Children’s services prioritising early help

Hardly a week goes by without early intervention being mentioned by a politician or media pundit on the topic of how society’s most challenging issues should be tackled.

But how widely are early help strategies being adopted by local authority teams working with children and families?

I was interested to see the results of a recent survey of children’s services staff in which 97 per cent of respondents said their authorities are already investing in early intervention programmes to achieve better outcomes for vulnerable children, young people and families.

Ninety-one per cent said they were attempting to predict which children were at risk of living in a “troubled family” and 83 per cent said they were engaged in early intervention work to reduce the number of children with the potential to end up not in education, employment or training (Neet) in the future.

This suggests that early intervention is alive and well in many councils. But the survey also revealed that data sharing remains an issue for some teams working to implement successful initiatives in their area. Almost 73 per cent of staff said that accessing the data they need to identify troubled families was a challenge.

Is this the experience of teams in your authority? What information do you think children’s services staff need to be able to access more simply? And what do you think could be done to make it easier for teams to source the data they need to implement successful early help?

Phil Neal is managing director at Capita Children's Services