Early help services - Assessment, analysis and intervention

This workshop will give participants experience of using Child and Family Training’s approach for staff working in early intervention/family support services with a case involving three siblings in middle childhood. The... [ view full abstract ]

This workshop will give participants experience of using Child and Family Training’s approach for staff working in early intervention/family support services with a case involving three siblings in middle childhood. The workshop will use a DVD case example involving a child who has a learning disability and much of her daily care is undertaken by a sibling to the detriment of her own school attendance and education. Their mother appears depressed. Participants will make assessments of each child’s experience in the home environment and formulate individualised child focused plans to help each child and their mother and measure the outcome.

This training approach for early intervention services uses evidence based approaches for assessment, analysis and intervention based on the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families (Department of Health et al 2000).

The assessment approaches include the HOME Inventory (Caldwell & Bradley 2003). The HOME was further developed by the creation of a semi structured interview, that takes the child and main carer through a specific day thus eliciting detailed information about the child’s experiences in the home environment (Cox, Pizzey & Walker 2008), and inclusion of the Family Pack of Questionnaires and Scales (Cox & Bentovim 2000). 

A model of analysis was developed to help practitioners maintain their focus on the child’s health and development after they have undertaken an assessment, and to analyse the factors and processes affecting the child’s progress and predict the outlook for the child’s health and development if nothing has changed (Pizzey et al 2015).

A range of intervention approaches for use by unqualified and qualified practitioners is available as part of the Hope for Children and families intervention resources (Bentovim et al 2015). Guidance on identifying outcomes and measuring the effectiveness of each intervention is incorporated into the programme.