Early help is about supporting families who are struggling with the day-to-day challenges they are facing. This could be when first becoming a parent or when a parent first faces a challenge that they feel they need help to manage, regardless of the age of their children, (pre-school, school age or leaving school).
What do we offer?
We offer a range of services within one team, as well as linking with other agencies such as Health Visitors, which makes it easier for families to get the right help, at the right time, from the right people. In Bromley our early help is known as early intervention and family support services and includes:
- Bromley Children Project - family support and parenting offer
- Children and Family Centres - a wide range of services, activities and support for families
- Common assessment framework (CAF) team - a whole family assessment tool for professionals supporting families so the family only have to “say it once”
- Information advice and support service - supporting young people, and parents/carers of children and young people, with disabilities and special educational needs to access the right support packages and an Education Health and Care (EHC) Plan
We offer a range of ‘early help’ to build confidence and resilience within families - to support them to tackle all kinds of problems and make the changes they need to make. Our aim is to offer the right help to as many children and families as possible at the earliest opportunity; we will support families to face challenges and make changes so that they feel more positive, in control of their situation, and have a happier family life. Families tell us that the support received from our services helped to prevent problems escalating and becoming harder to manage. Many families find this support invaluable as it helps them to keep their children safe and healthy, and reduces the likelihood of being referred to children’s social care due to increased risk and concern
Community based services
Our services are based in the community which means we have a good knowledge of the local area and can make better connections with the families we support. By creating joined-up support packages we can help families more effectively offering expert advice and support on issues including:
- Parenting
- Employment
- Debt
- Housing
- Domestic abuse
- Help with mental and physical health concerns
- School related problems - such as attendance
Challenging behaviour
We will, as part of our support, challenge negative risky behaviours such as crime and substance misuse, or where we believe that families are not doing what they need to do to protect their children from harm or exploitation. We work with families to identify the problems that children, young people and families are facing and ask:
- What is working well?
- What are we worried about?
- What needs to happen now?
We will support families, children, young people and parents/carers, to develop resilience and confidence to manage the challenges they are facing and by providing the tools to ‘bounce back’.