Family Early Help
When you start work with a family, you must provide them with the Early Help Privacy Notice. There are also Resilient Families tools to help you prepare for the first meeting with a family.
Privacy Notice
When you start work with a family, you must provide them with a hard copy or an electronic link to the Early Help privacy notice. The privacy notice sets out what information early help will ask about, what we will do with it, how we will store it, and which partners we might share the information with.
Why the Privacy Notice is Important
The Information Commissioners Office says that "individuals have the right to be informed about the collection and use of their personal data" and that "you must provide privacy information to individuals at the time you collect their personal data from them."
The statutory guidance that informs our work 'Working Together to Safeguarding Children' also stresses the importance of sharing information. It says 'practitioners should be proactive in sharing information as early as possible to help identify, assess and respond to risks or concerns about the safety and welfare of children, whether this is when problems are first emerging, or where a child is already known to local authority children’s social care'.
So it is legally very important that you make sure the family have the early help privacy notice.
There are also ethical reasons for this. A family's personal data and their rights around their data are important to them, just as the data about us in our own lives and our rights are important to us. A family might be worried about information being shared with another organisation, and we must reflect on that. So it is ethically very important to share the privacy notice at the start of your relationship with a family.
Exploring the Privacy Notice with families
We would strongly advise that you take the time to talk with the family about the privacy notice. This would include exploring the information you might share, with who, and how they feel about that. You can find practice guidance about this conversation here. Its really important you take seriously, and respond to, any concerns the family might have with sharing information. Talk this through with your supervisor. Early help is still a voluntary service; families can still decide if they want to work with early help, and decline the service if they don't.
What to do once you have shared the Privacy Notice
Once you have had this conversation, you should upload a casenote to Mosaic titled 'privacy notice shared with family' to the family's Mosaic file. You should put any concerns or worries that the family raised about sharing their information, and what you did about it, in the casenote.
Where to Find the Privacy Notice
Here is a link to Camden's early help privacy notice Early Help for children and families - Camden Council (at the bottom of the page) and here is a hard copy of the privacy notice if you want to print it out.
Resilient Families Tools To Help Start the Work
When you are allocated a family to work with with, you will have received information from the original CAF referral and from the exploratory work done by the Early Help Coordinators (which will be casenoted on Mosaic).
Each team has a different process to support the start of the helping journey with a family, including reviewing the historic and current information on Mosaic, discussion with your supervisor, and small group meetings.
There are some Resilient Families practice tools that will help you to prepare for your first meeting with the family and you can find them here (the Starting Out Map is highly recommended)