ad practitioners will be a family’s primary contact, developing a single assessment and plan with the family, monitoring progress, coordinating services and bring in additional practitioners and professional expertise around the family as required. Our ambition is that families only have to tell their story once and will access more hands-on support to navigate high-quality support from, for example, mental health, domestic abuse and substance misuse services. By working in a whole-family and strengths-based way, the Lead Practitioner will consider how the needs of all family members impact on one another and will seek to address those needs holistically to achieve better outcomes for the whole unit. The lead practitioner should have the skills, knowledge, competence, and capacity to work effectively with the child and their family. We are looking to test the expansion of the family help workforce to ensure that the core principles of a strong and trusting relationship and a consistent support for the family are fulfilled by whomever is best placed to fill that role for the family at that time. In many cases, a social worker will remain the most appropriate person to lead work with families, but the local authority will want to consider how non or other qualified practitioners could be appointed as lead practitioners and undertake section 17 work with families. We cannot achieve our vision for family help in isolation. An extensive universal and/ or early help offer will ensure that more families can be supported earlier, and family help can function as a targeted service specifically for families with multiple needs. Family help 81 and reformed child protection also need to be part of an integrated system, where both support and protection can wrap around the family an