Welcome to

BrighterFuturesTwenty-first centurywellbeing services forchildren and young people

2018-2021

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Foreword Page 4

What is early help in Thurrock? Page 5 - 7

Our Vision Page 8

Our Aim Page 9

The national and local context Page 10

Features of effective Early Help service ‘Brighter futures’ Page 11

Our focus on outcomes and responding to the priorities of the family Page 12

Our principals and strategic approach Page 13

Objectives of our Strategy Page 14

Measuring Success Page 15

Contents

As a partnership, our Early Help Strategy is central to our Brighter Futures ambition to deliver Twenty-first Century wellbeing services for children and young people. We want our children, young people and their families, to thrive and be able to contribute to their successful and prospering communities.

This Early Help Strategy describes how all partners will work together to plan and deliver a range of provision to support children, young people and their families at the earliest opportunity. It is based on the views of children and their families as well as local and national evidence on what works.

This strategy document will:

Describe our vision

Define what we mean by Early Help in Thurrock

Articulate the values that inform the development and delivery of services

Set out our ambition for the development of Early Help

Outline how we will know we are making a difference: our success criteria underpinned by effective performance monitoring

This strategy is designed for staff across Thurrock at all levels from Chief Executives and strategic

managers to frontline, operational staff. It is supported by multi-agency guidance and procedures which will be helpful to practitioners in their everyday working environment.

I would like to thank all those who have contributed to this document and wish you all success in continuing to make a positive difference to our children, young people and families in Thurrock

Rory Patterson

Foreword

Rory PattersonCorporate DirectorChildren’s Services

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It takes a whole village to raise a child Igbo and Yorubo (Nigeria) Proverb. The basic meaning is that a child’s upbringing is a communal effort.

Brighter Futures - the Partnership

In Thurrock we are using the whole range of professionals who work with children, young people and families to deliver the Brighter Futures strategy. This means that we will work together to make sure our services are co-ordinated, accessible and wherever possible local and co located. We want to avoid confusion and duplication for families who need information, advice and help.

As a partnership we are committed to working with children, young people and families in a way that recognises their strengths and assets and uses these to empower and support families to find solutions to their problems.

We will share our knowledge, skills and expertise so that we can add value to each agency’s individual contribution.

The Brighter Futures partnership incorporates the following partners and teams:

PASS

Healthy families (health visitors, school nurses)

Children’s Centres

Schools, Academies and Colleges

Nurseries

Housing

Thurrock Council

Police

Xantura

SEND

As part of our commitment to achieving better outcomes for children and young people we will focus on:

Promoting good physical and mental health for both children and families

Narrowing the gap and reducing inequality between the most and the least deprived groups across all national performance indicators

Meeting the targets in the Troubled Families Plan -

Parents and children involved in crime or anti-social behaviour

Children who have not been attending school regularly

Children who need help: are identified as in need

Adults out of work or at risk of financial exclusion or young people at risk of worklessness

Families affected by domestic violence and abuse

Parents and children with a range of health problems

Demand management. To help partners sustainably reduce demand for services

Increasing the numbers of children with a good level of development

Reversing the trend in the numbers of children who are obese

Increasing rates of breastfeeding

Contribute to a reduction in children subject to child protection plans and reduce the numbers of children coming into care

Increasing parental aspirations and skills/employment opportunities

Reduction in mothers smoking in pregnancy and young people starting to smoke

Reduction in teenage conceptions

Reduction in the misuse of drugs and alcohol

Reduction in incidence and repeat incidences of domestic abuse

Supporting children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) to remain as independent as possible and wherever possible to have their needs met through universal provision.

Early Help in Thurrock consists of all the help available to children and families at levels 1, 2 and 3 of the 4 level Thresholds document

www.thurrocklscb.org.uk/procedures/threshold-document

Brighter Futures

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Level 1 – Those requiring Universal Services

Level 2 – Those requiring Early Intervention/Prevention with a Lead Professional and a Team Around the Family.

