Early help: fragmented, uncertain and underfunded
Early help services are vital and support hundreds of thousands of children each year. But the current policy and funding environment for early help is fragmented, uncertain and underfunded.
Public services should not only exist to pull people out of crises or respond to harms that have already happened. The new Labour government’s manifesto recognises this. It sets out an ambitious approach to prevention highlighting the importance of prevention to tackle knife crime and to improve young people’s mental health.
However, there is an obvious gap – prevention isn’t mentioned in relation to children’s social care and early help services. That’s a problem for two reasons:
- Improving early help is both an opportunity to improve children’s outcomes and to tackle the spiralling costs of growing numbers of children in care; and
- Because early help is at the centre of the system of support that's needed to protect children from harm and improve their outcomes.
Despite that, there was little mention of children’s social care and the legislative changes needed to help rebalance the system towards early intervention in yesterday’s King’s Speech.
What’s early help and why’s it important?
The aim of early help services is to cast a safety net around families, to nurture and strengthen them, and to keep them together when they might otherwise fall apart.
Families referred to early help may be experiencing issues such as:
- Food insecurity.
- Disabilities or mental illness.
- Trauma.
- Drug and alcohol issues.
- Breakdown in family relationships.
- Extrafamilial harms (e.g. criminal exploitation).
The importance of early help
Participation in early help is completely voluntary. Parents are encouraged to build on their existing strengths and are empowered to deal with the challenges they face. Early help support workers connect families to other services available in their community such as food banks, housing, and financial support.
Early help services are vital to support children. They help make sure more children can be brought up safely at home, do well at school and stay out of harm.
Early help is cost effective
It also makes financial sense to invest in helping children early. By preventing problems from becoming crises and needing more costly interventions, such as children entering the care system or needing NHS mental health support, early help can create significant cost savings to the public purse and help reduce demand for already overstretched public services.
Local authorities are expected to have “a comprehensive range of effective [early help] services” co-ordinated across a range of providers that “should reflect any local assessment of need”.[i] Though there is no legal requirement to provide those services and there is no funding attached to that expectation.
The way local authorities try to achieve this varies considerably and includes government programmes, core funding, public health budgets, smaller specific amounts from other sources, and grant funding for specific initiatives.[ii]
Overall, in recent years, local authorities have been spending less on early help services and more and more on late intervention services, such as on providing homes for looked after children.[iii]
That shift has meant both a general lack of early help as well as huge differences in the way early help is provided across the country. Recently, central government has recognised this situation and responded by creating a range of initiatives to try and patch up the early help system.
We’ve taken a closer look at the main government programmes currently provided to local authorities to fund early help initiatives across England to see how the funding has been distributed. These programmes are:
- Supporting Families (2022-2025)
- Family Hubs and Start for Life (2022-2025)
- Family Hubs Transformation Funding (2021-2025)
- Reducing Parental Conflict Programme (2018-2025)
- Strengthening Families, Protecting Children (2019-2024)
- Families First for Children pathfinder and Family Networks pilot (2023-2025)
These programmes aren’t available to all local authorities. Which local authorities can benefit from the programmes is based on specific criteria, a formula, or through a competitive process.
When funding is awarded based on a formula or criteria, this always included levels of child deprivation. While this helps to ensure resources are targeted at the areas with the most need, this has resulted in geographical inequalities across the country.
The way that local authorities are having to pull together different pots of funding to deliver early help is becoming increasingly fragmented. This impacts how councils and their partners can deliver services.
The outcomes that each individual programme is working towards differ – as does the way that success is measured and reported. This can result in local authorities needing to report and measure a range of different outcomes, which can be time consuming.
We speak up for children and make sure their voices are heard.
All the main government programmes looked at for this blog end in March 2025 (with the exception of Strengthening Families). Their future beyond this date is currently uncertain. It is important that these programmes are supported to continue while longer-term discussions on Labour’s strategy for early help is developed.
Many local authorities in receipt of funding will already be devising plans for how they will continue to fund initiatives using their existing budgets, amongst many other competing priorities, or taking the difficult decision to close the service whilst managing the impact on their local community and other public services. This risks undermining the government’s aims to improve early help and could result in stagnation, rather than progress.
Short-term funding
All the programmes last between two to five years (with the exception of the Reducing Parental Conflict programme which was originally a four year programme that has been extended to seven years). This is a short period of time for services to be built up and delivered. The churn of short-term funded programmes makes strategic planning for the long-term challenging and may result in local strategies having to be reduced in scope.
The staff needed to run the programmes are likely to be hired on short-term contracts, with no guarantee that their role will be kept once the funding ends. This, combined with service delivery frequently changing, can make keeping up staff morale difficult.
Long-term outcomes
Most of the benefits of early help are seen in the medium to long-term. It’s hard to evidence the impact of services and realise their potential if they are only operational for two to five years.
On the whole, there is very little cash available within local authorities to invest in their early help services. These government programmes provide local authorities with an injection of funding to help them do this for a specific initiative. But it’s not enough.
Since 2010, spending on early intervention services (e.g. children’s centres, family support services and services for young people) has fallen by more than 45%, while spending on late interventions (like child protection and residential care) has risen by 47%.[iv]
In January, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities – the Department responsible for allocating local authority budgets – announced a £500 million support package to enable councils to provide crucial social care services. But this is a drop in the ocean in comparison to the LGA’s estimate that councils face a £4 billion funding gap over the next two years.[v]
The new government has made a commitment in its manifesto to working with local authorities to support children in care. That should include improving the system designed to keep children out of care. This would have every chance of boosting children’s outcomes, generating savings and helping reduce the burden on public services.
Last year, we helped 687,755 families, children, and young people. With your help, we could reach more.
References
[i] Department for Education 2023 Working together to safeguard children
[ii] ADCS 2022 Safeguarding pressures phase 8
[iii] Pro Bono Economics 2023 The well-worn path: Children's services spending 2010-11 to 2021-22 commissioned by Action for Children, Barnardo’s, NCB, NSPCC and The Children’s Society
[iv] Ibid
[v] Local Government Association 2024 Local government finances and the impact on local communities
