Welcome to the latest edition of the Early Help Newsletter. In this edition you can find an update on changes within Early Help following a period of redesign and transformation, which also included a restructuring to the Early Help team from Shropshire Council. There's also an update on the young carers project, information and support for neurodivergent children and important safeguarding learning from Shropshire Safeguarding and Community Partnership – plus lots more.

If you have information on your service area you would like to share in the next early help newsletter, please email Kate.Bentham@shropshire.gov.uk  or if you know of a colleague who would also like to receive this newsletter they can also email Kate to be added to the distribution list.  

‘By treating our children and young people with respect, love and trust and with the right amount of encouragement we can inspire them to dream big, build relationships and connections that matter and together with kindness and a sense of belonging we can do great things.’

Children and Young People’s vision statement

You will likely have heard that Early Help services have recently been through a restructuring process, following a period of redesign and transformation. During the transformation phase, we consulted with a wide range of partners to help us design the new Early Help offer and strategy and to make sure partners are fully informed about the new service, we are planning a launch event on the 16^th July, so please save the date, and look out for invites to follow.

In the meantime, we wanted to provide an interim update to give you a flavour of what we’ve been doing and what’s to come. During the consultation period, partners told us that they wanted:

• Easier access to support: we have implemented EHAST - the Early Help front door and will soon be facilitating the locality based Integration meetings (developed by Public Health) where partners can get help and advice to support their families. We have created a specific 0-5 team and a referral pathway for Health Visitors to refer vulnerable babies and small children and run a series of SEND drop-ins across the county, as well as offering weekly drop-in sessions for families in all our hubs, and other community or school venues. Listed here
• Clearer communication around the Early Help offer - we have launched a new Early Help Website, which hosts newly designed early help forms and promote the wider early help offer. You can access the new website here Early help website. Will we apply a consistent approach, across the county when planning locality meetings, learning from best practice. 
• Following feedback from you, our partners, we have developed a new role, to extend the Locality Development Officer (LDO) offer. The new roles – Early Help Locality Area Development Lead will develop and co-ordinate the Early Help offer in our hub locality and surrounding area, working more closely with our hub teams, whilst continuing to provide the hugely valued help and support to our partners in their vital early help work.

Our Parenting Team continue to provide a wide-ranging offer, from the extensive series of universal online modules (Access code Darwin18), to virtual and face to face Understanding Your Child, Understanding Your Teen, Sleep Tight workshops and more, all listed on our Family Information Directory

The also have a Parenting Help and Support line, offering parents one off help and support. Parents and carers can call 01743 250950 for all parenting challenges or questions they may have. Please do let your families know about this initiative.

Our Youth Support Team build invaluable relationships with young people in the community, through their targeted Detached Youth Offer, and run personal development sessions in schools. We are putting the finishing touches to the new Youth Strategy, which we will also be sharing at our launch events later this term.

We know that the involvement of children, young people and families is crucial to the development of a fit for purpose Early Help offer, to this end we have created a new Participation Lead role which will develop and roll out a new Participation Strategy across the partnership, we may need your help in identifying opportunities to embed the strategy in the coming months.

I hope that this has provided a useful oversight of our current offer, there will be period of transition as people settle into new roles, and we will do our utmost to ensure support for partners is not interrupted during this period.

If you have any questions between now and the launch event on the 16^th July, please contact our Service Manager: siobhan.hughes@shropshire.gov.uk

This is a reminder that Shropshire Council’s Welfare Support Team has funds available to help people with their essential living costs through the Household Support Fund.

They may be able to help people with things like:

• Food
• Energy and water costs (including payment towards arrears)
• Essential white goods
• Essential furniture items
• Essential bills

If you aren’t sure whether they can help with an item, please contact them on 0345 678 9078, selecting option 1 to speak to an adviser.

To apply, people should call them on 0345 678 9078, selecting option 2.

For more information on the Household Support Fund at Shropshire Council, see here

For more information on the Welfare Support Team, see here

Please also familiarise yourself with the following web pages, and share with families you think might benefit Cost of living help and Unclaimed benefits

When children and young people have needs related to neurodiversity they may require support from a range of services. 

There are a range of local support providers that parent carers and children and young people can access, the majority of which do not require your child to have a diagnosis.