Level 3 – Those requiring Targeted and Enhanced Support with a Lead Professional and a Team Around the Family or a Social Work Lead Professional and a Child in Need Plan ( depending on complexity).

Children with SEND are included at this level.

Level 4 – Those requiring Acute/Statutory Intervention with a Social Work Lead Professional and a Child

in Need, Child Protection or a Care Plan for Looked After Children.

At level 3, where children and families have complex and multiple issues, requiring multi agency support, agencies come together to provide support using common tools and processes.

Our approach to Early Help in Thurrock is based on identifying families’ strengths, is family centred, consent-based and focused on working collaboratively with families to build their resilience. A critical ingredient to successful working is the need for families to make a commitment to change.

Our Brighter Futures vision is to promote the wellbeing and resilience of families with children from conception to 18. For children with additional needs, support continues until they are 25 as we work with adult services to ensure a smooth transition for help and support into adulthood.

We will achieve our vision by empowering and supporting children and families wherever possible to

help themselves, using universal and community-based services in the first instance. When more specialist help is needed we will support families by offering the right service, at the right time, by professionals with a range of skills to prevent escalation of need.

Our Brighter Futures Vision

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We want all children and young people in Thurrock to live in resilient families, to be happy, safe and healthy and to grow up with skills, knowledge and attributes to be confident and independent; ready for adult life.

As partners we want to work together to provide a seamless service to children and their families, preventing the escalation of need and ensuring targeted, timely interventions that are supported by effective multi agency practices.

Our ambition for

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Our ambition for Brighter Futures is to ensure children and families achieve good outcomes through universal provision and when needed through effective early help.

We want to offer help as early as possible in an integrated way through close partnership working where we can build positive relationships with families to help them support their children to achieve good outcomes.

We aim to provide:

The right support at the right time for children, young people and their families so they can get the information and help they need in a timely manner

Support that helps build capacity and resilience in children, young people and families within their local communities

A trusted lead family worker that families can rely on

A co-ordinated response to the family’s concerns and needs tackled together, not separately so that children and families only have to tell their story once

Moving resources from specialist services to Early Help provision over time so we can offer more preventative support.

We will achieve our ambition by:

Identifying the children, young people and their families who need extra help and support at the earliest opportunity

Working together as a strong partnership to deliver an effective local offer of support

Delivering a whole-family approach to make a difference and achieve good outcomes

Supporting children, young people and their families to connect to their communities to be able to build networks of friendship and increasing emotional resilience and mental health and wellbeing.

Our Aim

Enabling children, young people and families to reach their full potential has been a common theme in a number of reviews that have been commissioned by successive governments.

They have all independently reached the same conclusion that it is important to provide help early in order to improve outcomes for children and young people. Interest nationally is also growing in an evidence base for early intervention, in particular a need to demonstrate effectiveness in order to produce cost savings in more specialist and acute services. It is becoming clear that early intervention is not a one-off fix, but needs to be a sophisticated, highly targeted process and approach. It needs to encompass a way of working that leads to specific outcomes. Establishing ‘what works

best’ at a local level is important, as is ensuring there is an effective return on investment, particularly in the long term.

A renewed focus and alignment of services is necessary because of the changing context within which all partners are working. There are a number of significant factors that contribute to the requirement for an Early Help Strategy in Thurrock at this time.

Taking the Signs of Safety approach to working with families and applying it more widely

The ability to review potential joint commissioning priorities and opportunities

Recommendations of the 2017 Annual Public Health report

Implementing the findings of the independent review on ‘demand management’

Responding to the increasing numbers of children subject to statutory interventions

Ofsted recommendations

Government focus on ‘Troubled Families’

The impact of trying to get more from a reducing resource base.

