Home-Start
Design of training resources
Looking after a toddler and twins with no family nearby. Suffering from a chronic condition. Then her husband left. She was heading towards being wheelchair bound and losing her children.
A grandmother raising her three grandchildren.
A partner abused in every way possible – mentally, financially, physically and emotionally. No strength to leave until one day, when feeding her two month old baby, her partner tried to strangle her.
A snapshot of the harrowing situations where Home-Start provide help to families with young children.
31% of children in the UK grow up in poverty and with 2,000 babies born every day in the UK - it’s an ongoing battle.
But with 1,000 locally based staff and 13,000 volunteers Home-Start are making a difference. Last year they transformed the lives of more than 58,000 children whilst supporting 27,000 families.
They couldn’t do any of this without their fabulous volunteers. Yet they can’t just be thrown in at the deep end. They need extensive training. Over their near 50 year existence Home-Start have built up a wealth of knowledge and experience as to how best support families with young children in need.
Transferring this to the volunteers is crucial for Home-Start’s very existence. So, condensing 50 years of learning into a set of training materials is vital.
As you would imagine, there’s a lot of information. It needs to be structured, easy to navigate and engaging for both the trainers and volunteers. Two main items were commissioned - firstly a resource training pack for the trainers and secondly training packs for the volunteers.
Experience had shown that face to face training worked best and both trainers and volunteers preferred physical packs.
A myriad of variables needed to be ironed out before starting design. Checking we had a clear structure for all the content, portability, landscape or portrait. It became clear that cross referencing between the 2 training packs was important - for both individual sections and pages. How would they use the materials? Turns out they need to take individual pages out for certain tasks. And finally how were we going to contain it all and could we make it more future proof for any updates.
When Covid threw a spanner in the works digital versions were created enabling training to be delivered remotely. Content was edited accordingly and pagination and cross referencing adapted. Had it been a digital only brief from the start we’d have designed it differently but we adapted in the most efficient and cost effective way possible so that training could continue.
With a mix of Illustrations / tables / charts / diagrams / images - the training resources help Home-Start deliver on their mission.
The earliest years make the biggest difference. Home-Start try to make sure those years count, so no child's future is limited.
Design
Print & Digital
Training Resources