Welcome

Dear Partners,

Welcome to the June edition of Families First News for Hertfordshire's early help professionals. 

This month we have had Carers Week, with our emphasis in Children's Serivices on young carers.  It is imperative that we all learn how to identify young carers and that they must be offered an assessment. 

June is also Pride month - a month dedicated to celebrating the LGBTQ+ communities and through diversity and inclusion, ensure that all members of our community feel valued and respected.   

We are continuing to learn about the values and reasons for the national reforms and working on how that shapes the future of our services in order to deliver this.  What we know so far is that services will be delivered through community-based, whole family services. Multi-disciplinary collaboration and partner agencies sitting alongside Children's Services in multi-agency teams are central, with a greater focus on helping families early to reduce those families needing statutory support. Implementation will take place in October 2025. The Department for Education programme guide sets out what is expected and how services should run, and is a recommended read: Families First Partnership programme - GOV.UK

On this subject, can you please help us gather views and feedback by encouraging the families you are supporting to complete an important questionnaire, read more here.

Finally, don't forget to take a look through our Learning and Development articles to see what is available for you and your teams, along with our local news pages and vacancies page.

We hope you enjoy this edition of Families First News and please encourage your teams to sign up to receive their own copy! 

The Development Team

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