The national and local context

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A multi-agency and integrated response that brings a range of expertise through a ‘Team Around the Family’ approach

A relationship with a trusted lead professional who can help co –design solution focused support in an integrated and personalised approach

An approach that empowers families and helps them to find solutions to their challenges and problems. This approach aims to build resilience, including support for young people and parents to seek and remain in education, employment or training

An approach that sees the child or young person’s needs in the wider family context

A single point of access for all sections of the community

Building capacity within the local community, faith and voluntary sector

Effective Information Governance framework enables a joined up single view of data across partners

Features of effective Early Help

Early Help is intervening early and as soon as possible to tackle problems emerging for children, young people and their families or with a population most at risk of developing problems. Effective intervention may occur at any point in a child or young person’s life

What is Early Help?

Centre for Excellence and Outcomes (2010)

In Thurrock our Early Help service is part of our Brighter Futures integrated offer to support children, young people and their families under a single identity.

Early Help is all about identifying needs within families early and providing preventative support before problems become complex and more intractable which may lead to safeguarding and child protection concerns that will require statutory intervention from Social Work teams.Early Help does not mean just offering support to very young children. Support may be offered in early life, or after the emergence of a particular need. Although research shows that the most impact can be made during a child’s early years, problems may emerge at

any point throughout childhood and adolescence. In Early Help we will therefore offer services for families with children and young people aged 0-18. Health services will continue until a young person is 19 years of age and for a young person with additional special educational or disability needs (SEND) this may mean up to the age of 25 years.

Evidence suggests that an early response is a more effective and more efficient way of delivering services. It is better to provide an intense, focussed intervention when problems first emerge, rather than delivering a more intrusive and higher cost statutory intervention when the needs have escalated. This includes using universal and targeted services to reduce or prevent specific problems from getting worse and becoming deep seated or entrenched. We aim to

reduce demands upon specialist and higher tier services. The use of predictive analytics will help us be truly preventative.

Local authorities, under Section 10 of the Children Act 2004, have a responsibility to promote inter-agency cooperation to improve the welfare of children’ (Working Together 2015).

There are financial, academic and ethical reasons for Early Help. The Early Intervention Foundation www.eif.org.uk/ provides evidence of the costs of late interventions and evaluates interventions for their effectiveness.

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In Thurrock we are committed to helping families improve the outcomes for their children and to support them to reach their full potential. We want to narrow the gap by improving the outcomes of children who are disadvantaged.

We will support children and young people to live the lives they want to lead and to have high aspirations.

Early Help ‘Brighter Futures’ will focus on improving the following outcomes:

Provision of a single point of contact for children, young people and families – one service

The provision of services to positive parenting, parent aspirations and parenting skills

Children and Young People are ready for education and learning

Improving opportunities for vulnerable children and young people.

Children and Young People are able to make healthy lifestyle choices

Children, Young People and their parents have good emotional mental health and well-being

Reducing demand on children’s Social Care by the prevention of harm and keeping children safe

Keeping children healthy

Making health care accessible for all young people by providing creative solutions and meeting health needs closer to home wherever possible

We will evaluate the impact of our Early Help- Brighter Futures services using a set of multi-agency, shared measures linked to each outcome.

Our performance against these outcome measures will shape how we deploy resources in the future.

Ensure that Early Help is ‘everybody’s business’

Helping families early will be an integral part of the way all professionals work in Thurrock

Our workforce will be confident, well trained and supported to engage and intervene with children, young people and their families to offer Early Help

We will invest in our workforce to ensure they have the necessary skills, experience and support to work effectively with families and across professional boundaries

We will make full use of community assets and resources as a key component of our partnership approach

Building capacity in the community will enable families to access help that is designed around local needs

Build the resilience of vulnerable families to support their children to achieve positive outcomes. Helping parents to be strong and effective is the most effective way to help children. There is a focus on parenting that runs through all of our work.

Early identification of need by working closely with universal settings, in order to prevent problems before they develop, or to intervene at the earliest possible stage.

Develop personalised and family focused service delivery plans based upon an agreed assessment of need.

Design and commission our services for families that are based on need and have an evidence base that they work.

