What is Early Intervention?

Early Intervention means identifying needs, risks and issues which may escalate into more serious problems, then taking action to provide help for children, young people and families to prevent future problems. We do this by building on people's existing strengths, helping them to achieve good outcomes and ensuring that individuals, families and communities achieve their full potential.

How can Early Intervention help?

Early Intervention can be done in a range of different ways, for example:

• Working with the adult mental health team to support an expectant mum so that when her baby arrives, she can be confident about her abilities as a parent and keep her baby safe.
• Identifying developmental delay in a young child and providing additional support in a children's centre or early years setting to help that child to catch up with his or her peers.
• Spotting that a child is having difficulty settling into school, which may be affecting that child's behaviour. Then finding strategies that help the school and family support each other in managing any challenging behaviour, helping the child to settle and learn.
• Responding quickly to a young person who is grieving following bereavement or family break-up and who may be at risk of missing a lot of school, starting to abuse alcohol, or self-harming.
• Noticing when families are affected by disadvantage or disrupted lives and finding ways to support and stabilise their situation so that children can learn, develop and achieve in line with their peers.
• Helping to tackle anti-social behaviour or substance misuse issues in older children to prevent these issues leading to ongoing criminality.

• Working with families where domestic abuse is an issue to end the cycle of abuse and prevent victims of abuse from continuing that abuse in their own lives.   

One of the important ways we help families through early intervention is by using a simple, effective assessment of children's and families' needs. This helps us to identify the most effective ways to work with children and families to change their lives for the better. This is sometimes called the Common Assessment Framework (or CAF). This assessment is carried out by a professional already working with a child, young person or family. The work that follows that assessment is co-ordinated by Wokingham’s CAF Co-ordinator through our integrated working processes to support Early Intervention.

What services does Early Intervention cover?

Some of the services which are part of Early Intervention are Wokingham Borough Council services in the Early Intervention and Community Support team, such as:

• Children’s centres
• Parenting and Family Support
• Youth Service
• NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) Prevention Service
• Youth Offending Service
• Community Wardens

Other Early Intervention services are provided by other Wokingham Borough Council departments, or by other partner organisations in the borough and beyond. These services include:

• Education Welfare Service
• Education Psychology Service
• Young Person’s Health Service
• Young Person’s Substance Misuse Service
• Foundry College
• Special Educational Needs
• Other services

How we can help

Our Early Intervention Service offers high quality early intervention through targeted and specialist services to children, young people and families with additional and complex needs. We offer these services in conjunction with partner organisations and agencies. All our partners are actively involved in working with us to work with children, young people and families to help them to achieve better outcomes, with a particular focus on children and young people from birth to 19 years old (and up to 25 years where a young person has Special Educational Needs).

Early Intervention blog

Read our Early Intervention blog.

More details

For more information, read our Early Intervention Principles and the Early Intervention Next Steps document, by Graham Allen MP.