Coordinating Early Help support is a key part of ensuring children, young people and families in Leeds receive timely, effective assistance when needs emerge. It involves practitioners working together with families to identify strengths, understand concerns and plan coordinated support, often across multiple agencies, so that the right help is provided at the right time. This collaborative, family‑centred approach aims to prevent difficulties from escalating, build resilience, and improve outcomes by making best use of local services and existing relationships.
Assign a clear lead practitioner
- Every family receiving early help support should have a named lead practitioner responsible for coordinating services. (this does not mean doing all the work)
- The lead practitioner’s role should be clearly communicated to the child, family, and all professionals involved, the family should be involved in the discussion of appointing the lead practitioner, where possible
Improve multi-agency coordination
- Early Help is everybody’s business and working together to share knowledge, skills and information is key.
- Services should work together through a coordinated early help plan rather than responding separately and in isolation.
- Regular multi-agency meetings should be held to share information, review progress, and agree next steps with all services involved and the family
Create a shared early help plan
A clear early help plan should identify:
- The child, families, other household members and important people details, school, health and language needs
- Consider previous support which has already been offered
- The role of each service and contact details of services currently supporting the family.
- Existing plans or assessments in place
- Understanding of the current support needs.
- Capturing the children and families’ voices
- Agreed goals and actions to worked towards
- How goals and actions will be reviewed, by who and when.
- Shared with families
Avoid isolated service responses
- Practitioners should consider the wider needs of the child and family rather than focusing only on their own service area.
- Professionals should communicate regularly to ensure support is joined up, including the family
Maintain accountability and oversight
- The lead practitioner should monitor whether actions are completed and whether support is improving outcomes for the child and family, goal scoring and multi agency meetings can help to establish if positive change is being made.
- Escalation routes should be clear if needs are not being met or reformulation completed with the family.
- A sustainability plan is completed with the family when the early help plan is closing, considering what the family have achieved, this will help to support the family should their needs re-emerge
Ensure the family is involved at all times
- Children and families should understand who is supporting them and how professionals are working together.
- Their views should integral to developing the early help plan, goals and actions and reviews. Children, young people and parents/carers should be present at all meetings