The Healthier Together website has information on the support available for 0-5 years, 5-18 years and a newly launched section for 18-25 years

Click to find out more about the Support for neurodivergent children and their families

NSPCC Learning has published a podcast episode looking at how the differing language and communication needs of d/Deaf children can affect their safety and the child protection support they receive.

The podcast features a discussion with a panel of experts from the Social Workers with Deaf Children and Professionals Working Group, covering: supporting a d/Deaf child with reporting abuse; potential barriers to identifying safeguarding concerns; and avoiding assumptions around how d/Deaf children and young people prefer to communicate.

Listen to the podcast: Podcast: Supporting d/Deaf children - putting the child at the centre of decision making

Listen on YouTube: Supporting d/Deaf children: putting the child at the centre of decision making | NSPCC Learning

Please share the following information with any parents to be:

Family Foundations is designed to help you build on your strengths to prepare for becoming parents. You and your partner will attend a series of classes designed with one overall goal; to help you create the best family you can so that your child has the best family possible.

There are 4 prenatal sessions (usually delivered between 20 and 30 weeks of pregnancy), followed by 3 postnatal sessions approximately 6 months after the birth of your baby.

The course is delivered by Family Foundations trained course facilitators.

Group discussions will look at feelings, thoughts, and communication. We will also be sharing video’s which will be points of discussion.

Using discussion and video clips all 7 sessions will be around the concept of putting your baby first.

Areas covered in the prenatal sessions are:

• Session 1 - Building a family.
• Session 2 - Feelings and conflict.
• Session 3 - The parenting team.
• Session 4 - Working it out.

Following the birth of your baby postnatal sessions will include:

• Session 5 - New parent experiences
• Session 6 - Security (Family security)
• Session 7 - Putting it together. (Pulling all you have learnt together)

If you would like to attend the course please speak to your midwife who can complete the referral form.

Please find below a link with up to date information on the Young Carers offer in Shropshire, which is now run by Shropshire Council.

This offers support for any young person aged from 5 to 17 who help to look after (or ‘care’ for) a family member who has a physical disability, mental illness, or alcohol/drug addiction.

There are around 650 known young carers in Shropshire, but there are probably lots more children and young people who are caring, but just see this as being part of a family.

If you are working with a family where you think there is a young carer, please consider the support offered through the young carers project, a referral form is on the link below.

Young carers | Shropshire Council

The integration work as part of One Shropshire, has several key strands of development which includes multi-disciplinary integrated practitioner teams and Community and Family hubs, developing in local communities. The work brings together multi-agency partners based in Shropshire.

The teams provide an efficient means of considering and exploring how best to identify and meet the needs of families, children and young people, where their current situation is negatively impacting on them.  

Local services are under increasing pressure, working with families in crisis. The teams, which comprise of Early Help, Community NHS Teams, Primary Care representative, West Mercia Police and other partners, identify opportunities to work with families at an earlier stage and will improve the lives of families, children and young people and reduce the need for more specialist services across the council, the NHS and the wider early help system. 

The multi-agency approach reduces the potential risk of the situation escalating further by providing access or signposting to the right level of support in a timely way. 

There are now 5 regular multi-disciplinary integration meetings, called Consultation Panels, in operation across Shropshire covering Oswestry, Market Drayton, North Shrewsbury, Bridgnorth and Ludlow and the hinterlands around these areas.  

Work is underway to establish the approach across all areas of the county, linked to the 5 integrated practitioner teams already working together.  

This work is linked to the developing Community and Family hubs, as we grow the integrated offer in our communities. More information will be available on our hub approach in the future. We are working hard with colleagues across health, care, the voluntary and community sector, our communities and others, to ensure that communities have access to what they need, at the right time, closer to home. 

If you would like more information or you have a family that you would like to refer to the panel for discussion, please complete the Consultation Panel Referral form which can be found here - Integration projects | Shropshire Council 

The Shropshire Safeguarding Community partnership have published four learning briefings on their website. They relate to statutory case reviews that have been untaken.

Two are for children, you can read about:

• Aces and Injuries here
• Injuries in a 4-month-old here

Two are for adults with care and support needs, you can read about:

• Mark here
• Joan here

Please take the time to read these briefings and explore the learning from them.

Connexus have been funded alongside Women’s Aid to deliver CYP group work for those impacted by domestic abuse. This is enabling them to open up referrals from external agencies again.

