wider partners to create the shared ownership, practical delivery and pace needed to move from policy intent to robust implementation.
Drawing on our work across the country, informed by national learning and experience of complex children’s services transformation, we help places accelerate progress, manage risk and ensure delivery.
The challenge: making a new model operational, safe and affordable by March 2027.
What we bring
A whole-system perspective
We help partners design around children and families, not organisational boundaries.
Hands-on delivery experience
We combine strategic design with practical implementation support.
Learning from across the country
Our work across the country brings insight into emerging models and lessons from implementation.
Transformation experience
We understand reform in the context of financial pressure, SEND, workforce and structural change.
Challenge and alignment
We help partners test assumptions, address difficult questions and make collective decisions.
From policy intent to operational delivery
Understand national policy and define local ambition
We translate national policy into clear recommendations for your local system. Working with partners, we establish shared ambition, local non-negotiables and the early decisions needed for delivery.
Design one coherent operating model
We design how different strands of the reform work together across the child and family journey. This includes pathways, thresholds, roles, decision-making, agency interfaces and links with existing services.
Build operational and financial readiness
We turn the operating model into a deliverable implementation plan, resolving key workforce, finance, governance, data, digital, commissioning, estates and locality dependencies.
Support implementation, test and learn
We support partnerships through implementation, helping teams introduce new ways of working, understand what is changing for children and practitioners and refine the model before wider rollout.
Our role is to leave partnerships with more than a programme plan.
We help create a shared operating model, clear partner ownership, an implementable roadmap, stronger delivery assurance and a sustainable system of help, support and protection for children and families.
Working together to overcome delivery challenges
Multiple agencies and decision-makers - We build a local coalition for change through facilitated workshops and alignment conversations.
Limited time to pilot, learn and scale - We bring learning from across the country to accelerate implementation and avoid reinventing the wheel.
Competing transformation and pressures - We specialise in working with services on their improvement journey, and aligning the Families First reforms with other initiatives and work already underway, including SEND, Family Hubs.
Risk of structural change without practice change - We keep the focus on outcomes and lived experience, support co-production with families and children, develop outcomes frameworks and child journey mapping.
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