Front door services and Early Help
Early help is a vital component of children’s services, alongside the multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH) and local family provision such as the Family Hub. Together, these services, with local variations, make up the front door to child and family support.
Come on in!
Many people experience the entry points into services as barriers. In health services, for example, the sometimes complicated referral routes are designed to limit or control the flow of patients. The children’s services front door is specifically not designed for a gatekeeper function, but is there to welcome in, offering children and families appropriate help and support as quickly as possible.
Through the front door, early help services provide support as soon as problems begin. Often this will be early in a child’s life, but it can also apply to older children, young people and adults, when a new problem is emerging. Hence early help may be needed at the point of leaving care, entering youth justice services, or when a child is acting as young carer to one of more family members, for example.
Early help is voluntary and often multi-agency, offered at schools, health centres, neighbourhood and community facilities and through voluntary organisations.
Ten years ago
In 2015 Ofsted published the report of a thematic review of early help. The report described conditions for the UK’s children and young people living with risk, including 2.6million with parents who had problematic drinking, 130,000 living with violence and abuse, 17,000 whose parent/s had a severe and enduring mental health problem. Among the many findings it was reported that,
… many assessments did not include the views of children. In almost a third of cases, the inspector specifically noted the absence of the child’s voice or sufficient understanding of their experiences, where this would have been expected given the child’s age. In almost all of these cases the assessment was also found to be too focused on the adults’ needs and not sufficiently child-focused.’
One of the hallmarks of a good assessment was evidence of,
…a professional speaking to the child about their experiences and asking for their thoughts and feelings about their circumstances.
Also in 2015, Mind Of My Own was formed as a legal entity and we began in earnest to promote the use of our software in children’s services, to ensure the voice of the child was being heard. In our idealistic view, nothing could be better or easier than a digital tool to capture the child’s views, wishes and opinions, in the privacy of their own space, at a time of their own choosing and in their own words. There were challenges along the way, for Mind Of My Own and for Early Help services, as expectations shifted, social and fiscal conditions changed and social work was stretched more thinly than ever.
A decade of early help
In the next decade referrals to children’s social care continued to increase as, overall, budgets became more constrained. The Covid 19 pandemic of 2020-21 created unprecedented levels of mental health problems, loneliness, school phobia and family trauma. The reverberations are still being felt.
In the five years between 2015 and 2020, according to Action for Children, more than 60,000 opportunities for early help were missed every year, while in the same period, funding dropped 21%.
In 2022 a report by Research in Practice was published by Ofsted, in which the authors stated that a limitation was the lack of children’s voices, both in this report and the literature that informed it. Throughout the report references were made to the cuts in public spending, described as ‘regressive and inequitable’ in the greatest cuts being made where the most vulnerable people were affected. The kind of early help offered differed across local authorities and there was no clarity around referral criteria, threshold management and extent of multi-agency working.
A year later Ofsted published a thematic review, upholding the findings of the Research in Practice review and concluding,
The proposed government reforms to children’s social care need to appreciate the variability between local areas, such as differences in their:
understanding of the role of early help
strategy and practice
capacity, across geographical areas and partners
child-centred family approach.
Recent reform
By March 2025 the government had published its Plan for Change. The promised ‘radical reforms’ include early family help and strengthened front doors, backed by £500m funding. Many children’s service leaders and practitioners will have questioned whether this will be enough to fill the gaps left by the inequities of the previous decade.
At Mind Of My Own we aim to work in partnership with the organisations using our software and something we hear a lot from early help colleagues is how difficult it can be to spot concerns early enough. When children’s voices are not captured in real time for assessments, those early signs often slip through the cracks.
We support early help teams across the country with digital participation tools that help children share how they’re feeling – safely, easily, and in their own words. It helps teams intervene sooner and get support in place before things escalate.
This quote from an early help worker using Mind Of My Own testifies to the power of digital participation apps:
One early help worker was trained in the morning of one day and then that afternoon she had a visit with a young girl she’d been working with for about a year. She went to the house and worked through Mind Of My Own with the child, who ended up disclosing what was happening in the home. The worker knew something was going on but she would have never suspected the level of mistreatment that was happening. That child was helped – and we believe it’s because they were both using a digital tool and asking questions in a different way.
Whose voice?
We note that recent reports and reforms, while stressing the need for family-centred approaches, appear to have overlooked the vital role of hearing the child’s voice – from the child. There is always a power imbalance between children and adults, it can exist just as vigorously within the family as within the structural containment of service usage. Yet children are the experts in their own lives and having their voices heard can expedite early supports, often avoiding later crises.
In an earlier piece we state that by embedding the voice of young people in early help, we can ensure the views of parents or caregivers do not overshadow those of young people. We can make certain children’s perspectives are equally considered, balancing the support process.
With apps purposefully designed for young people in social care and family support, those with additional needs and those within youth justice, we offer a spectrum of digital participation to support early help.
Our front door is here, we would love to welcome you inside.
References (sources used to prepare this article, all accessed on 24/25 June 2025)
https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/safeguarding-child-protection/early-help-and-early-intervention
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/councils-backed-with-over-500m-to-restore-family-services
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6751af4719e0c816d18d1df3/Plan_for_Change.pdf