What will happen when I ask for early help?
Initially you'll have a conversation with your trusted person, and discuss the problems that you're facing, and they'll explore the help and support you think you may need. To capture this information, they might suggest completing an early help assessment.
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 us plan the next stage, where we'll create together a family action plan. We'll work out together who you feel will be the best people, including practitioners from early help partner agencies, to support you. It's useful for everyone to come together to have a 'Team around The Family' meeting. During these meetings, we'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 a family when working in a 'Team Around the Family' way. They'll bring help to the family and reduce the need to tell their story multiple times.
The lead professional is usually the person who will undertake an early help assessment with the family. They'll work with the family to develop a unique family plan which will identify different roles other people have to support the family to achieve their own goals.
They'll organise and co-ordinate Team Around the Family meetings, ensuring that the child and their family understand what's happening at each point of the process. They'll include their voices where absent or unable to use, and encourage participation in decision making about what happens next.
The lead professional has a few important jobs:
- They set up and run the first TAF meeting
- They help the family actively take part in the meeting
- They invite the right professionals and ask the family who else they want there
- They push the plan forward and focus on what's best for the family
- They keep the meeting on track and ask another professional to make sure the action plan gets done
- Everyone involved gets a copy
- 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
