Home-Start and the Delivery of Family Support Nick Frost and Liz Johnson School of Continuing Education, University of Leeds Mike Stein and Lorraine Wallis Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York The publication of Child Protection: Messages from Research (Department of Health, 1995) and of the `Supporting Families' Green Paper (Home Office, 1998) have both highlighted the importance of developing family support services, in keeping with the word and the spirit of the Children Act, 1989. This article presents some of the findings of a three year study of a voluntary organisation, Home- Start, which offers support to mothers with children under five through volunteer home visiting. The article makes connections between the activities of Home-Start and the wider debate about family support in the United Kingdom. Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. T he current era in British child welfare policy and practice can be characterised as post-Messages from Research (Department of Health, 1995). Practitioners, policy makers and researchers are currently facing the challenges posed by the Messages studies and asking a number of questions about how we move forward. Amongst the major questions facing child welfare in the United Kingdom are: . how can family support services be developed? . can child protection be delivered through family support mechanisms? . how should policy and practice develop? . what are the respective roles of the statutory and voluntary sectors? A wider context for these issues is provided by the Green Paper `Supporting Families' (1998). The Paper emphasises the centrality of family policy to the New Labour project and the need for wide-ranging policies, linking family support, health visiting, employment policy, education and crime prevention, for example. In order to contribute to the debate around these issues this article reports some findings from a three year study of a voluntary organisation working across a local authority area in the field of family support (for the full study see Frost and others, 1996). The findings of the study will be linked to the issues arising from the post-Messages and Green Paper context. Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. CHILDREN & SOCIETY VOLUME 14 (2000) pp. 328±342 Correspondence to: Nick Frost, School of Continuing Education, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT. E-mail: N.Frost@leeds.ac.uk