Joint Strategic Needs Assessment: early help

A number of national strategies and guidance underpin the approach to early help.

The government’s refreshed Supporting Families Programme guidance for 2022 to 2025 focuses on providing early help to vulnerable families with multiple and complex problems to prevent them from escalating into crises. The programme aims to drive early help system transformation locally and nationally to ensure that every area has joined-up, efficient services, is able to identify families in need, provides the right support at the right time and tracks outcomes in the long term.

The Family Hubs and Start for Life Programmes form part of this work, with the aim of strengthening multi-agency support for families based on local needs. Family hubs are a place-based way of joining up locally in the planning and delivery of family services, bringing partners together to improve access, improve the connections between families, professionals, services, and providers, and put relationships at the heart of family support.

In January 2021, the Government commissioned an Independent Review of Children’s Social Care which was published in May 2022. Critically, the review proposed a new approach to family help to improve children’s lives through supporting the family unit and strengthening relationships achieved through the streamlining of early intervention and widening the scope for targeted early help to support families requiring lower-level statutory intervention (Section 17 work under the Children’s Act 1989).

Working Together to Safeguard Children statutory guidance was updated in 2023 and this revision has a renewed focus on how organisations and agencies provide help, safeguarding and protection for children and their families. The early help focus is on strengthening the role and contribution of organisations and agencies including education and childcare settings in supporting children and keeping them safe, including information on a child’s right to education and risk factors for practitioners to consider when identifying children and families who may benefit from early help. The approach to working with families has been strengthened throughout the guidance, outlining the role of family networks.