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Families First – What is Changing?

The Think Family reforms in Newcastle, delivered through the Families First model, are about creating one joined-up system of support for children, young people, and families.
At its core, the approach brings together services through shared processes and pathways, enabling a coordinated and graduated response across the continuum of need. By strengthening collaboration between agencies and reducing fragmentation, families can access the right help at the right time. The overarching aim is simple: every child and family gets the help they need, when they need it, ensuring support is timely, coordinated, and focused on achieving the best possible outcomes.
Our ambition is to strengthen our preventative approach, further improve outcomes, and ensure that families receive the right support at the right time, from the right professionals.
It’s is an opportunity to build a culture that is relational, strengths-based, and focused on what matters most to families. We want a system where practitioners feel valued, supported, and empowered to do their best work.
For most practitioners, the biggest change is likely to be a move from service-led, process-driven practice to relationship-based, multi-agency, family-centred practice, where one coordinated system works alongside families to provide the right help at the right time

The shared vision is that:

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Families get help earlier, quicker and in a coordinated way, preventing issues from escalating and ensuring children receive the right support at the right time. This improves outcomes, strengthens family resilience, and reduces the need for more intensive services.

Services work as one system, not separate silos, ensuring children and families experience a joined-up service. This improves communication, reduces duplication, and helps deliver the right support at the right time.

Families are partners in decision-making, not passive recipients, ensuring their voices are heard and their strengths are built upon. This increases engagement, promotes sustainable change, and helps achieve better outcomes for children and families.

Practitioners build consistent, trusting relationships, helping families feel supported, listened to, and understood. This increases engagement, strengthens partnership working, and leads to better outcomes for children and families.

The Newcastle System – How It Fits Together

Community Family Offer

Community Family Offer focus will be on short-term, high impact support for families with new emerging needs, helping to provide support earlier and reduce the need for more intensive support later. Community Family Offer is currently developing Our Family Plan for Family Partners and Practitioners to use when they are the allocated worker for a family. This will link with the Family Help Assessment so that if a family needs to move from the Community Family Offer to the Family Help or Child Protection teams, the information they have already shared can be carried across and avoids families having to repeat their stories.The role of the Community Family Offer across the wider system is more important than ever, and this is recognised in the Families First guidance. Our Best Start Family Hubs provide early support and help families with children aged 0-19 (25 with SEND) connect to services in their local area. This is central to making the new model work well. From families needing early community-based support to those receiving help from child protection teams, the support and group work delivered by CFO Practitioners will continue to benefit families across the whole system.

Family Help Service

The Family Help Service brings together Early Help and Child in Need support within a single, integrated service. Delivered through eight locality-based teams and an additional needs team, it provides coordinated support for children, young people, and families. Family Help Keyworkers, Social Workers, and Family Support Workers work together to assess needs, build on family strengths, and provide the right support at the right time to improve outcomes and reduce the need for more intensive interventions.

Child Protection / Safeguarding

Child Protection and Safeguarding services provide targeted support for children who are at risk of, or experiencing, significant harm. Through Multi-Agency Child Protection Teams (CFN Protect) and six dedicated Child Protection teams, professionals work together to assess risk, coordinate interventions, and ensure children are protected. Specialist services, including Risk Outside The Home (ROTH), Youth Justice Services (YJS), and Multi-Systemic Therapy (MST), provide additional expertise and intensive support to address complex needs and improve safety and outcomes for children and families.

Corporate Parenting / Care Services

Corporate Parenting and Care Services support children and young people who are in care, ensuring they are safe, cared for, and able to thrive. Dedicated Children in Care teams work closely with young people, carers, and partner agencies to promote positive outcomes and stability. The service also supports care leavers as they move towards independence and oversees fostering, residential care, and permanence planning to provide children with secure, nurturing, and long-term family arrangements wherever possible.

What Does This Look Like in Pactice?

One Family, One Plan, One Lead Practitioner

Under the new way of working, families receive a more coordinated and consistent service. Instead of working with multiple professionals and separate plans, families now have one assessment, one plan, and one Lead Practitioner who oversees support and acts as a single point of contact. The Family Help Assessment and Plan replaces separate Early Help and Child in Need plans, creating a joined-up approach centred on the needs of the whole family. In practice, practitioners coordinate support across agencies, remain involved for as long as support is needed, and minimise unnecessary handoffs and disruption, helping families build stronger relationships with services and achieve better outcomes.

The Lead Practitioner role is central to the reforms and is designed to provide children and families with a consistent, trusted point of contact. As the main relationship holder for the family, the Lead Practitioner coordinates all multi-agency support, leads the assessment and planning process, and ensures that the voice and lived experience of the child remain at the heart of decision-making. They bring together the right professionals to create a Team Around the Family, ensuring services work collaboratively towards shared goals. By remaining the family’s main point of contact throughout their journey, the Lead Practitioner helps build trust, reduces fragmentation, and provides a more coordinated and effective response to need.

All work within the new model is underpinned by trusting relationships, strengths-based practice, respect for family expertise, and consistency of worker. This approach recognises that families are best supported when practitioners work alongside them, building on their strengths and understanding their unique experiences. In practice, this means fewer changes of worker, more time invested in developing meaningful relationships, and plans that are created with families rather than for them. By fostering trust, collaboration, and continuity, practitioners can better support families to achieve sustainable change and improve outcomes for children and young people.

Within the new model, families are recognised as active partners in identifying needs, making decisions, and shaping the support they receive. Family meetings take place early, within 10 days, to bring together those who know and care about the child and family. Family Group Decision Making is embedded throughout the approach, ensuring that families have a meaningful role in developing solutions and planning for the future. Practitioners work alongside families to help them identify their own strengths, networks, and resources, enabling them to design plans that reflect their priorities and build on what is already working well. This increases family ownership, strengthens support networks, and leads to more sustainable and effective outcomes for children and young people.

Through CFN Connect, families and professionals benefit from a single access point for referrals, making it easier to access the right support at the right time. Referrals are rapidly reviewed and triaged to ensure children and families receive the most appropriate response, whether that is community-based support, targeted assistance through Family Help, or safeguarding intervention where there are concerns about a child’s safety and wellbeing. This streamlined approach reduces delays, improves decision-making, and helps ensure that needs are identified and addressed as early as possible, leading to better outcomes for children and families.

Services are organised into North, East, Inner West, and Outer West localities, enabling support to be delivered closer to the communities where children and families live. This locality-based approach helps practitioners build strong and effective relationships with local partners, including schools, health services, and voluntary and community sector organisations. By working regularly with the same partners and developing a deeper understanding of local strengths, challenges, and resources, practitioners can provide more responsive and coordinated support. This strengthens collaboration, improves access to local services, and helps ensure that children and families receive support that is tailored to the needs of their community.

A key feature of the new model is the way services work together through co-located or closely aligned teams, multi-agency child protection arrangements (CFN Protect), and shared decision-making. Professionals from different organisations, including police, health, and education, are embedded within safeguarding teams to strengthen collaboration and ensure that expertise is available when needed. Joint allocation and transfer meetings enable agencies to make decisions together, share information effectively, and plan coordinated responses for children and families. By promoting shared responsibility for outcomes, this approach reduces fragmentation, improves communication, and ensures that children and families receive a more joined-up, timely, and effective service.