What is 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. Early help can be at any developmental or age milestone in a child or young person's life.
It is about offering help to children and families before any problems are apparent and in providing help when low level problems emerge. This could be in the early years of a child or young person's life (including pre-natal interventions) or early in the emergence of a problem at any stage in their lives.
Early Help is not about specialist services for children, young people and their families. Specialist services are there to support families who are experiencing significant difficulties e.g. social care services for children who are at risk of harm. Early Help is about stepping in to prevent escalation of children, young people and families needing any sort of specialist service. Early Help is about providing low level services at the right time to meet family's needs and to keep them in control of resolving their issues and problems.
Early Help is important as it allows for support to be put in place at the right time to meet families' needs prior to issues reaching crisis point and to reinforce families' own skills to determine their life course and therefore reducing poor outcomes and inequalities for children and young people. It also helps to break the cycle of families being dependent on services by empowering and enabling them to do things for themselves making them more resilient and independent.