| 5 minute read | DSLs and Safeguarding Teams |
‘Early help’ implies a focus on intervention before a challenge facing a family escalates to the point where statutory CSC services are required (Lucas & Archard 2020). The law, the guidance, the huge increase in child protection proceedings and rise in numbers of looked after children show that early help is vital to the welfare of our children. However, this report states we have clearly failed to make the water-tight case for early help.
The authors state early help should be a ‘focused, preventative tier of support and intervention’ yet arguably in practice, it has become a ‘description of the earliest part of the safeguarding system’. Historical language such as ‘Troubled Families’ is still where blame is attributed instead of an acknowledgement of the wider challenging context. Also, the fact that a common definition of early help does not exist or that there is variation between thresholds for accessing support between areas and widespread and significant funding and resource cuts has led to a lack of firm conclusions being drawn between cause and effect. We need to be able to access a more nuanced understanding from rigorous evaluation of early help.
The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care provides an immediate opportunity to do this and to set out the outcomes it needs to achieve. The Department for Education and the Treasury will then need to make the resources available to enable early help to care for the welfare of our children.
In January 2021, the Government announced a review into children’s social care. In response, the National Children’s Bureau (NCB) sought to undertake a scoping review to explore the academic and grey literature to better understand the state of the evidence base in relation to the delivery and effectiveness of early help, and to make some recommendations for the review.
The report sets out fuller details but to give some context there were 583 per 10,000 children classified as children-in-need, 97 per 10,000 children on child protection plans and 90 per 10,000 children looked after during the year to March 31st, 2020 (DfE, 2020).
In England a set of cohort studies of children followed until their fifth birthday showed that 22.5% of children were referred to children’s social care before their fifth birthday; 17.0% had required a social work assessment; 14.3% had been a child in need and 11.1% had been in need because of concerns about abuse or neglect (Bilson and Martin, 2017). The numbers formally investigated had risen by over a third from 4.7% of children who became 5 in 2012 to 6.4% or one in every 16 children who became 5 in 2017 (Bilson and Munro, 2019).
These annual figures understate the level of involvement of children over their lifetime. At the same time, the aforementioned far reaching and significant cuts and local authorities reduced spending on early intervention and non-statutory services such as children’s centers and family support. At the same time, they increased funding on late intervention and statutory services such as safeguarding.
The report tackles the variation in definitions of early help and family support and concludes:
- The effectiveness of early help, whether defined as strengthening and supporting families or as increasing the sustainability of children’s social care, is borne out in evidence.
- The availability of early help has implications for demand in children’s’ services, including the numbers of children that are ‘screened into’ the systems for child protection and this may have indirect effects across the children’s social care system.
- The concept of early help is ‘fragmented’, there is no clear vision of what kinds of support are required or how much support is required to adequately meet the demands of the families who need the support in a timely way i.e. as or before the issues arise.
- There has arguably been a ‘narrowing’ of the kinds of support which are available which has shifted the concept of ‘early help’ to one of ‘early intervention’ and away from a ‘family support’ conceptualisation of early help.
- Any national strategy relating to safeguarding and/or early help should recognise that their effectiveness at a population level is dependent on families having sufficient resources and living in secure homes of adequate quality.
- The effects of austerity may be a reason for evidence at a systemic level to explain why early expenditure is becoming less effective for reducing rates of Children in Need and early help services being increasingly focused on ‘more intensive’ and ‘edge of child protection programmes’ than universal support.
- ‘Early help services which intervene on factors such as poverty and low-income – as principal causal determinants of abuse and neglect and other outcomes for children – directly or indirectly, are often at considerable risk because of the relative paucity of research studies that consider them, their limited compatibility with experimental evaluations, and the poorly defined scope of early help. This is especially true for ‘family support’ and ‘preventative’ services that develop informal networks of support and provide ‘concrete support’, sometimes outside of the children’s social care system. These neglected aspects of early help may form the foundations upon which other types of support, such as ‘early interventions’, can best function’.
