Early Help Research and Principles

Early help means identifying and providing effective early support to children and young people who are at risk of poor outcomes. It includes providing support as soon as a problem emerges, at any point in a child’s life. It can be provided at any stage in a child or young person's life. Early help can be offered to parents, children or whole families, but the main focus is to improve outcomes for children.

Early help will offer a full range of services and will cover the full spectrum of need in order to ensure that families get the right help at the right time:

• Advice and guidance
• Getting help
• Getting more help
• Getting risk support.

Independent reviews and research have long championed approaches that provide early help for children and their families.

• View the full Munro review of child protection (external link) - Professor Eileen Munro highlighted in her review of child protection, ‘preventative services can do more to reduce abuse and neglect than reactive services’
• Graham Allen : Early intervention: the next steps (external link) - The importance and benefits of early intervention
• Tickell review of the early years foundation stage (external link) - Indentifying a growing body of evidence of the effectiveness of early help for children and their families
• Frank Field: preventing poor children becoming poor adults - Indentifying a growing body of evidence of the effectiveness of early help for children and their families
• Andrea Leadsom review - The best start for life a vision for 1001 critical days
• Early Intervention Foundation (external link) - What Early Intervention means, how it works and what it can achieve. The effects of disadvantage or adversity in early life can be negative, but they are by no means universal or irreversible. An extensive body of evidence, built around rigorous testing of specific programmes, shows that early intervention can improve outcomes for children and families by targeting the circumstances that make supporting children’s development difficult.
• Case study - A case study from a family who engaged in Early Help
• Early Help glossary of terms - Terminology used in Early Help,

Many Local Authorities are using Family Hubs to deliver Early Help. This link provides some guidance on family hubs.

• Introducing Family Hubs - The Family Hubs Network (external link)
• National Centre for Family Hubs - Resource library (external link).