Early Help Strategy

We would like to invite you to share your views regarding Merton’s proposed approach to “Early Help”. Early help is provided when families need a bit more help than is universally available from a health visitor or a nursery or school. Sometimes when families need extra help they may get extra support from a health visitor, children’s centre staff, community and voluntary sector staffs, youth  workers or support workers in school  

Children, young people, parents and carers 

Thinking about a time when your family was given extra help, we’d like to hear about how it was for you. Was it; 

• The Right Help for you?  
• The Right Time for you? 
• The Right Place for you? 

We’d like to understand how the extra help worked for you, what was good about it and what could have made it even better? 

We know that this year has been exceptional and some families may have not been able to access services in the usual way. So, we also want to know if there are things that could have helped in the past year, which you think might have helped your family during the Covid pandemic.  

Professionals and practitioners 

We would like to understand how your organisation and/or you in your role could support us to achieve our priorities  

We will be seeking views between 1 March and 7 April, after this we will review the feedback and amend the strategy, with a final version being published in April  

Merton Safeguarding Children Partnership launched their Early Help Strategy in November 2021.