What is Family Help?
Family Help is the new term introduced in Working Together to Safeguard Children 2026 and reflected in Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) 2026. It replaces the previous term Early Help and brings together early help services and some higher-level family support into one joined-up system.
What does this mean for parents?
Getting the right support at the right time, before problems become bigger.
Family Help is designed to work alongside families when they may be facing challenges such as:
- Attendance difficulties
- Behaviour or emotional wellbeing concerns
- Parenting support needs
- SEND or additional needs
- Family relationships and conflict
- Housing, financial or practical difficulties
- Concerns about a child's safety or welfare
The aim is to keep children safe, healthy and thriving by providing support as early as possible and coordinating help from the professionals who know the family best. This could include school staff, health professionals, social care, family support workers and other agencies working together with parents.
About Lumi Nova
Lumi Nova: Tales of Courage is an engaging child-led, parent/guardian supported therapeutic intervention that can be used on most smartphones or tablets.
It facilitates graded exposures (the active ingredient of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) with psychoeducation to empower 7-12 year olds with mild to moderate needs to learn to self-manage fears, worries and anxiety.
It is practical, age appropriate, non-stigmatising, encourages self management and provides user progress and health outcomes data in real time to authorised professionals.
When a parent, sibling, grandparent, friend or someone in the school community has died, children and young people grieve just as deeply as adults, but they can show it in different ways. They learn how to grieve by copying the responses of the adults around them and rely on them to support them in their grief.
How a child or young person responds to someone dying will be influenced by their age and understanding, the relationship they had with the person who died, and how the person died.
A range of reactions and emotions are common, and are likely to settle over time with reassurance, acknowledging what has happened and their feelings, giving them clear and age-appropriate information, and keeping to normal routines.