Early Intervention: Policy and practice developments in England

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Early Intervention Policy and practice
developments in England

• Helen Jones
• Professional Adviser
• ACWA Conference
• Sydney

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What do we mean by early intervention?

• Prevention of any problem ?
• Prevention of most serious problems ?
• Trying to stop things getting worse ?
• Promotion of positive development?

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Policy Problems

• Identification of needs at earlier stage is
  resource intensive and requires additional
  services to be in place
• Concern about treating the worried well or
  problems which would have been resolved without
  intervention
• Does early intervention normalise or stigmatise?

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And

• Do we understand enough about effectiveness in
  early interventions which may require more than
  soft focus parenting support ?

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Emotional and social well-being in childhood and
adolescence

• Importance of a resilience framework
• Importance of an overarching outcomes framework
• Importance of service integration and
  partnerships
• Importance of links between universal, targeted
  and specialist interventions

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Resilience framework

• In a resilience framework, practitioners are
  encouraged to attend to the developmental task of
  doing well in life
• 
  Newman 2004

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Current policy framework

• Every Child Matters (ECM)
• - ECM Next Steps
• - ECM Change for Children
• National Service Framework for children, Young
  people and maternity services

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Every Child Matters focus on outcomes

• be healthy
• stay safe
• enjoy and achieve
• make a positive contribution
• achieve economic well-being

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Key domains of resilience
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Every Child Matters Programme

• Principle of progressive universalism delivered
  through
• -Childrens Centres
• - Extended Schools
• - Parenting Strategy
• Universal services to identify and reach children
  and families in need of targeted and specialist
  support

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Aims of Every Child Matters

• Improving outcomes through
• improvement and integration of universal
  services early years, schools, health service
• early identification and intervention, with more
  specialised help
• services reconfigured around child and family
  multi disciplinary teams, multi-agency working
• listening to children, young people, parents
• to be delivered through 150 local change
  programmes

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Prevention-Promotion Agenda

• Childrens centres to identify and support
  families and work with other services
• By 2010 all schools will offer access to core of
  extended services including parenting support
• Integrated Youth Services for 13-19s

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Common Assessment Framework (CAF)

• The CAF is a standardised approach to
  conducting an assessment of a childs additional
  needs and deciding how those needs should be met.
  It can be used by practitioners across childrens
  services in England

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Common Assessment

• To help identify children who require additional
  services
• To support the integration of services
• Used by all professionals
• To achieve common thresholds of concern
• Legislation in Children Act 2004

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Harmonised system of assessments

• Common Assessment (assessments undertaken by any
  professional in making a referral)
• Assessment framework (assessments of need
  undertaken by social workers)
• Looking After Children (Undertaken by social
  workers to assess outcomes for children and young
  people in care)
• Integrated Childrens System

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Information Sharing Index

• Operational information-sharing Index by 2008
• Central index with 150 local parts
• To support effective prevention and early
  intervention
• Index will contain all children in England

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The Index in practice
Information Hub / Information Sharing spine

• name, address and date of birth
• school or other educational setting
• GP
• a flag stating whether the child is known to
  agencies/contact details
• where a child is known to more than one
  specialist agency the lead professional who
  takes overall responsibility for the case

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The leaves and stem model of information systems
R1
CHILD 1
Health Record
Education Record
Social Care Record ie. ICS
LEAVES
R2
Education Record
CHILD 2
Health Record
Social Care Record ie. ICS
STEM
R3
CHILD 3
Health Record
Education Record
Social Care Record ie. ICS
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System Reform

• Respond earlier to need and so doing improve
  child outcomes
• Redirect resources way from high cost heavy end
  where there is little evidence of proportional
  benefit

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Promoting Child and family Wellbeing

• 4 key dimensions
• - distinguishing promotion, prevention and
  early intervention
• -focusing the intervention
• -length and intensity
• -values for engaging the community

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Interventions Framework

• Universal, targeted and specialist services
  delivered at levels of
• Child, family, community, society
• 
  Prilleltensky et al
• 2001

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Examples

• Child- Portage programmes
• Family- Surestart
• Communities- Portsmouth Safer Communities
• Societal- Tax credits

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Early intervention for foster and adoptive
families

• Using evidence-based interventions with foster
  and adoptive families as part of standard
  training, not in response to difficulties e,g
  Webster Stratton
• Healthy Care to support the provision of a
  healthy environment for looked after children by
  training carers in benefits of play and creativity