Good Practice: Early advice empowers families

Purpose To provide early support to families with children with additional needs

Funding About £170,000 a year from Wakefield Council and Wakefield District NHS plus support from disabled children's charity Kids

Background If your child has a disability or additional need, finding the right support can be a frustrating process. A series of reviews of services for families with disabled children in Wakefield identified a lack of information. So Wakefield Council set out to create a "one-stop" information and advice service and commissioned the charity Kids to run it.

Action Kids secured the contract in October 2009 and the WeSail service, which supports children from birth to 18, was up and running by January 2010. A seconded team of professionals from other agencies works alongside Kids to support families with children who may have physical or learning disabilities, be on the autism spectrum or have healthcare needs.

It has an advice line that families can call to find out about local and national services. Staff also provide face-to-face support and administer grants for short breaks and fun activities. The project has two full-time and two part-time key workers who help families with a range of issues, co-ordinating support and acting as a single point of contact. They work with families for up to a year.

"A lot of what we do is about empowering families to help themselves, so by the end of that year they are ready to move on," explains Catherine Lacy, area manager for Kids in Wakefield.

The team, which includes a Connexions adviser, community learning disability nurse and a children and family worker, also provides more short-term help with specific problems such as behaviour management.

Outcome To date, the service has dealt with more than 580 calls to its advice line. More than 600 families are now members of the Information Network - a voluntary register of disabled children - up from about 200 when the service launched; 132 have received support from a key worker and 152 have benefited from short-term intervention. The most recent evaluation of the scheme shows how much families value the service, with 97 per cent judging the advice they received as "extremely helpful" or "very helpful". Ninety-five per cent of parents reported improvements for their children and themselves.