I probably would have grown up with my mum instead of in care, if there was such a thing as Early Help, because there was no one to intervene when it was needed.
Early Help is what it says on the tin. It's providing help to young people and families; nipping problems in the bud when they arise, getting in early and giving the family as much support to sort things out for themselves as possible. We decided that this was one of the top priorities for the safeguarding board but it's more than just about safeguarding children. For me it's a public health issue. It's about making sure that children grow up happy and healthy and that we do the very best that we can to give them the best start in life and the best childhood and adolescence that we possibly can.
When Professor Eileen Munro reviewed child protection arrangements in this country, which resulted in the new Working Together 2013 statutory framework, one of the things she stressed was the importance of an Early Help system. And what we wanted to do was to create a system that's easy for people to use so that they can get help from their colleagues and all of these different agencies, many of whom are represented on the Safeguarding Children Board, are there to help and support. That's their job.
Our frontline workers, so our health visitors and school nurses come in to contact with all children across Devon throughout their childhood. Therefore they play a really critical role in providing Early Help and support for young people and their families.
In adult mental health services obviously we primarily work with the adults, but a lot of the time the adult is part of a wider context, part of a family, with children. They encounter stress with that and so do their children and what we want is the best outcome for everybody. So it’s important that if we intervene earlier, it will be more effective for all concerned.
I work with adults with a learning disability and Early Help will be a real bonus drawing together all the professionals so that parents with a learning disability are able to parent their child from birth, through the teenage years, right the way through to adulthood.
Within midwifery services I think we have the opportunity to identify very early within a woman’s pregnancy that she and her family may need extra support and to have everything in place for when that baby is born.
Our new Early Help system helps support them to do their job and help other professionals and practitioners do their job and therefore prevent children going through to a position where they are at a safeguarding risk, that they reach those statutory levels for intervention.
Everything we do around service strategy and service planning should involve users and children and young people are very special users and we need to make sure that what we're doing fits in around their lives. It's about using preventive measures to stop things from escalating into very complex expensive situations.