Nurture Families is a social enterprise working to improve life outcomes for children in Herefordshire and Worcestershire by focusing on support for parents and babies in the first 1001 days and beyond. They provide psychotherapeutic intervention, parent support groups, support with wellbeing, finance and a pathway into employment for mothers.
Nurture Families is a relatively new organisation, founded in 2015 with a different approach to early years support for families and young children. They wanted a solution that could help them operate day-to-day, as well as setting them up to scale. In the past, they had multiple systems, with different interfaces, and were looking for a solution that had everything in one place in order to use the data to automate processes and make the organisation more efficient. They were also looking for something with ease of use, visual appeal, and ease of access to multiple levels of users, such as by giving families access to the appropriate parts of the platform too.
Nurture initially utilised Zone to facilitate the day to day recording within their Forest School. Both the EYFS and CoEL frameworks were implemented in such a way that practitioners are able to complete what was a laborious task, much more easily.
Statements used to summarise elements of child development are taken from these frameworks and suggested to the practitioner based on the information they enter throughout a diary entry. This ensures standardisation across the data being inputted and makes the process of completing a diary entry much more intuitive and efficient.
To facilitate planning when each child is in “focus week”, a concise calendar was integrated into Zone. The practitioners responsible for each child are then informed when a particular child is currently in “focus week”. This ensures that all of the required information is collected and can then be shared with parents.
A virtual link between the Nurture Families website and Zone were made, creating a single source of entry for all referrals which feed into the relevant trackers. Whether this be a child attending the kindergarten, a parent who requires support or an applicant for a job vacancy.
All family members are offered a family portal to access a live feed of everything their child has been getting up to, such as activities and accidents, as well as important organisation updates. Secure chat channels were created for families to communicate with Nurture Families directly, providing a secure method of instant communication within Zone.
Nurture Families run their organisation on Zone, giving their families, staff and management access to different parts of the system relevant to their individual requirements. Helen views Zone as a “multilevel, multifaceted system that enables Nurture to bring together every element of the organisation’s structure, covering all workflows and data management needs.”
In partnership with the development Team at Zone, Nurture Families were able to unify their workflows and follow all of their processes in one system. To Helen,
“It’s a lot more than a tool. It’s become the mind map of our business." Day-to-day activities have been “streamlined, reducing admin and increasing staff satisfaction.”
The front-facing app has enabled Nurture Families to give their parents access to a live information feed, akin to a social media platform, enabling staff to share pictures, observations and important information with families.
One of Helen's colleagues, Hannah, loves
“the Zone trackers which act as a central point where anyone involved in a project or process can go to view progress, who’s doing what and what’s next, so everyone is joined-up.”
Helen feels that both Zone's internal chat platform and the register bring much value to the organisation. She loves the direct communication with the families of the children they support and the time saved by recording the register dynamically on Zone.
