Department sets deadline for councils and fellow safeguarding partners to fully roll out family help services, multi-agency child protection teams and family group decision making, under Families First Partnership programme reforms.
Key reforms to children’s social care must be implemented by March 2027, the Department for Education (DfE) has told councils and their children’s safeguarding partners.
That is the deadline for the rollout of multidisciplinary family help services, multi-agency child protection teams and family group decision making (FGDM), the DfE said, in updated guidance on its Families First Partnership (FFP) programme reforms.
The DfE will monitor implementation through quarterly collections of data, with areas that fall behind given “an enhanced level of support and challenge to enable effective implementation”.
£3bn funding for reforms
The FFP programme is the biggest element of the government’s children’s social care reforms, backed by £2.4bn from 2027-29 on top of £540m in 2025-26, when its rollout started.
It aims to improve support to families with complex and multiple needs, so children can stay with their parents, enhance the effectiveness of child protection practice, so more children at risk are safeguarded, and involve family networks more in decision making when agencies have welfare concerns (see box).
Alongside the rollout deadline, the updated guidance also encourages councils to provide family network support packages through their FGDM service, involving the provision of money, goods and services to help relatives and friends care for children and keep them out of the care system.
The three elements of the Families First Partnership programme:
Multidisciplinary family help services: these are responsible for supporting families across targeted early help, child in need and child protection, through the provision of a consistent lead practitioner and a team around the family, with the objective of keeping families intact where it is safe to do so.
Multi-agency child protection teams: these are designed to improve the quality of safeguarding practice by bringing together skilled social workers, police officers, health practitioners and education professionals into single teams, an approach that will be put into law through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
Family group decision making meetings: these involve giving extended families the opportunity to hold meetings and develop plans to safeguard and promote the welfare of children involved with early help or social care; under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, councils will be required to offer such meetings to families at the pre-proceedings stage, to enable them to develop alternatives to children going into care. Councils are also encouraged to provide family network support packages (FNSPs) – comprising money, goods or services – to help family networks care for children they have stepped in to support..
Implementing family help services
The DfE said councils and their partners – chiefly NHS integrated care boards (ICBs) and police forces – needed to ensure their family help services were “fully operational” by March 2027. This should include:
- The merger of targeted early help and child in need provision into a single family help offer, such that all children at targeted early help and child in need levels are being supported by the family help service.
- The establishment of multidisciplinary family help teams, consisting of social workers, alternatively qualified practitioners and a range of other specialists – such as domestic violence, youth work or mental health practitioners – based on local need, to deliver this support.
- Each family having an allocated family help lead practitioner (FHLP) to provide direct work and co-ordinate support from other professionals and services.
- Families receiving a family help assessment, tailored to their circumstances, co-ordinated with other assessments and led by the practitioner most suited to identifying their needs.
- Families having a family help plan, with clear, measurable outcomes for the child and expectations for the family, and specifying the agencies and practitioners involved and the services being provided, with regular reviews.
Through the quarterly data collections, councils will need to report on the implementation status of their family help service.
As well as the core elements of the service, the DfE has set a number of other expectations for partners to report on through the data collections, with some having earlier deadlines than March 2027.
By the end of June 2026, partners need to have published an updated threshold document, removing the distinction between targeted early help and child in need.
They also need to have produced a workforce development plan across the partnership by the end of September 2026, while, by the March 2027 deadline, they should have implemented a case management system with a single workflow for targeted early help and child in need cases.
As part of their family help offer, partners should also have in place an integrated front door for new contacts and referrals by March 2027. Areas with existing multi-agency safeguarding hubs should examine how these can be aligned with other places where families come into contact with services to make the integrated front door a reality, the DfE said.
Rolling out multi-agency child protection teams
As with family help, safeguarding partners should ensure their multi-agency child protection teams (MACPTs) are fully operational by March 2027.
This means that they will lead and make decisions in relation to all strategy meetings, section 47 enquiries, child protection conferences and child protection plans, while also providing advice to other professionals on safeguarding children.
