Families First partnership feels like a positive step. After years of squeezed early help budgets and services pushed towards crisis, the direction of travel is right. Earlier support, families involved in their own solutions, less gatekeeping at the front door. Most people working in children’s services welcome it.
But there’s a quieter risk worth naming.
Not that services don’t care about the child’s voice – they do. The risk is that in the real work of implementing Families First – the training, the restructuring, the new referral pathways – the question of how children’s voices are actually captured, recorded, and used gets treated as something to sort once the main structure is in place.
We put out a three-part series exploring exactly this. You can listen to the episodes here.
A few reflections we took from this:
The gap between intention and evidence
Families First requires more than good intentions around participation. It requires services to demonstrate that children were heard – in their own words, not interpreted through a carer or worker. That their views shaped the plan. That the intervention was proportionate. That duplication was reduced and escalation avoided where it could have been.
These aren’t soft outcomes. They’re the evidence base. And they need to be there from the start.
The challenge is that verbal conversations with children can miss things. Not because practitioners lack skill – many are excellent – but because children don’t always say what’s really going on in a face-to-face conversation with someone who has authority over their life. That’s not a failing. It’s just reality.
We hear this from practitioners regularly. One professional told us: “We think we know what’s going on, but do we really?” That’s an honest question. And it’s exactly the right one to be asking.
Voice needs structure to travel
The Lundy model makes a point that’s easy to overlook. Voice and participation aren’t just linked — they’re co-dependent. Voice without an audience doesn’t count. An audience without influence doesn’t count either.
That means capturing a child’s view isn’t enough on its own. It needs to be heard, recorded, and acted on. And that record needs to be retrievable – usable as evidence, visible in the child’s file, reportable across a team.
In practice, this is where participation often breaks down. A child says something important. A worker notes it informally. It doesn’t make it into the assessment. It’s not there at the review. The voice was technically heard – but it didn’t travel.
The opportunity in Families First
Families First is asking services to reimagine the front door — to replace the language of thresholds and eligibility with supportive conversation, and to bring families into their own solutions from the earliest point.
That’s exactly the right context for thinking about digital voice tools. Not as an add-on, but as part of how that supportive conversation actually happens. A child using their own device, in a private setting, in their own time – rather than performing for an adult in a room – can tell you things they won’t say out loud. They can structure their thoughts. They can share something they’ve been sitting on.
And because it’s structured and digital, it doesn’t disappear. It feeds into the child’s record as their words, verbatim. It’s retrievable. It reduces duplication because the child’s voice is already there when it’s needed.
What this means in practice
Families First is a change programme. And like any change programme, it comes with change fatigue. Practitioners are navigating multiple systems, absorbing new frameworks, managing caseloads that haven’t shrunk. Nobody needs participation that feels like more admin.
The question isn’t whether to capture the child’s voice. It’s how to make that feel natural, manageable, and – crucially – worth doing. Because when it is, it changes what you know. It changes what you can evidence. And it changes what you can actually do for that child.
It is their story. Not their referral. And they are at the front door right now.