How Safe & Together Can Support Local Authorities Implementing the Families First Partnership Programme
By Nic Douglas, European Regional Manager, Safe & Together Institute
I’ve been incredibly encouraged by the ambitious and transformative vision laid out in England’s Department for Education’s Families First Partnership (FFP) programme. Its focus on early intervention, whole-family support, and multi-agency collaboration represents a crucial opportunity to enhance the way practitioners and systems respond to domestic abuse perpetration and its impact on families.
The programme’s emphasis on relationship-based practice and the integration of support around the family are central tenets of the Safe & Together Model. It supports a move away from a narrow focus on risk towards better recognition of family strengths, protective efforts, and collaborative work with families at the earliest opportunity. Safe & Together aligns closely with the Families First vision of supporting families before crisis hits, empowering networks, and preventing the need for statutory intervention wherever it is safe and possible to do so.
Shared Vision: Keeping Families Safe & Together
The FFP programme recognises that children’s needs are best met when help is provided early, before risks escalate. Domestic abuse often sits at the centre of multiple complex needs, yet too often services only become involved when harm is already significant.
Safe & Together reframes this approach. Rather than wait for an incident to trigger a response, the Safe & Together Model encourages professionals to look at patterns of coercive control, understand the wider impact on the family, and intervene early with a clear focus on increasing safety and stability.
Through this lens, early help isn’t just about services—it’s about relationships. Practitioners trained in the Safe & Together Model are better equipped to build trust with survivors and their family networks, offering consistent, non-judgmental support that empowers rather than punishes.
Supporting Whole-Family, Multi-Agency Practice
The Families First guide highlights the critical importance of multi-agency, multidisciplinary teams embedded within local systems. It sets the expectation that domestic abuse will be one of the priority harm types to which local partnerships must respond.
It is encouraging to see a focus on breaking down the silos between early help, child in need, and child protection services. For families experiencing domestic abuse, this consistency is vital, as survivors often describe experiencing services as fragmented and overwhelming. Within this context, they need to be able to build relationships with trusted practitioners, while interventions flex to meet their changing needs.
The Safe & Together Model offers a practical and evidence-based framework that equips Family Help Lead Practitioners, Multi-Agency Child Protection Teams (MACPTs), and all safeguarding partners with tools to do just that.
By centering perpetrator accountability, partnering with the non-offending parent, and focusing on the impact of abuse on children, we enable professionals to avoid the common pitfalls of mother-blaming and victim-blaming. This ensures a more accurate assessment of risk and more targeted and effective interventions, asking:
What has the survivor done to keep the child/ren safe, despite the harm?
What roles can extended family members play in supporting stability and safety?
How can we intervene with the perpetrator to reduce risk and build accountability?
By embedding these questions in our assessments and planning, we ensure that family networks are not only included but equipped to be part of the solution.
Enabling Seamless, Trauma-Informed Support
The FFP programme’s structure—integrating targeted early help, child in need, and child protection—is an opportunity to embed trauma-informed domestic abuse practice at every level. Safe & Together supports this by helping practitioners understand the intersection of domestic abuse with other presenting issues, such as parental mental health, substance use, or housing instability, which often co-occur in complex family situations.
With Safe & Together, family help practitioners can maintain continuous, supportive relationships with families, even as needs escalate or de-escalate. This approach minimises disruptions for children and builds trust, which is key to supporting survivors who may have long-standing fears or negative experiences with services.
Strengthening Decision-Making and Supervision
The FFP guide calls for skilled oversight, reflective supervision, and consistent quality assurance. Safe & Together’s frameworks for mapping perpetrator patterns, assessing protective efforts of survivors, and identifying the harm to children are ideal tools to support decision-making within supervision and multi-agency forums. These tools bring clarity to complex cases and help avoid over-intervention or under-response—both of which carry significant risks for children.
Family Group Decision-Making and Safe & Together
The FFP programme rightly champions the use of Family Group Decision-Making (FGDM), particularly in care proceedings and reunification planning. The Safe & Together Model enhances FGDM by ensuring that the safety planning process includes robust strategies for managing the behaviour of the perpetrator, rather than displacing risk onto the non-abusive parent or extended family. It provides a language and methodology to ensure that children's safety is not simply assumed but actively created.
Building a Skilled and Confident Workforce
The Families First reforms will require significant workforce development, and the Safe & Together Institute is ready to provide support. Our training, coaching, and organisational support are designed to equip frontline workers, supervisors, and leaders with the skills and confidence to navigate domestic abuse in a child-centred, perpetrator-focused, and survivor-engaged way. This will be critical to the success of Family Help teams and MACPTs in responding to families affected by domestic abuse perpetration.
The evidence base for this approach is compelling. The recent Respect evaluation findings demonstrate that Safe & Together implementation leads to improved knowledge and confidence in addressing domestic abuse. It found that practitioners shifted their attention towards a focus on perpetrators, feeling more confident in holding them to account. Practitioners also reported increased opportunities to partner with survivors and move away from the “failure to protect” narrative.
Similarly, the Scotland learning report showed substantial improvements in practice quality, with practitioners reporting increased understanding of the impact of domestic abuse on children and families, improved partnering with survivors, and more effective assessments of perpetrators’ patterns
A Collaborative Path Forward
The Families First Partnership programme presents an opportunity to reshape our approach to working with families impacted by domestic abuse perpetration—one that prioritises early support, builds on family strengths, and maintains children’s relationships wherever it is safe to do so.
At the Safe & Together Institute, we share that vision. We are committed to working with local authorities and safeguarding partners as they embed these reforms and to help realise the vision of a rebalanced, preventative, and compassionate system of family support.
When we provide practitioners with the right tools and knowledge to understand domestic abuse dynamics, they make better decisions, achieve better outcomes, and work more effectively.
Together, we can create a system where families impacted by domestic abuse perpetration feel seen, supported, and empowered.
Additional Resources
Safe & Together Institute’s domestic abuse–informed trainings
Safe & Together Institute’s upcoming events
David Mandel’s book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence
