Early Help Support for Families

Early help is all about providing the right support to children and families at the earliest possible time and is a way of describing the extra support a family can receive if they need it. Every family has its ups and downs. There are lots of different reasons why you might need a bit of extra support and it’s OK to ask for help.

When considering what support you need, it’s helpful to consider what different options are available:

1. Support from universal services (for example, your child’s school, GP, health visitor or midwife).
2. Support from specialist and community services (for example, mental health services, support for special educational needs, financial support, housing support and domestic abuse support). For information about what specialist and community services are available, contact the Family Information Service by telephone: 01904 554444 or email: [email protected].
3. Having a family early help assessment and support plan.

Early Help Assessment

To help explore what you and your family would like support with, you might want to consider an Early Help Assessment (EHA).

An EHA can help to:

• recognise what is going well for you and your family
• explore what you may need help with
• coordinate the workers/services already supporting you
• help identify other services that can help

The EHA gives you a chance to tell your story

A worker you trust will talk with you to find out about your family and any difficulties you are facing. Ideally, this will be somebody already supporting you or your children. They will talk with you about what is going well and any strengths you can build upon.

With your permission, they will contact other services working with you to ask what support they are offering and how they think you could be helped further. All this information will be brought together in a single document, called an Early Help Assessment, for you to reflect on with your lead practitioner.

The EHA is your plan

This information in your EHA will be used to create your support plan, looking at what you and your family need help with and who can help you. Support can be a variety of things; it may be a referral to a specialist service, it might be helping you or a family member develop skills and strategies, navigating complex processes or identifying practical solutions to problems.

You get a copy of your assessment, plans and reviews. Your whole family’s views are very important and should be included throughout.

The EHA is a chance for you to review support

To make sure everything is going well, you will have regular review meetings with your lead practitioner, other involved professionals and anyone in your family network who you would like there. This is called a Team Around the Child and Family (TACF). This will help to talk about what is going well, where you still need some support and to see if anything in the plan needs to be different. The reviews happen at regular intervals and can continue for as long as you all agree your family needs support.

Your ‘go to’ person will be your lead practitioner

This is someone who makes sure the people supporting your family are all talking to each other and to you. They often lead the TAF meetings and will support you through the EHA process. You can speak to them to discuss any concerns or issues that you or your family may be experiencing. The ‘lead practitioner’ can be anybody who is already supporting your family, and you can help to choose who this person is.

Your choice

An EHA is a voluntary process and can only happen with your permission. It's your way of being able to tell your story once to ensure you get the right support.

Sharing information

Your lead practitioner will tell the Supporting Families that you have an EHA. The Supporting Families Team will keep this safe on a secure database. They only share your information with your consent, and with professionals who can help you as part of your EHA plan. The lead practitioner will explain this in more detail as part of the process.

There may be times when your information needs to be shared to keep someone safe. A worker may share information:

• to help a person who may be at risk of harm
• to help prevent or detect a serious crime
• if we have legal obligation to do so

We'll explain these to you if they need to happen.

To find out more, talk to a worker or service which you or your family are accessing. This could be a worker in your child’s school, nursery, a health professional, health visitor or midwife, for example. Let them know you think an EHA might be helpful for you and your family. The worker might be the person who could be lead practitioner, or they might help you find an appropriate lead practitioner.