Many services are traditionally aimed at those members of society who have identified needs, especially the more specialist ones. However, services can also build positive behaviours and skills in a proactive way, and often these are best done locally with specialist services best operating on a larger geographical scale. This is about catching people earlier before more serious problems occur, or encouraging positive behaviours. Much of the public health work falls into this category, such as smoking prevention programmes or healthy eating campaigns.
In EC1, a good example of this is some of the Family Support work. This was led by social services in partnerships with voluntary sector providers, and with the involvement of schools and children centres. Some of the work involved training teachers and other frontline workers to better spot and address early warning signs of problems in families, such as drug and alcohol abuse. Also, it involved many people attending parenting courses, including Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities.
There is a lot of attention now on early intervention, and much of this is centred on more ‘whole family’ approaches. The Allen Review, covering the prospects of early intervention and providing recommendations about the future of early intervention programmes, was published in January 2011. Also, the Early Action Taskforce, launched in January 2011, is a group of charities, businesses and political leaders working to help build a society that prevents social problems from arising rather than just coping with the consequences.
