What is Family Help?

If you work in a school, nursery, health or care setting, you'll have noticed a new term appearing in safeguarding guidance over the last couple of years: Family Help. It's replacing what used to be called "early help" and "targeted early help," and it's a central part of the government's wider reform of children's social care. Here's what it actually means, and why it matters for anyone with safeguarding responsibilities.

Where Family Help comes from

Family Help is the centrepiece of the Department for Education's Families First Partnership (FFP) programme, which grew out of the 2021–22 Independent Review of Children's Social Care and the previous government's Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy. The reforms are backed by billions of pounds of funding through to 2029, and councils across England are required to fully implement them by March 2027.

The idea is to bring together services that used to sit in separate silos — targeted early help and child in need support — into a single, multidisciplinary Family Help offer, delivered under section 17 of the Children Act 1989.

What Family Help actually looks like

Rather than a family being passed between different teams as their needs change, Family Help is designed to give them one consistent practitioner — a Family Help Lead Practitioner (FHLP) — who coordinates support across agencies, whether that's around housing, mental health, domestic abuse, or parenting support. The aims are to:

• Provide earlier, less stigmatising support so children can stay safely with their families wherever possible.
• Strengthen the response when children do need protecting from harm, through multi-agency child protection teams (MACPTs) and expert lead child protection practitioners (LCPPs).
• Involve family networks more directly in decisions about a child's welfare, including through family group decision making (FGDM) meetings before more formal proceedings are considered.

Early evaluation from the Pathfinder areas, reported by Community Care, found that families felt more listened to and supported where the FHLP role had been properly embedded, and that practitioners reported stronger relationships across agencies. It also found variation in how consistently multi-agency child protection teams had been rolled out — a reminder that implementation is still very much in progress.

What this means for schools and other settings

For anyone in a Designated Safeguarding Lead role, Family Help changes who you're likely to be referring into, and how. Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) 2026 reinforces that DSLs should be involved in early help and Family Help arrangements, and the Working Together to Safeguard Children statutory guidance is being updated to formalise all family help provision — including what used to be targeted early help — as section 17 "children in need" support.

Practically, that means:

• Referral routes and thresholds in your local area may have changed, or may still be changing as councils roll out FFP.
• Staff need to understand that "early help" as a term is being phased out in favour of Family Help, and that the offer behind it has changed too.
• DSLs should check with their local safeguarding partnership for the current position, since implementation timelines vary by area up to the March 2027 deadline.

Keeping your team's knowledge current

Because Family Help is still being rolled out nationally, guidance and local arrangements are likely to keep evolving over the next couple of years. Our Safeguarding in Education and Level 3 safeguarding courses reflect the current guidance on Family Help and early intervention, and are reviewed as statutory guidance is updated. For teams that need ongoing access as things change, a Virtual College training subscription means updated course content is included as standard, rather than requiring a fresh purchase every time.