User-centred design, QR codes, and real-time data capture are no longer the future of family services; they are fast becoming the present.
A key challenge for Best Start Family Hubs (and for plain old Family Hubs before them) is communicating what exactly they are: A building? A set of services? Or a way of thinking about how local systems should integrate around the needs of children and families?
The new Department for Education and Department of Health and Social Care guidance, published on 30 March 2026, believes that, like the Holy Trinity, they can all be all three things at once. But this definitional ambiguity should not disguise a very important point: in the domains of digital and data, the Best Start Family Hubs and Healthy Babies: guidance for local authorities provides an ambitious and genuinely transformative roadmap for improving outcomes in the early years at scale.
Human-centred design has always, by its very nature, sought to overcome complexity by building products and services around the needs and experiences of real people. Instead of beginning with what an organisation wants to offer, it asks what families are trying to do, what gets in their way, and what would make the services easier to discover, access, and benefit from? In today’s digital world, there is a huge opportunity to use data to create more joined-up service offers and to make it easier to track and understand impact. The new BSFH guidance, unusually for government guidance, places this opportunity at the centre, treating digital and data-driven decision making not as an add-on but as part of the core operating model for BSFH delivery.
Information on the ‘local BSFH offer’ should be provided in an “accessible digital format”, and family services should include a “flexible digital offer” alongside face-to-face delivery. Local authorities should “use varied digital touchpoints (e.g. websites, texts, emails, notifications and QR codes) to guide families to the right support” and “design digital journeys around parental needs and behaviours”. So the question is no longer simply whether an area has an app, a website, or a booking system. The question is whether families can move through a joined-up journey that is built on a connected system of both digital and physical platforms.
This approach is fully supported by our own experience: digital services scale most effectively when they are not standalone, but integrated into the local offer, local outreach strategy and wider family experience.
On data, the guidance is perhaps even more ambitious. Barriers and complexities in data sharing mean we often cannot see individual families' full journeys across services, and, without consistent ways to identify users, we risk double-counting and duplication - making it difficult to understand true reach, or attribute impact to specific interventions.
Through the new guidance, local authorities and partners will be expected to improve data quality, strengthen governance, put information-sharing agreements in place (all far easier said than done), and crucially “work over time toward systems that can capture unique service user data across the BSFH network”. It is this last point that excites us the most here at EasyPeasy. This takes us closer to data showing real-time correlation (note: not causation) between need, service reach, and impact.
EasyPeasy already provides granular real-time data, and we have an increasing focus on direct integration with local authority systems. But now we want to identify any of our existing or potential partners who want to explore what real-time data matching and GLD impact might look like. Get in touch if that sounds like you!
So this is all very exciting. We have three years of stable funding, a national early years strategy with senior political buy-in, and an ambitious piece of guidance that offers a compelling vision for where we might want to take all this. And I haven’t even mentioned the ability of digital services to reach families at scale at a time of acute workforce shortages.
Exciting as this is, I do not want to under-estimate the huge challenges that our colleagues in local authorities and the rest of the public sector still face after years of austerity, or the very different starting points that different areas find themselves in. This is a shared endeavour (perhaps some might even say a ‘mission’?) and one which we embark on together.
Key takeaways from the new guidance
In summary, the guidance asks local authorities to:
- Publish information on the ‘local BSFH offer’ in an accessible digital format and include flexible digital services alongside face-to-face delivery.
- Use varied digital touchpoints (e.g. websites, texts, emails, notifications and QR codes) to guide families to the right support and design digital journeys around parental needs and behaviours.
- Co-produce digital routes with practitioners and families through user research and testing, producing digital routes with practitioners and families.
- Build in continuous learning, testing, and refinement processes, underpinned by strong local data foundations.
- Develop the capacity to analyse and present data to improve local understanding of services’ reach and impact, and work towards systems that capture unique service user data across their BSFH network.
We’d love to hear from you
Whether you’re already partnering with EasyPeasy or not, we’d love to connect with local authority stakeholders who are actively considering the implications of the new Best Start Family Hubs and Healthy Babies guidance for local authorities, and considering innovative approaches to real-time data matching and integration. Reach out to us today! You can also find out more about our partnerships with local authorities, download a Best Start in Life commissioning guide, and book a call with the team on our website.