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One Front Door

Seeing the whole picture for the whole family

The needs, vulnerabilities and risks of family members are connected. A mental health worker supporting a vulnerable woman should know if there is domestic abuse in the household. A child safeguarding team should be aware of substance misuse in the home.

If information isn’t shared then we deal with one person and one concern at a time. This leads to opportunities being missed to help people and lives being put unnecessarily at risk.

But if we work together and build a picture of each family that reflects how people actually live their lives then we can help people earlier and more effectively.

We developed One Front Door to do just that. The scheme brought together multi-agency specialist teams of statutory and voluntary sector partners to:

  • identify the needs and risks of every family member at the same time
  • make vital links between the individuals and the families they belong to
  • provide earlier specialist support to adult and child victims, as well as those perpetrating domestic abuse.

Funded by the Government’s Tampon Tax from 2016 to 2019, the pilot ran in seven locations across England. This first stage concluded in June 2019. The results showed a significant impact on early intervention and prevention.

 

No one understands what is happening for us a family. We have eight different workers in our house but each one cares about something different.

Survivor

Key findings

Improved structural approaches

  • Perpetrator responses were commissioned for the first time in local authority areas
  • Cultural change programmes were initiated in children’s social services
  • Ofsted named One Front Door as a positive model in two sites and highlighted faults which would be resolved by its adoption in a third

Improved ways of working

  • Practitioners were overwhelmingly positive about new ways of working
  • Multi-agency work became more collaborative and effective
  • There was an increase in parity of esteem between specialist, often voluntary, agencies and large statutory partners which deepened engagement between them
  • There was a shift from multi-agency teams simply administering information to bringing specialist expertise and analysis on all information available

 

It’s not just saving time, we’re better risk assessing, we’re helping the families better.

Police representative, One Front Door pilot site

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