Our support is firmly grounded in evidence about what works for families, and shaped by the feedback of those we work alongside. However, our team recognised the need for a more consistent and structured way to keep the child’s experience fully in view across our work.

In 2024, our Operations Manager developed the PLANTS framework: an approach designed to keep the voice and lived experience of the child at the centre of our support. Used within six‑weekly supervision sessions, it helps staff and volunteers check in on progress in a structured and reflective way. It enables us to track children’s wellbeing over time, notice changes early, and identify safeguarding concerns more quickly.

PLANTS focuses attention on the key elements children need to thrive. It supports volunteers to reflect on children’s wellbeing across these areas, recognising where strong foundations are already in place and highlighting where a child may not be getting what they need. In doing so, it gives us a clearer, more objective picture of the child’s experience, alongside our understanding of the wider family context.

The strength of PLANTS is that it is both practical and reflective. It helps us balance empathy for parents with a clear, consistent focus on the child, ensuring that children’s needs are not overshadowed by the very real challenges families may be facing.

We are particularly excited about this work because it represents a meaningful shift, moving from implicitly child-focused support to a more explicit, trackable and shared understanding of children’s needs and experiences. It strengthens our safeguarding practice, improves the quality of our supervision, and helps us better evidence the difference our support makes.

Since its introduction, the approach has proved highly effective. It has been shared across the Home-Start network and is now recognised as good practice, with wider adoption supported through workshops, one-to-one support, and inclusion in Home-Start UK toolkits.

To support this rollout, Home-Start UK asked us to deliver practice development sessions for the network in February 2024 and June 2025. These sessions focused on how we capture and reflect the voices of babies and very young children, an area that can often be challenging to evidence in a meaningful way.

Working alongside our data-focused colleagues in Lambeth, we are now building on this strong qualitative foundation by developing an approach to quantifying child outcomes. This will strengthen how we measure, understand and communicate the impact of our work for children.

Hillingdon borough is a highly diverse community with people from all around the world choosing to raise their families here. But when things get tough, support isn’t equally available to everyone: how do you get help if you aren’t confident speaking English, or don’t know where to go; or what if the only help available isn’t accessible to you because your cultural needs are different?

In 2021/2022 we noted that to support increased numbers of families from ethnically diverse communities we needed volunteers who understood those communities first-hand, and who shared a native language with families in need. But when we tried to recruit volunteers from different cultures, we struggled, and we didn’t know why. Conversations with colleagues across the Home-Start network confirmed that this was not unusual, but it highlighted an important gap we needed to address.

To understand what was preventing people from these communities coming forwards, we applied for (and won!) funding from Civil Society Roots to undertake a research project (Dec 2023 – Nov 2024) exploring the barriers to volunteering for people from ethnic minority backgrounds. The findings have shaped our own EEDI strategy and prompted changes in how we recruit, support and retain volunteers.

Through conversations with over 150 local residents, we heard that many people from ethnic minority backgrounds felt unsure whether they would “fit in” or be welcomed. Alongside this, people described a combination of practical and cultural barriers — including time pressures, language, unfamiliar or intimidating recruitment processes, and concerns about confidence and belonging.

We also saw that there is a significant amount of informal volunteering already taking place within communities, which is often not recognised or translated into formal volunteering roles.

We used this learning to make tangible changes: we simplified our application process, introduced informal coffee mornings as a first step into volunteering, increased our presence in community settings, and ensured that volunteers from diverse backgrounds were visible and actively involved in welcoming new recruits.

The impact has been clear. Since 2022, the proportion of non‑White British volunteers at HSH has increased from 37% to 62%. More recently, our training cohorts have become consistently more diverse, with an average of 72% non‑White British participants — closely reflecting the diversity and the families we support (79.7%) and supporting us to better represent diversity of the borough (62.9% non‑White British).

Importantly, we didn’t keep that learning to ourselves – we shared our findings across the whole Home-Start UK network. In 2024, our Director, Clare Nazerali, delivered an online session open to all Home-Start Directors focused on reducing barriers and creating more inclusive volunteering pathways. We also shared our findings as part of wider conversations within Home-Start UK, including an EEDI-focused staff learning day aiming to inform thinking across the national network.

The relevance of our findings is not limited to Home-Start, and we’ve since delivered training on volunteer recruitment, retention and inclusion to a wide range of organisations — from the Greater London Authority Volunteer Managers Forum to a Cranfield Trust webinar that reached over 300 participants. Each session draws on practical experience: what we’ve tested, what we’ve changed, and what difference it makes.

Our approach to partnership working is also reflected in our contribution to perinatal mental health support in Hillingdon.

In November 2022, we were proud to be part of a visit by The Princess of Wales to Colham Manor Children’s Centre, hosted by the Maternal Mental Health Alliance. The visit brought together partners from health, social care and the voluntary sector, including Home-Start, to highlight the impact of joined-up, holistic support for families.

Working with Home-Start colleagues across West London, we developed a joint project that created a direct referral pathway between perinatal mental health (PNMH) services and Home-Starts. This work was shaped by a shared understanding: that for many mums, particularly those leaving intensive inpatient support, the transition back into the community can be challenging, and without the right support, may lead to a cycle of repeated medical intervention.

By offering Home-Start support as mums leave specialist care, we help provide continuity at a critical point. Equally, supporting mums experiencing mild to moderate perinatal mental health challenges can prevent difficulties from escalating to the point where more acute intervention is needed. This creates a smoother, more supportive journey between services, with the right help at the right time.

Home-Start Hillingdon’s approach to this work is strengthened by our close, collaborative partnership with the Local Authority and other statutory services. This joined-up working plays an important role in helping mums re-engage with both community and statutory support.

For many parents, attending groups such as parent and baby sessions can feel daunting. Our volunteers provide practical and emotional support to build confidence and help make those first steps feel manageable, enabling mums to reconnect with services and their wider community.

As part of the project, we worked closely with PNMH professionals and specialists within the Local Authority to co-design and deliver specialist training, which is now offered to all staff and volunteers. This ensures they are well equipped to understand and support families experiencing perinatal mental health challenges.

For us, the Princess’s visit was not about showcasing a single organisation, but about demonstrating what is possible when services work together. Families benefit from joined-up support throughout pregnancy and early parenthood, leading to greater continuity of care and better outcomes for parents and their children.