Targeted Support (which used to be called Early Help) is the support we give to children, young people and their families. The families have needs that aren't met by universal services. These are services that are available to everyone, like health and education.
When a family has more needs, we make sure they have access to the support they need at the earliest possible stage. This is to stop their needs becoming so great that they need more specialist support later.
The Early Help in Peterborough leaflet provides lots of information to help you find out about the support available for you and your family and how to get the help you need.
View the Early Help in Peterborough leaflet
View the Early Help in Peterborough leaflet in an accessible text version
View the Early Help in Peterborough leaflet in a number of other languages:
If you are worried that you are not coping, or need some extra support, you can speak to a trusted professional. This might be a Learning Mentor, Student Support Officer or Family Worker at your child’s school or setting. Or it might be a Housing Officer or someone from the Health service.
Early Help is how we use all the resources available including family support, community support, the voluntary sector and public organisations to provide timely and effective support to you as a family. The Early Help assessment records your needs, what is going well, what is not going so well and what is causing you concern or worry.
The Early Help assessment can be carried out with you by a trusted professional.
Our Early Help offer has three levels:
Peterborough City Council has worked with a wide range of partners to develop a new Early Help Strategy called Strong Families, Strong Communities. This strategy sets out a partnership vision and action plan for Early Help for the next five years.
In Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Webster Stratton (The Incredible Years) and a range of Triple P parenting programmes are available to help families better understand and manage their children's behaviours. These programmes are free to parents and are endorsed by our paediatricians and neurodevelopmental service.
You can find out more on our Parenting Offer fact sheet.
To assist parents in understanding and responding to their child’s behaviours, Peterborough has introduced the opportunity for parents to engage in Evidenced Based Parenting Programmes. Engagement with the programmes should enable parents/carers, children and young people to learn new skills and gain confidence in their abilities to help manage potentially challenging situations in the home environment.
In the first instance, families are encouraged to speak to their school, early years setting, children’s centre or health worker to ask about how to access one of these programmes.
Children and young people may experience a range of emotional health and well being issues including low self-esteem, low confidence, self harming and eating disorders. There is a wide range of support available from a range of partners including:
Also view our Mental Health (Local Offer) web page.
The pathway is to provide initial support for parents of children and young people with presumed ASD/ADHD, it is designed to support parents/carers through the assessment process.
The Peterborough Neurodevelopmental Service CPFT is an integrated multi-agency service for school-age children and young people with diagnosed or presumed neurodevelopmental issues
The service includes consultant psychiatrists, consultant paediatricians, a clinical nurse special clinical psychologists, nurses, child and family workers and a specialist practitioner all of whom have specialist knowledge and skills in children and young people’s neurodevelopmental needs. This service can help school age children and young people, their families and professionals involved with them through consultation, assessment, diagnosis, interventions, monitoring, review and training. The pathway is designed to ensure that children, young people and families who need a specialist assessment and associated support receive it, in a timely manner.
The aim of the Pathway is
To ensure that sufficient information is gathered and provided to support any further assessment/diagnostic process and to ensure that the children and young people most in need are referred.
To provide families with early help and peer support opportunities by providing them with appropriate strategies to help manage children and young people's presenting behaviours via a range of paediatric endorsed evidence-based programmes to suit their individual needs.