Children, young people and their families will drive the design and evaluation of our services and be involved in decision making regarding the delivery of those services. We will do this by engaging with families and gain their feedback throughout our intervention and on the point of closure.

Ensure clarity for service users and providers of universal services on how to access services when they need them. Services will be easily accessible and information on services will be accurate and up to date.

We will ensure that children, young people and their families are supported through key transitions that occur during their lives that may cause disruption to their well-being, including transitions between schools, between services, and between professionals.

Deploy both generic and specialist roles, recognising that we need to implement a Whole

Family Approach with one Lead Professional for the family, whilst we maintain the knowledge, skills and experience of relevant specialist roles.

Ensure that providers work together to offer coherent and integrated early help and preventative services.

Integrated commissioning will ensure that we eliminate duplication; aligning spending in order to get best value for money and evaluating outcomes to ensure services are effective.

The Brighter Futures Board will bring together early help and prevention services for children, young people and their families under a common governance structure with shared vision, outcomes, objectives, integrated commissioning and clear decision making.

The Brighter Futures Board will bring together strategic leaders from across the partnership to oversee the successful delivery of the Brighter Futures strategy. There will be a clear governance and accountability framework which will enable decision making to be transparent and effective.

Our principles & strategic approach

Responding to the priorities of families and improving outcomes

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We believe that our success should be directly measured against outcomes experienced by children, young people and their families. Over the next 3 years we will expect to see more families that are empowered and supported to take control of their lives, and that they are helped in their local communities avoiding the need for statutory intervention.

We will measure the outcomes detailed in the strategy as proxy indicators of success and use our agreed performance indicators to measure the impact.

These measures are reported through the Brighter Futures Performance Dashboard and presented to the Board on a quarterly basis.

Our key objectives will be to:

Deliver our priority outcomes

Improve early identification of the children with the highest predictive of poor outcomes and improve long term tracking of the impact of our interventions with these key cohorts.

Improve the effectiveness of our Early Help- Prevention service through the implementation of Signs of Safety (Well-being), ‘strengths based’ approach of working with families.

Integrate with key partners to maximise impact and positive outcomes.

The key drivers for change within Early Help- Brighter Futures are to improve outcomes for children and young people through the early identification of need and the implementation of best practice.

Our strategy to deliver improved outcomes with reducing resources will be to:

Reduce demand on high need/high cost services-above all by reducing numbers of Looked After Children.

Target our resources upon priority outcomes and invest in early help-prevention services.

Work with colleagues and partners to deliver integrated services for shared outcomes, in particular health, education (including SEN), Children’s Centre’s, Youth Offending, Housing, DWP, Primary Care, Health services and Adult services.

We will continue to target support for children and families with significant needs and those which meet our priority outcomes. This approach will need continued engagement with our key partners from universal services (most notably schools) and health to meet lower levels of need.

We will make better use of Business Intelligence via Xantura and work with partners to improve the systematic earlier identification of those children at highest risk of poor outcomes. We will have a particular focus upon identifying cohorts in Early Years where health visitors and early year’s providers have a key role, and in those approaching adolescence where primary, secondary schools and youth work providers have a key role. We will continue to work alongside Xantura to develop and implement the predictive framework and aim to be more confident in identifying children who are at risk of coming into care.

With the integration programme as well as establishing earlier identification mechanisms, there will be a greater need for partners to share information. It may also result in using the same common assessment and progress measure tools such as Outcomes Star.

We are working with Public Health and NELFT leads to fully integrate the Brighter Futures model of Early Help - Prevention and deliver our joint performance indicators that are based on shared ambitions and agreed vision.

We will continue to build on the work previously undertaken by the Early Offer of Help Team and the Troubled Families Programme to develop an embedded approach to supporting parents to return to work, extending this to all of our vulnerable families.

We need to raise aspirations of all families we work with and be more effective with DWP/JCP services in supporting young people and parents into employment. We need to improve upon school attendance and reduce the number of families at risk of eviction and homelessness.

Measuring SuccessObjectives of our Strategy