Helping Birmingham Families Early: The “Signs of Safety and Well-being” Practice Framework

Rising demand for early help services is currently taking place against a backdrop of closing or reduced services and shrinking public authority budgets across England. Complicating matters is the wide variety of service orientations and differences in assessments offered to vulnerable families. This can be confusing for them. Moreover, this is an inefficient approach to providing help. This article presents a methodology of early help practice with families, designed to ease any service orientation problems, while promoting a more uniformed approach to early help practice in Birmingham, England. This article is concerned with the wide variety of tools and approaches in early help practice and is critical to how risk and need exploration operates because practitioner anxiety about working with risk potentially fuels an escalation of referrals through to statutory services. To help build practitioner confidence about working with need and risk, a practice framework based on signs of safety has been developed for Birmingham’s early help services, replacing over 80 pre-existing assessment tools. Strengths-based practice debates provide the theoretical backdrop for this discussion.