Hammersmith & Fulham Early Help Services: Pathways and Processes

Early help Vision

  • to promote the wellbeing and resilience of families with children from conception to 18, in a timely way by offering high quality and effective services.

Early Aims

  • to offer help as early as possible to families who need support. The aim is to identify families with additional needs as early as possible through close partnership with a range of services.
  • to work together and build relationships with families in order support children and young people to achieve good outcomes.

Early Identification – An integrated approach:

  • All young people, children and families require access to high-quality universal services, but those who are at risk of poor outcomes or those with additional needs may also require targeted or specialist support.

The ‘Team Around’ is an empowering and effective integrated approach toworking with families: supporting parents to be fully involved and bringing a small core group of professionals together with the family, face-to-face on a regular basis to share knowledge and pool expertise to formulate an action plan of support with the family. The Team around approach brings the various elements of support together as a whole approach for the whole family,providing a multi-agency perspective in providing preventative and early intervention services to families. It is an established approach within each of the three boroughs early help services. It is a term that denotes good practice - achieved through collaboration and cooperation, with theTeam Around the Family(TAF) and the Team Around the Child(TAC)processes being used to support an individual child/young person/family, bringing a core group of professionals and the family network together to understand the needs of the family and work together to agree a course of action to provide the support needed.

The ‘Team Around the setting’ (TAS)extends the approach beyond individual families to focus upon the local community and groups of children and families. The TAS meeting provides a flexible means of integrating targeted and universal services which is not hindered by organisational boundaries. It is an integrated partnership meeting. A growing network of TASmeetings are being developed across the three boroughs: whilst the names of the meetings may differ they all share a common purpose – to create an opportunity for a core group of professionals providing universal and targeted support to children and familiesto cometogether on a regular basis, usually around a universal setting e.g. a school, children’s centre, GP surgery etc.to develop a shared understanding of the needs of the local community and those connected to the setting, pooling knowledge and expertise to provide an integrated response.The early conversation facilitated by the TASenables greater consideration to be given to emerging needs and information is shared swiftly and appropriately to improve outcomes for children and families. The meeting can be used to plan and develop joint strategy for local communities supported by the setting, and/or identify individual families who would benefit from joint working and additional support.

The early help serviceswithin each of the three boroughs provide a ‘Named Contact’for many of the key universal settings, acting as the first point of contact, meeting regularly to discuss individual and groups of children. Key milestones and transition points e.g. developmental health checks, starting at school and moving from primary to secondary school are used proactively as opportunities to better identify families who would benefit from additional support, using the common assessment framework(CAF)to jointly consider children’s needsand to provide improved access to timely and co-ordinated support.

NBThe format is developed by the setting and tailored to their needs – some prefer to combine the joint strategy and/or joint working around individual families into one meeting, others prefer to have a separate TAS and meeting with the named contact .

Early help assessment

A range of staff across universal , specialist or targeted settings may undertake an Early Help assessment using the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) – a process by which the needs of a child or young person are assessed and an action plan to meet those needs is agreed and progressed. The CAF is a shared process, involving the family to piece together a picture of a child’s needs and to provide a greater understanding of the strengths and challenges faced by the family. It is asingle assessment offering access to multiagency support, reducing the need for numerous referrals and assessments, identifying needs and jointly delivering co-ordinated early help as early as possible. The CAF should result in an Early Help Action Plan, unless the assessed level of risk and need indicates a higher or lower level of response is appropriate in accordance with the Tri-borough Threshold and Assessment protocols:

Referralto the Local Authority:

Each borough has a ‘Front Door’ where initial contact is made with families and professionals with concerns over child safety or wellbeing. An initial screening will be made by the duty worker, who will assess the risk and needs of the case and give it a risk rating of:

  • Level 1 Blue (very low)
  • Level 2 Green (low)
  • Level 3 Amber (medium)
  • Level 4 Red (very high)

The risk ratings are determined by the Tri-Borough MASHrisk framework in conjunction with the Tri-Borough Threshold of Needs, and assess the likelihood of acase becoming Child in Need or a Child Protection case. Depending on the outcome, the blue rated cases will be referred to Early Help teams or a universal service such as a children’s centre. For red, amber and green cases, a referral will be made to MASH (Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub). Contact can be made with Front Doors face to face, through telephone or e-mail.

MASH (Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub)

The Tri-Borough MASH offers a dedicated information gathering and safeguarding risk assessment service to all three boroughs. MASH is a co-located multi-agency team which includes Social Care, Health, Police, Education, Probation, Housing and Youth Offending Service with a remit to work collaboratively to collect and interpret information and assess safeguarding risk. Safeguarding encompasses both child protection (s47) and broader concerns about a child’s wellbeing. The Tri-borough Threshold of Need provides a common set of risk indicators are used by each borough to ensure a consistent approach to identifying and categorizing the level of risk.Cases referred to MASH will be rated blue, red, amber or green in conjunction with further information gathering. Cases are then progressed for allocation to the appropriate service.