By next March, they should be fully staffed by appropriately skilled, qualified and experienced social workers – known as lead child protection practitioners (LCPPs) – health professionals, police officers and education practitioners, with teams physically co-located where possible.
Partners should also have also identified additional practitioners to be part of MACPTs – such as domestic abuse, mental health or substance misuse staff – based on local harm profiles, and agreed equitable and sustainable multi-agency resourcing of the teams.
Similarly to family help, the DfE wants partners to have some elements of the MACPT model in place before March 2027:
- Parents and carers involved in the child protection process should be offered accessible advice, information and support in all cases by the end of June 2026.
- Multi-agency workforce development plans should be in place by the end of September 2026.
- By the same date, partners should have developed a shared multi-agency practice framework, including arrangements for
accountability, quality assurance, monitoring, training and supervision of teams.
Family group decision making implementation
Councils should also have a “fully operational” FGDM service in place by March 2027, offered to family networks at all points of the children’s services journey, from initial referral onwards, when it is judged to be in the child’s best interests.
The number of offers made should increase during 2026-27, with the majority of families at the pre-proceedings stage offered FGDM by March 2027, in line with the duty placed on councils under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
Where parents consent, an FGDM meeting should follow, with the purpose of enabling the family network to develop a plan to address services’ concerns about the child. The DfE has tasked councils with a target of 67% of offers converting to meetings.
Councils should have sufficient, trained FGDM facilitators on their staff to co-ordinate meetings, it said. While this should normally be a professional with no previous involvement with the family, families may request that their FHLP facilitate the process.
The role involves meeting with the child and parents, to explain the process, find out more about the family situation and identify members of the family network who will be invited to the meeting.
Facilitators should meet all invitees and help the family plan the meeting, while also convening with the FHLP and other professionals to discuss the child’s needs and how the family network can help meet them. They should also decide whether certain people – including parents or other family members – should be excluded from the meeting on safeguarding grounds.
The meeting should give the family network sufficient time to develop a plan to address concerns about the child. Where this is “lawful,
safe and addresses the key concerns, it can be agreed”.
Family network support packages promoted
As in the initial version of the FFP programme guidance, the updated edition states that practitioners should “commit to providing the support contained in the plan to the family network”.
However, it goes much further in spelling out what this means in promoting the use of family network support packages (FNSPs), which were not mentioned in the first edition.
The DfE said these packages involved providing funding to tackle specific barriers family networks face in providing the support set out in the plan. It suggested this could range from providing a car seat, to help with transport, to a loft conversion, to provide extra space in the family member’s house for the child.
It said FNSPs could be provided to families under targeted early help, child in need or child protection, as an invest to save measure, to prevent councils facing greater costs from the child going into care.
Among data measures that the DfE will collect are the number of FNSP packages offered and their total value, both of which it wants to see increase during 2026-27.
How DfE will monitor implementation and support improvement
Alongside the quarterly data collections, the DfE said it would monitor implementation of the FFP programme by carrying out “structured engagement” with local authorities, including by requesting further information on progress being made.
It will also carry out surveys of safeguarding partners on their perceptions of the challenges and benefits of FFP, including questions on partner engagement and workforce-related issues.
In addition, safeguarding partners would benefit from a “national FFP delivery support offer”, involving the publication and sharing of learning and the provision of targeted support to areas where needed.
The latter will involve high-performing local authorities – so-called children’s social care improvement teams – being matched with councils in need of help, to whom they will provide leadership coaching and operational support to deliver improvements.
In some cases, the DfE will appoint expert advisers – similar to commissioners sent in to support struggling local authority children’s services – to help councils and their partners develop plans to improve their delivery of FFP.
Separately, the DfE has appointed consultancy Mutual Ventures to support delivery of FFP, through the provision of coaching to a small number of areas and by facilitating communities of practice and group sessions in which to share learning.
Source: Community Care, Mithran Samuel
