Early Help Assessment (EHA) information for families

Read more information about the EHA, aimed at parents and young people.

What is an Early Help Assessment?

You can read more about the Early Help Assessment and its benefits below.

Read more about EHA

Before starting an Early Help Assessment

  • Explore your existing support network. Someone may already be able to provide the needed support, such as your wider network of friends, family or professionals. We encourage you to tell us about the people important to you.
  • Get agreement from all family members and the child/young person that help is needed. It's difficult to make progress if people don't want help.
  • Know that all assessments go through a review process. More information may be requested. The team decides if it meets the threshold for Family Support services.

If you're a professional, consider contacting the Family Support team first. They can help determine if an assessment is the best approach or if other services are more appropriate. You can read more information for professionals.

What will happen if my Early Help Assessment is accepted by the Family Support team?

  1. Your family will be allocated a Family Support Practitioner (FSP) or Young Person's Worker (YPW) for an Adolescent Early Help Assessment.

    This will focus on issues around young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) or who are at risk of becoming NEET).

  2. They will contact you and your family regularly and carry out home visits.

  3. This will generally take place at home or in school/education settings.

  4. This will be a meeting of which you, your family, your network and any professionals involved would be invited and encouraged to attend.

  5. This will happen while an EHA is open.

  6. This will be agreed at the Family Network Meeting (FNM) for you and the professionals involved.

    The Early Help Assessment process will follow Suffolk’s SOS+ framework, one of the key principles being finding solutions together.

  7. This will happen with the family, network and professionals.

  8. Once it looks like things are improving, closure will be discussed and agreed with you, your family, network and professionals involved

Safeguarding

The Family Support teams offer early help, where support is agreed between us and family. If we have serious worries, what we call safeguarding concerns, we will need to follow our policies and procedures.

The Family Support Teams work closely with Social Care Teams, and if we have a safeguarding concern while an Early Help Assessment is open this will be discussed with the Social Care Team within a Transfer Meeting.

Conversations should take place with the parents/carers and young person prior to a Transfer Meeting, unless doing so would place the child at risk of significant harm.

At these meetings it could be agreed that the concerns meet the threshold for a Social Work Assessment (SWA). Then the case would transfer to Social Care to address safety. If the threshold for a SWA is not met, the Social Care Team will advise the Family Support Team to further helping the family.

More guidance

You can find more guidance on EHAs and how to complete an EHA using the SOS+ approach below.

Early Help Assessment guide