The lack of capacity and resources across health, police and
social care is limiting local areas’ ability to make early help
services a clear priority. Many local partners recognise the
importance of early help in meeting children’s needs early, but
prioritising it is a challenge.
Read ‘The multi-agency response
to children and families who need help’ report.
The report draws on the inspections of 5 local authority areas to
evaluate how local partners, including children’s social care,
health services, schools, police and wider services work together
to support children and families who need help. The report
specifically considers how well local early help services are
delivered and co-ordinated.
Early help was effective where all leaders understood how to meet
the needs of their local areas and worked with partners and local
communities to make sure services were accessible. It also
found that local partners were not equally engaged in delivering
and making decisions about the early help services in their area.
Across the local agencies, the report found there were
well-trained and knowledgeable early help workers from a range of
agencies undertaking effective work with children and families.
However, staff working in early help services were increasingly
working with highly complex family situations, and sometimes
above a level they felt was appropriate. Knowing where to go if
risks escalate was key and for some children and families the
skills and expertise of a social worker was needed. Without that
social work oversight, children did not get the right help at the
right time.
The inspectorates call for proposed government reforms to
children’s social care to take account of the variability between
local areas and the capacity within the different agencies to
deliver effective early help services.
Yvette Stanley, Ofsted’s National Director for Social Care:
Getting the right response at the right time is critical to
meeting children’s and families’ needs before things escalate.
Prioritising early help is a real challenge for local areas and
children and families don’t always get the help they need when
they need it.
A multi-agency approach, that effectively brings together
partners across children’s social care, health services, schools,
the police and the voluntary sector, is essential. The excellent
work we saw during these inspections, where local partners
engaged and developed services tailored to their communities’
needs, should become expected practice.
Nigel Thompson, Deputy Director for Multiagency Operations at the
Care Quality Commission (CQC):
Faced with workforce and resource pressures, people working in
and across services have managed to develop ways of working with
the needs of children and their families at the centre.
However, the variation we have seen across areas highlights how
important it is that the opportunity to learn from this is not
lost. Without a shared knowledge, as well as a shared commitment,
the offer to children and their families will remain
inconsistent.
Michelle Skeer, His Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, Fire and
Rescue Services (HMICFRS):
Ensuring children and families have access to early help is
crucial. We saw some good examples of police forces sharing
timely information with partners and conducting early
intervention programmes that benefitted children.
But police forces and other agencies cannot work in isolation,
and an effective multi-agency collaborative approach is key to
ensuring children get the right help at the right time. This
should be done consistently.
Notes to editors
The 5 local areas inspected as part of this joint targeted area
inspection were:
- Bedford Borough Council
- London Borough of Harrow
- Sunderland City Council
- Surrey County Council
- Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council.
The sample of local areas this report is based on is not
nationally representative and we cannot generalise from these
findings to all areas. However, they do provide an indication of
current practice.
