What is Family Help?
Family Help (formerly known as Early Help) is a simple concept. Family Help means taking action to support a child, young person or their family early in the life of a problem, as soon as it emerges.
Family Help is support for families who have children aged 0-19 years (or 25 if the children have SEND).
Preventive services are more effective than reactive services and offering support early is critical to preventing issues from escalating. Family Help seeks to meet the needs of and support the family in resolving difficulties and prevent them becoming entrenched.
Family Help, also known as early help or intervention, is providing the right support to families, at the right time, to achieve change that lasts. It is a key part of delivering frontline services that are integrated and focused around the needs of children and young people.
See Family Information and SEND Directory
Who should offer Family Help?
As with safeguarding children and young people, Family Help is everyone’s responsibility.
Family Help is not an individual service, but a system of support delivered by local authorities and their partners working together and taking collective responsibility to provide the right provision in their area.
The first person to offer support to a child or young person and their family should be the practitioner identifying the issue.
Some Family Help and Family Help Assessments are provided through “universal services”, such as education and health services, and other partners working together. This Family Help sits at Level of Need 2 on our local safeguarding continuum.
Other Family Help services and Family Help Assessments are coordinated by a local authority and/or their partners to address specific concerns within a family and can be described as targeted early help. This Family Help sits at Level of Need 3 on our local safeguarding continuum and is coordinated and led by our teams of dedicated Family Help Outreach Support Workers.
Offering swift and coordinated help and support to families is the responsibility of professionals in all agencies.
The Liverpool Levels of Need framework sets out the responses expected of all professionals when identifying unmet needs.