Missed opportunities – and why they matter
Early help is a vital public service in supporting families and preventing problems from escalating- but only when it is available at the point at which it is most needed. Too often, the ‘front door' to services becomes a threshold for assessment rather than a route to timely intervention. Can the upcoming record investment in children's services and a renewed focus on early intervention through the Family Help model shift the dial on how early help is delivered?
New analysis by Action for Children highlights the extent of these missed opportunities for early support. Between 2020 and 2025, 88% of closed child in need assessments did not result in a referral to early help. Yet more than one in five of those children were re-referred for assessment within a year. Scaled nationally, this equates to around 360,000 missed opportunities across England to prevent a re-referral to children's social care.
This does not reflect a lack of commitment to preventative family support on the part of local authorities, commissioners, providers or practitioners. It is the predictable consequence of rising demand and reduced capacity, following more than a decade of sharp falls in funding for early intervention. Our most recent annual analysis of children's services spending with the Children's Services Funding Alliance shows that, despite recent increases, spending on early intervention in 2024 was 42% lower than in 2010. In practice, this means fewer opportunities to offer help at the points where it could prevent problems from escalating. For too many families, their first contact with children's services is already a moment of crisis.
The consequences are felt across the rest of the system. Early help- support for children and families below the threshold for statutory intervention- ranges from parenting support and family hubs provision to housing and debt advice, domestic abuse support, SEND and disability services and community-based mental health support. Every missed referral is another family left without structured support, more likely to return at a higher level of concern.
The view from practitioners
Through Action for Children's work with children and families across the UK, we hear regularly about missed opportunities: points at which services are already in contact with a family but the right support isn't available.
Alongside our new data analysis, a survey of over 250 Action for Children practitioners last summer found that 62% said there was too little early help available for families, with 33% saying there was less support for parents than two years ago. Practitioners described long waiting times for mental health and SEND support, and too few options to offer families while they wait. As one family support worker put it:
‘The support is not there to refer families to. We can signpost, but there are long waiting lists for everything... Families are being told to wait months- sometimes years- for assessments or support. By the time help comes, problems have escalated.'
Another described the exhaustion parents feel from constantly ‘fighting for support', with the system only responding ‘once things reach breaking point'.
New analysis of early help referrals
To understand what spending trends mean for families in practice, we carried out a new analysis drawing on FOI data from 137 local authorities in England, covering 2.2 million children who had a child in need assessment during 2020-2025.
We know from a previous analysis undertaken by Action for Children in 2022 that there is a significant gap in access to early help at a crucial point in families' interactions with children's services – when a child in need (Section 17) assessment is closed. That earlier analysis, which examined data from 2015 to 2020, identified more than 64,000 missed opportunities to prevent a re-referral to social care by providing early help at that point.
Our new analysis shows that the picture has worsened, with missed opportunities increasing by 13% to 72,000 a year. There remains significant variation between local authorities' early help referrals rates at this stage, ranging from 25% in some to 1% in others.
This is despite 93% of local authorities saying they have a process in place to refer a family to targeted early help services at this point. This suggests that the gap is not one of awareness or intent, but capacity. When social work teams are operating under intense pressure, and early help provision is limited or hard to access, assessments can become an end point rather than a gateway to support- leaving families without structured help and increasing the likelihood that they return later at a higher level of need.
Families are reaching social care, being assessed, and then leaving without structured support- even though the evidence is clear that early help can reduce re-referrals.
The coming opportunity in April
Alongside others in the children's sector, we have been calling for many years for the government to increase funding for early intervention and to strengthen national data on early help provision and outcomes. We strongly welcome the progress that has been made in moving early intervention to the forefront of the policy agenda and securing record investment in children's services.
Over the past year, work has begun to move towards the new Family Help model, designed to bring together early help, child in need and child protection. The test of this approach, which local authorities are expected to implement fully from April, will be whether it consistently delivers the right support at the right time, and whether it can be embedded in local systems under pressure. Through our early help and Family Hub services across England, we see the impact of timely support every day, and we will continue to work with local partners to build the capacity needed as reforms take shape.
Our next report on children's services spending will be published in May, setting a baseline before the new investment enters the system from April. We would like to see the Department for Education support local leaders by publishing a national outcomes framework for children's services as part of the Best Start Family Hubs guidance. This would enable local and national understanding of how early help, Family Help and children's social care interact. It would also give a fuller picture of where capacity is most constrained and how investment is translating into tangible and measurable support for children and families.
Until then the missing piece of the puzzle remains: what help is actually delivered, and what difference does it make to families at the moment they need it most. With record investment and a new model coming in April, we have a rare chance to turn missed moments into meaningful support. The question now is whether the system can seize it to deliver the change children need.
Martha Hampson is senior policy advisor, Action for Children
