Early help assessment
An early help assessment is a tool we use to support our work with families and helps us to identify what families need help with and inform how we can work with families to make the changes they need.
We work with families using the ‘Circle of Support’. It helps to guide our conversations and find out what is working well, and what additional support may benefit your family.
We focus on all those living in your family home and wider family connections to develop a clear picture of what day to day life is like. The Circle of Support has a set of question prompts for parents and carers, and another set of questions that are specifically for children and young people. These tools help us to get the views of everyone in your family.
Within the Circle of Support is the Readiness to Change model, and the family will be asked to score themselves on each area of the assessment criteria.
The early help assessment isn't a referral form for other professionals to complete in order to receive another service to support the family. The purpose of the assessment is to identify the help that's needed, and to inform a family plan of support which will identify who may be able to best support you.
The assessment can be shared with other services, who can offer additional support. It helps everyone to work together, to make sure you get the right help at the right time, and to strengthen community connections. It's a shared document so that you only tell your story once. This document is stored safely in our case management system.
When we use a restorative approach in the assessment, we focus on asking key questions to understand why there are challenges or concerns. The idea is to uncover the root causes, address any harm, and improve things for children, young people and families. These questions are open-ended and don't blame anyone.
The goal is to work together to find solutions.
The early help assessment process - step by step
- When completing an assessment, we'll work with family members to build relationships and involve them in every part of the process.
- We'll work with each child to understand what's important to them and place them at the centre of the assessment.
- We'll use different activities to help gather information, and with families’ agreement we'll speak with other professionals who have more information that's important to include. This could include school, nursery, or health visitors.
- We'll talk about family history as this informs us of each child’s life experience, and include strengths and achievements.
- We'll focus on all members of the family and how their lives are, or have the possibility of, impacting on other household members.
- We may use other types of assessment tools, such as an exploitation risk assessment, if we're worried about the safety of a family member.
- We'll include any other assessment that has already been completed, such as the information contained in an education, health and care plan, or information collected in reports from an education, health and care needs assessment, to avoid duplication.
- We'll always include factual information in the assessment, and where professional judgement or opinion is included this will be clearly noted.
- Assessments will be clear, informative, and not overly descriptive to ensure that we can identify what each part means for the child/ren.
- We'll use the assessment to inform a family plan which everyone will work towards, and where continued or more help is needed we may need to revisit the assessment.
