Why are they needed?

Lead professionals will support those children, young people and families who have additional needs that require input from more than one practitioner. The reason for introducing a lead professional model is to ensure that they receive a more coherent, person-centred and effective service.

We know from practice that children and families who require support from a number of specialist professionals often receive fragmented and sometimes contradictory services such as:

• Children and parents having too many professionals involved with them, sometimes giving conflicting and confusing advice on how best to meet the child's needs
• Children and young people falling below a key agency's threshold for support and failing to get the input of that agency as part of a joined-up approach, even when the agency has staff with the relevant training and expertise to meet their needs
• Children and young people receiving short-term, inconsistent or conflicting support from different professionals, and so losing trust and confidence in services or failing to receive the right support at the right time

It is not just children and families who are left feeling short-changed. We also know that:

• Practitioners working in universal services often cannot access or are unsure how to access more specialist help, and worry that children and young people's needs will increase before any support is made available.
• Practitioners with a remit to provide more targeted support experience frustration at receiving sometimes inadequate, misleading or inappropriate referral information, encounter barriers to information sharing and communication problems with other practitioners, and can find it hard in turn to access more specialist services.
• Practitioners have to take part in too many over large and bureaucratic case conferences and management meetings, to the detriment of delivering early intervention support.

Such fragmentation causes confusion for everyone; it can cause delay in children receiving the support they need, and lead to poorer outcomes for children and young people using services.

The lead professional offers a solution to this fragmentation, in combination with other key aspects of the Change for Children programme, namely:

• Professionals working with children and families having the confidence and knowledge to understand when a child may require additional help, whether they have the skills to provide that additional support and if not, to be able to work with other more specialist professionals to deliver this
• Professionals being able to carry out a common assessment of children and families which has currency with other professionals who may become engaged
• Professionals having the confidence to share information about children and families
• Multi-agency services being developed within and linked to mainstream services, bringing together professionals from different agencies to meet the needs of children and families who have additional needs without stigma