What will happen when I ask for early help?
Initially you'll have a conversation with your trusted person to discuss the concerns you have. They'll explore the help and support you think you may need. They might provide you with some information or signpost you to another service that can help, or they may also suggest completing an early help assessment which captures some of your family’s worries and concerns.
This assessment will capture what's going well, what you're finding difficult and the support you feel that you need as a family to improve things. This will help them plan the next stage, where they'll create together a family action plan. Together you'll work out who you feel will be the best people to support you. It's useful for everyone to come together to have a 'Team around The Family' meeting. During these meetings, they'll agree who the most appropriate person is to lead the action plan, and they'll be known as your 'lead professional'.
A lead professional is a person, usually a professional such as a teacher, school support staff or health visitor, who is the single point of contact for you and your family when working in a 'Team Around the Family' way. They'll co-ordinate help for your family and reduce the need to tell your story multiple times.
They'll organise and co-ordinate Team Around the Family meetings, ensuring you and your family understand what's happening at each point of the process.
The lead professional has a few important jobs:
- They set up and run the first TAF meeting
- They help your family to actively take part in the meeting
- They invite the right professionals and ask you who else you want there
- They push the plan forward and focus on what's best for your family
- They keep the meeting on track and ask another professional to make sure the action plan gets done
- Everyone involved gets a copy of the plan
- They give everyone a chance to talk
- They make it clear who needs to do what
- They check the plan when needed
- They follow safeguarding policy and procedure if there are concerns
- They remember that they're part of a team and can't do everything alone
- If things aren't going well, they might need to have another meeting. If a practitioner isn't doing what they agreed on, the lead professional talks to them and finds out why. If it keeps happening, they might consider escalation to their manager
- They make sure they have everyone's contact details
- They decide on a date for the next review at the first meeting and for the ones after that
There might come a time when you and your lead professional decide that things aren’t moving forward as planned, and your family needs some extra help from Shropshire’s Council’s targeted Early Help Team or another specialist agency.
