Early Help Offer

What is Early Help?

Every family has its ups and downs. Being a parent is hard work and there are no instructions.  Sometimes, you or your children may need extra support. This may be before your children are born, when they are very young, or throughout their school years. 

There is no shame in asking for help. We are here for you.

Early Help is a programme that helps you recognise what's going well for you. It will help you see where you might need extra support. We will work with you to find the best person to work with you and your family to make this happen.  This may be through an Early Help Assessment (EHA).

Early Help Assessment

The Early Help Assessment is a standard assessment used by all practitioners working with children, young people and their families or carers.

The aim of the EHA is to provide the right support at an early stage before the need for support increases.

To complete an EHA you will meet with either our Family Support Worker, provided through our partnership with Lady Manners School, or one of our Designated Safeguarding Leads.  During this meeting we will talk about what is going well and what's not going as well as you would like for you and your family, this will help us to identify the right kind of support.

Every person and family is different, but an Early Help Assessment aims to:

• Help you see what's going well and not so well for your family
• Help you and others to see what support might be needed
• Create a picture of your family's circumstances, which can be shared, with your permission, so that you don't have to keep repeating yourself to different workers
• Help you to be part of a team of people working together on the same plan, to get things going well again.

What happens after the EHA has been completed?

With your permission, people from different organisations that are working with your family, will share information and work together to identify the best support available for you and your family.  This could be schools, health professionals, charity organisations.  The EHA meeting may be followed with a Team Around the Family (TAF) meeting. 

What is a TAF?

The Team Around the Family, TAF,  is an opportunity for all those to involved in offering support to meet with you and identify the next steps and create a support plan.  The support plan is then reviewed at regular intervals to ensure that the support is working and that it remains relevant.  During this meeting, you would choose a 'lead professional'.  This can be any of the people working with your family - you might choose the worker you see most often or the person you find most approachable.  Your lead professional will arrange the review meetings and be someone you can speak to at any point about any concerns you and your family may be experiencing.

Here at The Woodland Federation of Peak District Schools we have an open door policy to communicate, providing time to talk to all parents, children and families, to ensure all children are safe, happy and learning.

• We are available to talk via telephone, Class Dojo,  direct email and face to face, and provide time for our parents to communicate and work with us e.g. through Parent Consultations and good daily availability.
• Our children are actively encouraged to speak about any concerns they have to a member of staff. They know that our staff take all concerns very seriously and they know that they can speak to any responsible adult in school. 
• We have an effective PSHE curriculum which supports children and develops key skills, not only for school, but for life.
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We work more closely with families and children who need extra support. We put in place intervention in school to support children who need it, be this for academic or mental well-being.

• EHAs help identify the specific needs of our children and families, so that they can be assigned to the correct interventions for their educational, social, physical and emotional needs.
• We can refer children to the school nursing team. You can speak directly with the school nurse team or we can refer you as a school.
• Access to relevant agencies will be signposted if appropriate to enable good attendance.

We signpost families and seek support from different support agencies. There are a number of support agencies out there who we can access or signpost you to if you are experiencing difficulties at home. There are also agencies which can be contacted independently should you wish to do so, who might be able to help and provide the support for your family:

• Family Support Workers
• Local Community Police Officers
• Mental Health Team

We will also seek further support from services to best support our families. 

The Designated Safeguarding Lead will work with parents and children and families services to organise additional support when required. Support could involve:

• Children and families team
• Multi-agency safeguarding team
• Safeguarding children board
• Social workers

Helplines

Police 999 in an emergency or 101 for a non-emergency situation

National Domestic Violence helpline: 0808 2000 247

National Centre for Domestic Abuse: 0844 8044 999

CARP: 0845 602 9035 providing advice for victims of domestic violence

www.childnet.com/resources - e-safety

www.thinkuknow.co.uk - e-safety

www.derbyshire.gov.uk