They are now able to offer group work to CYP. This can either be Peer group work – in school, the community or virtually or whole family unit work, again in schools, the community or virtually. At the moment they are able to offer the Healing Together programme or drawing and talking depending on client age/needs etc. They will be offering further programmes of work once training allows.

Should you wish to refer please email Zoe below for a referral form - the child and parent need to consent to the referral being made.

They can not work with anyone who is still living with a perpetrator of domestic abuse and there needs to be some level of professional involved with the family (if they are not currently supported by SDAS) in order to help monitor and manage risk.

If you have any questions please contact Zoe Price - Senior Children & Young Persons Support Officer, Shropshire Domestic Abuse Service. Office: 0300 303 1191, Mobile: 07814145326, Email: Zoe.sdas@connexus-group.co.uk

Please find below a link to the latest newsletter from our colleagues in Compass.

This newsletter has useful data, an insight into a Day in the Life of a Compass Senior Social Worker, and some tips and suggestions for partners. 

Early help news | Shropshire Council

For agencies/voluntary organisations working with families in Shropshire

Introduction to Reducing Parental Conflict

If you are working with families, you are likely to interact with parents who share that they are discontented with their relationship or even display conflict or tension in their relationship, whether they are together or separated.  Research shows that this has a detrimental impact on outcomes for children. This can be challenging – to help you with managing your response, this 2-hour interactive virtual session, delivered via Microsoft Teams, aims to support practitioners to build awareness and develop the confidence, knowledge and skills to work with parents to reduce conflict and improve outcomes for children. 

All practitioners or agencies that have contact with parents either directly, or by working with their children, can play an important role in identifying and supporting the reduction of parental conflict. Underpinned by a solid evidence base, the session will raise awareness of how conflict may be damaging for children, why it can be hard to address and introduce some simple tools that can be used with parents to break the cycle. 

Wednesday 3^rd July 2024 from 1pm to 3pm via Microsoft Teams

Further dates will be set later in the year, so please email tracey.bowen@shropshire.gov.uk to be included on the waiting list.

Complex Co-parenting: working with parents in conflict

Do you work with families where parents are unable to agree at all? Are you struggling to support them to work together to improve outcomes for the children? Are you unsure if what you are seeing is domestic abuse, parental conflict or parental alienation? Does the family feel that this way of behaving is just the way things are?

Families with unresolved intergenerational trauma make up a high percentage of re- referrals to services, often described as the revolving door. To improve outcomes for families, agencies need to view family conflict through a trauma lens and explore traumatic events experienced during childhood and how this can have a negative impact on parenting and use constructive approaches to help parents co-parent effectively. ​

This course will help you to:

• understand a range of co-parenting styles​,
• differentiate between domestic abuse and destructive parental conflict​,
• define parental alienation​,
• understand the importance of reaching fathers​,
• identify appropriate tools to use when working with parents​

Tuesday 9^th July 2024 from 9.30am to 1.30pm at Shirehall, Shrewsbury

Further dates will be set later in the year, so please email tracey.bowen@shropshire.gov.uk to be included on the waiting list.

How to Book

Please book any places by using your Leap/Learning Pool account (can click into course titles for direct link to each course).

If you don’t have a learner account with us or are struggling to book through our booking system, please email your name, job title, agency, work email and details of the course(s) and date(s) you wish to book to attend to Tracey Bowen, Supporting Families Training Administrator email tracey.bowen@shropshire.gov.uk or call 01743 254370

SSCP are offering the opportunity for practitioners to train to be able to deliver the Raising Awareness in Safeguarding and Protecting Children. This will enable organisations to deliver the training to their workforce and colleagues from partner agencies, should they wish.

The next Train the Trainers session will be on:

Day 1 – Thursday 7^th November 9.30am - 4.30pm

Day 2 – Thursday 14^th November 9.30am – 4.30pm

Venue: Shropshire Supports Refugees Hub - 3-5 Mardol Gardens, Mardol, Shrewsbury, SY1 1PR. Access - Please note that in this venue there are two flights of stairs and no lift. 

For further information about the content of this two day course, and details of how to book, please visit the SSCP Train the Trainers (2 Day Course) — Shropshire Safeguarding Community Partnership pages.