Church and family

Earlier in the week I came across an article in The Guardian about the government's Troubled Families programme. You might remember its launch with David Cameron's pledge to turn around the lives of 120,000 of England's most 'troubled' families within the current parliament. I suggest you read the article - it's about a family intervention worker in Manchester and the impact she's had on the lives of a couple of the families she's worked with.

The one slight drawback with the article is that it implies that once a family has an intervention worker it's just a matter of time until all the children are happy and achieving at school, that family relationships are functioning well and all the grown-ups have a useful job that pays a living wage. But the stories suggest that this intensive, hands-on approach is working.

There are some helpful contributions from those who know about this kind of thing towards the end of the article - it seems that there's evidence that family intervention has a good track record - but some inevitable criticism of the time frames set by the Department for Communities and Local Government (the programme is due to report its results in time for the general election in 2015) and the payment-by-results approach to financing the programme, plus the closing down of existing early intervention programmes like Sure Start and the reduction of funding to other community programmes.

But one of the things that struck me as I read was that this is the kind of thing that I think the church should be involved in - I'm not sure how that would work, but instinctively I think it ought to.