On Thursday we welcomed Bill Wiggin, MP and the Mayor and Mayoress of Bromyard to the Centre. At the meeting the management team delivered a short presentation outlining the services and activities on offer. The award of a new Children’s Centre contract and the Centre’s participation in the Royal British Legion Bromyard’s “Everyone Remembered” were also on the agenda; pictured above with Sarah Eardley (CEO at the HOPE Centre) are Bill Wiggin, MP, Cllr Roger Page, Mayor of Bromyard with the Mayoress, Claire Davies, holding some of the poppies that have been made at Oscar’s Café.

The MP and Mayor and Mayoress are very supportive of the essential services and support offered by the Centre to the local community and the role it plays locally. The Mayor acknowledged the importance of the presence of the centre in Bromyard and the variety of different services on offer.

A recent publication from the LGA, Local Government Association, highlighted that in Herefordshire the number of Child Protection Plans increased by 88% compared with last year.  The early intervention and support services that centres like Hope for Children & their Families offer are a trusted and known resource situated locally.  This makes them able to seamlessly provide services quickly and easily thereby helping to avoid escalation to more costly interventions from statutory services.

Background Last year a consultation took place about the future of the Children’s Centre service delivery after March 2018 in Bromyard.

An overwhelming majority wanted us to remain delivering the service.

Service Changes You will notice with immediate effect and over the next 3 months, changes that will have to be made in order to deliver the service in accordance with the funding and contractual arrangements that the Council require. This will affect our universal services (groups, events) and also our individual support work with families. We have had to change the names of the groups we run and we are aware that there has been some negative feedback to this.

Current situation In order to move towards the changes the Hope Centre is expected to make the service has to move in line with what the Council intend to offer from October 2018. The Council has informed us that there will need to be reductions to services in Bromyard in order to align our delivery with other Children’s Centres in Herefordshire, and focus on specific targets. Originally it was hoped that the Council would make those decisions before March 2018 but this did not happen. We can confirm that we have received a revised contract to deliver until the end of September 2018 on new terms and conditions.

Hope centre services Our priority is, and always has been, all the families we work with and this will continue to be at the forefront of all the services here. However, as a result of the changes that are being made to Children’s Centres nationally and locally, we are obviously affected.

Future The future for Hope’s involvement in the delivery of this service however still remains uncertain.  We have worked very hard since the Consultation in the intervening months to convey the importance of maintaining a universal and targeted service in Bromyard to the Council and will continue to do so.

We are very grateful to everyone who has helped us to do this and for the ongoing support we receive. The Council are in the process of making decisions about the future delivery in Bromyard that will be in place in October in just over 3 months.  We will of course keep everyone updated as soon as we can and in the meantime….

Please support us We would like to encourage everyone who uses the centre to carry on coming and supporting us: let us know what matters to you and how you will be affected if there wasn’t a children’s centre service here in Bromyard for you to access. The Cabinet member for Children and Young People is visiting us in June and we will be informing her about our concerns about the reductions and the impact upon the families we work with. It is very helpful for us to know how you will be affected if you can’t access support or help immediately in Bromyard so please let us know.

If you would like any more information or have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.