St Elphin’s and Early Help
Our team of staff are here to support and recognise the importance of helping our children and their families as soon as possible in their lives, or when issues emerge.
What is Early Help?
Every family has its ups and downs. Being a parent can have its challenges and there are no instructions. Sometimes, you or your children may need extra support. This could be before your children are born, when they are very young, or throughout their school years. Early Help helps you to recognise what is going well for you and your family, where you may benefit from extra help and who is the best person to work with you and your family to make this happen. This may be through an Early Help Assessment (EHA).
Early Help Assessment
This starts with an Early Help conversation. You can have an informal chat with our Pastoral Lead in school or Local authority worker about what’s going well and what’s not going well for you and your family, and they will let you know what sort of help is available.
From this conversation we may jointly decide to complete an Early Help Assessment (EHA). This is how we get a full picture about the whole family. We use it to help you see what is working well and identify the areas where you or a member of your family may need a bit of extra support.
It‘s your choice to take part in the assessment and you can choose who else should be involved. A good assessment is done with you not to you.
Every person and family are different, but an Early Help Assessment (EHA) will:
- Help you see what’s going well and not so well for your family.
- Help you and others to see what support you might need.
- Create a picture of your family’s circumstances, which can be shared with your permission, so you don’t have to repeat yourself to different workers.
- Help you to be part of a team of people working together on the same plan to get things going well again.
What Happens after the EHA?
With your permission, people from different organisations working with your family will share information and work together to help support you and your children.
This could be School, Health Visitors, Family Support Workers, Children’s Centre Workers etc. This may then be followed by a ‘Team around the family’ meeting.
Why do I need to give my permission (also known as consent)?
Your personal information belongs to you. Agencies can’t share your information unless you agree, because your information is protected by law under the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).
How to contact us:
You can contact school on 01925 635143 and ask to speak to Mrs Brown or a member of the safeguarding team or email school, if you would prefer, on stelphins_primary@sch.warrington.gov.uk and someone will get in touch with you.