Early help: councillor training

1. Early help: councillor training

2. Session outcomes: • Councillors are equipped to ask officers key questions on the Council's early help offer, acting as a 'critical friend’ • Councillors and officers have a shared understanding and commitment to the early help approach

3. Introduction

4. What is 'early help'? Early help:  • is all support available to children up to the level of a formal statutory intervention (child in need, child protection plan, taken into care) • includes universal services (accessible to all children – e.g. health visiting and children’s centres), as well as ‘early intervention’ for those identified as being in need of extra support The terms ‘early help’ and ‘early intervention’ are used in different ways in different local areas (and sometimes interchangeably)…but there are clear differences between the two…

5. What is ‘early intervention’? • support provided to children identified as being at risk of poor outcomes (e.g. poor mental health, poor academic attainment, or involvement in crime) to help them avoid those poor outcomes • targets specific, identified issues to prevent problems from occurring, or prevent problems from getting worse • is more intensive than, or additional to, the support available through early help services

6. What is an early help 'offer'? An early help ‘offer’ is an approachto the delivery of support to children, young people and families, which encompasses a range of services and partners. Early help is led by local authorities, but the ‘offer’ includes the work of a wide range of local agencies (e.g. NHS, schools, police, voluntary and community sector).

7. Current approach to early help locally

8. Why is early help important? • Effective early help works to reduce the risk factors, and increase the protective factors, in a child or young person’s life. • Risk factors can threaten a child’s development, limit their future social and economic opportunities, and increase the likelihood of poor outcomes in later life • Protective factors are the characteristics and conditions that can mitigate risk factors

9. Can you name some risk and protective factors for children?

11. Local population needs

12. Why is early help important? As well as benefiting individuals, early help can help to build healthier, happier and more productive communities, and it can produce a range of economic benefits to societythat significantly outweigh the cost of intervening (for example: higher employment rates; and long-term savings to the health, social care, criminal justice and social security systems).

13. But...a note on the ‘economic benefits’… • While the delivery of high-quality, evidence-based early help can reduce pressure on children’s social care (and other public) services, this is more likely to occur in the long-term • The problems that some children face are so complex/entrenched that early help support is unlikely to reverse their trajectories in a short period of time • Early help (and other) services often need to work with children and their families over months or years • It is therefore important not to overstate the short-term economic benefits of investment in early help

14. What is 'effective' early help? EIF's definition of ‘effective’ early help support is that which is proven by at least one robust study to improve one or more child outcomes. It is only through rigorous testing and evaluation of early help support that we can establish what is effective. Evaluations of early help programmes/approaches identify the impact that can be attributed specifically to the programme/approach being measured, rather than outcomes that could result from a range of other factors. 

15. What is ‘effective’ early help? There are many early help programmes and approaches that are very popular with children, young people, families and practitioners, but that have not yet been tested so do not have evidence of effectiveness. In the current context (local authority funding pressures and increased demand for services), local areas should consider conducting evaluations to ensure that they’re delivering effective support. While evaluations can sometimes be time and resource-intensive, they are the only way of establishing with certainty that the early help support being delivered is helping local children, young people and families (i.e. helping in the way that it was designed to).

16. Measuring the impact of early help locally

17. What legislation is relevant to early help? Early help is largely discretionary – there’s no specific legislation - but there are several pieces of legislation containing relevant elements:  • Children Act 1989 • Education Act 1996 • Children Act 2004 • Childcare Act 2006 • Working Together to Safeguard Children 2018 (statutory guidance) See the LGA/EIF resource pack (p.10-11) for more detail on the above.

18. Breakout session Questions for discussion in groups: • What local early help needs have you identified through your casework? • How can you and others improve the design and delivery of the local early help offer at both the ward and local authority level?

19. Further information and key resources www.eif.org.uk • ‘Early help resource pack’ (for councillors) • EIF ‘Guidebook’ (an online directory of over 100 early intervention programmes that have been evaluated and shown to improve outcomes for children and young people) • ‘Evaluating early help’ (guidance on evaluation of complex local early help systems) • ‘10 steps to evaluation success’(guidance on how evaluation evidence can be used to turn a 'good idea' into an intervention that 'works') • ‘Realising the Potential of Early Intervention’ (report that makes the case for improved prioritisation of, and investment in, evidence-based early intervention)

20. Quick session evaluation • Please complete the short feedback form, and hand it to a council officer on your way out Thank you!