New Ofsted research: Evidence the early help system isn't working

‘Early help’ is the name for services that support children and families before they meet the threshold for intervention from children’s social care. These services might include parenting support, play and activity groups, or more intensive services like counselling and disability support.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of families in the UK access early help support in various forms. Accessing early help services can prevent children from coming to harm and needing to go into care. In this way, early help is an essential public service.

Action for Children offers many early help services and is able to see first-hand the difference it makes to people’s lives. One example is Jessica and Billy’s (not their real names) story.

This week, Ofsted published a report on the multi-agency response to children and families who need help.

This report focused on the inspections of five multi-agency services across England and reviewed the practices of individual agencies, as well as the effectiveness of multi-agency working arrangements. This includes children’s social care, health services, schools and the police.

While their findings are based on a small sample, it gives a good indication of current practice and some of the barriers faced by children and families in need of support. It found that:

• Agencies are finding it difficult to prioritise early help when there is a pressure on resources.
• Local resources are not consistently well understood or used between services or in the community, meaning that some children and families face delays when trying to access support.
• Quick access to low-level preventative support can make a big difference to the experience of children and families.
• A responsive and skilled workforce with enough capacity is crucial for high-quality and child-centred practice.
• The evaluation and oversight of early help is vital to address gaps in provision and track the progress of children and families.

We've found evidence of the same challenges in our own research. Alongside other children’s charities, we commissioned research that estimates that spending on late intervention increased from 58% of all children’s services spending in 2010–11 to 80% in 2020–21. This is in contrast to a £1.9 billion drop in spending on early intervention services for children and young people between 2010-11 and 2020-21.

Research published by the Institute for Government made similar findings.

One impact of the fall in early intervention spending is that families are missing out on early help. Our ‘Too Litte, Too Late’ report found that:

• Not enough early help is happening and there are big variations between local authorities.
• There are over 60,000 missed opportunities to provide early help every year.
• Spending on early intervention has fallen and there are great differences in the level of spending across the country.

In ‘Stable homes, built on love’, the government outlined its vision for family help services – a new approach to early help.

They want every area in England to provide families with supportive and welcoming family help services, delivered by a skilled multi-disciplinary workforce, and for family help services to provide effective and intensive support to any family facing significant challenges.

While the government has announced a number of funded work streams to achieve this, they are currently only available to a limited number of local authorities and the funding is short-term.

• Increasing and protecting funding for early intervention, including early help services. This would guarantee the provision of services and help to improve the balance between early and late intervention in children’s social care.
• Committing to investing in the roll out of family help services across all local authorities in England beyond 2025, as was recommended by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care. This would reduce the postcode lottery of early help provision and help to create a shared understanding of what early help is.