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Early help assessments

At some point, your child or family may need extra support from one or more services. This is known as early help. To find out the level of support your family needs, and which services can provide it, professionals such as your GP, health visitor, childminder, or family support worker will need to carry out an early help assessment.

What happens for the assessment

The early help assessment focuses on your child, your needs, and on other things that may be impacting your family life, such as housing or financial difficulties. It's used across all services who work with children, young people and their families.

The assessment involves professionals meeting with you and your child so you can tell them what's working, what's not, the kind of support you need, and how they can help you. They record the information you give them in the assessment form, so they can work out the kind and level of support they can give you. They'll draw up an action plan which sets out this support, so you know what you can expect from the services who will help you.

If lots of services are involved there may be a number of professionals working with you from different agencies. These will come together to make decisions, and are known as the team around the family (TAF). The TAF will choose a lead practitioner who'll be responsible for talking with you on behalf of the whole group.

After the assessment and levels of support

If your early help assessment finds you need extra support, you'll be offered this through either universal, targeted or specialist services.

• Universal services are those which are available to everyone, like health services and education. These are provided as a right to all children, young people and their families. Families can self-refer into universal services or access them for information and guidance.

• Targeted services are for families who face more challenges and may have multiple needs. These services provide extra expertise to meet a family's needs. Group provision and one-to-one support is available through our family hubs.

• Specialist services are used when a child or young person’s needs can't be met by other services. Practitioners can request help from a specialist service where they feel a child is suffering or likely to suffer significant harm.