Family Support Practice Principles
1. Working in partnership is an integral part of family support. Partnership includes children, families, professionals and communities.
2. Family Support interventions are needs led and strive for the minimum intervention required.
3. Family support requires a clear focus on the wishes, feelings, safety and well being of children.
4. Family support services reflect a strengths’ based perspective which is mindful of resilience as a characteristic of many children and families lives
5. Family support promotes the view that effective interventions are those that strengthen informal support networks.
6. Family support is accessible and flexible in respect of location, timing, setting and changing needs and can incorporate both child protection and out of home care.
7. Families are encouraged to self-refer and multi-access referral paths will be facilitated.
8. Involvement of service users and providers in the planning, delivery and evaluation of family support services is promoted on an ongoing basis.
9. Services aim to promote social inclusion, addressing issues around ethnicity, disability and rural/urban communities.
10. Measures of success are routinely built into provision so as to facilitate evaluation based on attention to the outcomes for service users and thereby facilitate ongoing support for quality services based on best practice.
Dolan, Canavan and Pinkerton, Family Support as Reflective Practice (2006)