1st October 2026
“When a child spends their earliest years in temporary accommodation, the consequences can extend far beyond housing. It can affect their health, development, education, and sense of security. Behind every statistic is a child with potential.”
Professor Monica Lakhanpaul, University College London
A New National Initiative
We are delighted to announce that the Institute of Health Visiting (iHV), the design research agency Stby, and the CHAMPIONS Project academic research team (co-led by University College London and De Montfort University, Leicester) are working in partnership on an important new project which aims to address the critical challenges facing refugee and asylum-seeking families with children under five who are living in temporary accommodation across the UK.
Funded by the Nuffield Foundation, this national initiative brings together frontline practice leadership, creative design research, and rigorous academic scholarships to deliver this ambitious new co-design project.
Addressing an Urgent Need
Across England, tens of thousands of young children are spending their crucial early years in temporary housing, where stays frequently stretch from 2 to 5 years. Living in temporary accommodation is often characterised by chronic stress, environmental hazards such as damp, mould, pest infestations, extreme temperatures, and severe overcrowding, alongside a lack of adequate kitchen or bathroom facilities.
For refugee and asylum-seeking families, housing instability is further complicated by complex legal, structural, linguistic, and migration-related barriers. Crucially, these families are not defined solely by trauma or vulnerability. They bring immense resilience, deep cultural parenting strengths, agency, and rich lived experiences. A meaningful service model must honour these strengths rather than viewing families through a deficit lens.
Health visitors hold a distinctive universal early-years role and are particularly well placed to recognise how housing, family circumstances, health, and child development intersect. Uniting the clinical authority of the iHV, the user-centred design expertise of Stby, and the rich empirical evidence base and Safe-Healthy-Educated (SHE) framework of the CHAMPIONS Project, this partnership will translate research into practical, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed health visiting support.
Co-designing the Future of Practice
Working together, over the next 18 months, the iHV, Stby, and the CHAMPIONS Project team will co-design new practice blueprints directly alongside health visitors and refugee/asylum-seeking families across the UK. The ultimate goal is to produce guidance to support the health visiting delivery, training curriculum, and practice tools that equip health visitors to deliver equitable care. Crucially, the resource will be designed to support future scalability, ensuring its benefits can be adapted to support all families with children under five living in temporary accommodation.
Get Involved
To learn more, explore the CHAMPIONS Project website, visit Stby’s Design Practice, or email [email protected].
Look out for our Voices blog piece with more on the project in the next few weeks.
