Families First

The Families First Partnership Programme is about making sure every child and family in Kent can access the right support, from the right professional, at the right time without having to repeat their story. It’s a “tell it once” approach that puts people, not processes, at the heart of support. The programme is aimed at transforming how support is delivered to children and families. It focuses on providing earlier, more integrated help to prevent problems from escalating into statutory intervention.

Bringing ‘co-design’ to life

We’re currently engaging with children, families and professionals to gather their insights on the programme’s Vision, Mission and Values. We’ve been actively collecting feedback from the Young Adult Council, Kent Youth Voice and partners in the voluntary sector to ensure a range of perspectives informs our approach.

This programme will be co-designed with colleagues from KCC's Children, Young People and Education directorate, along with Police, Health, Education and the Kent Safeguarding Children Multi-Agency Partnership through a series of task and finish groups, to support the delivery of the three workstreams below:

Workstream one: Family Help

Family Help aims to improve children’s outcomes by understanding and responding to the needs and circumstances of the family as early as possible to enable children to thrive and families to remain together. Family Help will take place at the heart of communities, bringing together local services under a combined, multi-disciplinary practice approach and service offer.

Workstream two: multi-agency partnership working

Establishing multi-agency child protection teams will bring a clear, fresh focus where there are safeguarding concerns, bringing experts together across agencies to identify actual or likely significant harm and take decisive action to protect children.

Workstream three: systems, policies, data and KPIs

Developing appropriate infrastructure for sharing, storing and analysing information. This is to enable local agencies to identify families requiring support, track needs and outcomes over time and provide practitioners with the latest information to inform their work, with an emphasis on seamless information sharing.

What next?

The Department for Education has set ambitious timelines for delivery, with programme design scheduled to run until early 2026 and implementation of the co-designed model beginning autumn 2026 into 2027.

The programme team are entering the co-design phase using task and finish groups to begin shaping the key deliverables of the three workstreams.

If you would like to reach out to the programme team, please email familiesfirstteam@kent.gov.uk.