Debate contribution: Early Intervention and Family Support Services: North Antrim

Debate contribution by Ms Sian Mulholland on 26 May 2026.

MLA

Ms Sian Mulholland

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

26 May 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Adjournment

Heading

Early Intervention and Family Support Services: North Antrim

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5583465

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am really grateful for the opportunity to have an Adjournment debate on access to early intervention and family support services in North Antrim. The debate is about families who are trying to get help early before difficulty becomes crisis. However, too often, they find a system that is fragmented and overstretched and find that it is really difficult to navigate their way through the quagmire of different bureaucratic processes. North Antrim is not without services, and I pay tribute to those who work in those services. In Ballymena and the Mid and East Antrim and Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council areas, we have dedicated staff working in Little Steps Sure Start, family support hubs, health visiting, school nursing, the children's early intervention service (CEIS), child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) and community and voluntary organisations. However, for me, the question is whether families can access the right support quickly, locally and before crisis. I recently engaged with Action for Children and have done so throughout my time as an MLA. It runs services across the Northern Trust area, including the Choices family support service, the family support hubs and Ballymena Little Steps Sure Start, which I have visited.

Their message was really clear: the model is good and the staff are committed, but the need and complexity are increasing, and demand is greater than supply. I recognise that Sure Start is funded through Education, not Health. However, it is highly relevant to this debate, because most health-related needs are first identified through Sure Start, health visitors, school nurses, GPs and family support services. There might be a speech and language delay, developmental concerns, a parental mental health issue, emotional distress, poverty or wider family stress. The question that I am asking, and the question for Health, is this: what happens next? Parents do not experience their child's needs as an education issue one day, a health issue the next and a social care issue the day after that. They experience one family, one child and one urgent need for help. I have heard from a constituent whose child's developmental concerns appeared very early and very suddenly. Her child's speech regressed at just 15 months. It happened rapidly over the course of a week. She did everything right: she contacted the GP immediately and tried to seek help as early as possible. The autism diagnosis did not come until her child was almost three. That gap matters. Parents are told repeatedly that early intervention is crucial, particularly before the age of five when so much of the brain's development is taking place, yet, in practice, many families are left with little or no support while they wait for that official diagnosis. Some services cannot be accessed without the formal diagnosis, even when parents know exactly what they are seeing at home. Families who can afford it go private, but many simply cannot. That builds unfairness into the system from the very start. For that family, early intervention did not feel early. A child's development does not pause when a family navigates that referral process, the thresholds and the waiting lists. Most importantly, that window for support can be missed. Action for Children also raised concerns with me about increasing special educational and additional needs. Those teams are adapting, but they require higher staff-to-child ratios due to safeguarding. If commissioning and funding do not reflect that complexity, services will be asked to do so much more with the same resource. What we are seeing across North Antrim and Northern Ireland is that need is widespread and increasing. Eligibility can still be based on old geographical boundaries and historic patterns of deprivation. New housing estates have been built and communities have changed, but children who need support may well be missed. Poverty is yet another major pressure. When I visited the Trussell Trust food banks in Ballymena, it was clear that poverty is on our doorstep. Families are dealing with all sorts of housing pressures, fuel costs, childcare costs and the cost of the school day. Those pressures are not separate from a child's well-being; they absolutely shape it. I have constituents ringing my office with the same awful experiences far too often. At first, the issue may be that the electric is running low or the family needs an emergency food parcel. Then the school raises concerns about behaviour or attendance. Then the child is presenting as increasingly anxious, distressed and dysregulated. The family will be signposted in so many different directions, but nothing feels clear. Support and services feel too far away and too hard to reach by public transport. Often, they are just too difficult to navigate for a parent who is already in a pressurised situation. Referrals can be made to CAMHS or for ADHD or autism assessment, but families are now being told that they could be waiting months or, more likely, even years for the help that they need. While a family waits, life does not stand still. Poverty persists, it becomes parental stress, and parental stress becomes family conflict. That can then affect a child's emotional well-being, behaviour and development. In some cases, it leads to intervention by the police and justice system. What began as a need for early help can then involve bringing in schools, health visitors, nurses, doctors, social workers, CAMHS, crisis services and, in some cases, care proceedings, all of which puts more and more pressure on our social and healthcare system. By that stage, the cost is far greater financially for the system and emotionally for the child and the family. Harm has become entrenched, relationships are fractured and the opportunity for earlier, cheaper and more humane support has been missed.

Yes.

Thank you very much, Danny. That is pretty much the point that we are talking about: the postcode lottery. I will go into a wee bit more detail on some of the other projects and models that I have engaged on over the past few months. It also applies to harmful behaviours. That is what fed my real interest and input. I met Marcella Leonard, an independent consultant social worker, who pointed to the widening gap in early intervention for children displaying harmful sexual behaviour, interpersonal violence, child-to-parent violence or technology-facilitated harm. Too often, the system there, particularly in the Northern Health and Social Care Trust, was responding after escalation rather than therapeutically when the warning signs first appeared. That is the reality. There is a bottleneck in the system, and early intervention is one of the ways to unblock it. Castle Tower School is a good example of how joint working between Health and Education, with speech and language therapy and occupational therapy, can unlock progress for children, because behaviour, communication, sensory regulation and emotional well-being are all connected. However, that is one school. It is not a whole trust. It is not a whole-constituency model. Families should not have to rely on being in the right setting to benefit from joined-up support. That is exactly why bringing that support together, whether it is through a family-centred model or a strengthened early intervention pathway, really matters so much across North Antrim, particularly for a rural constituency where access and transport are a big deal as well. Bringing services under one roof could be part of the answer in North Antrim. The Minister has spoken about it. Action for Children has spoken about it. They want to develop a family centre in Ballymena. At Ebrington, the Western Health and Social Care Trust's early intervention support services provide short-term, whole-family support for children aged from nought to 18 who face challenges around school, behaviour, family difficulties, development or health. That is the kind of accessible, relationship-based model that we should be ambitious for in North Antrim. I have also seen some really promising work in other trusts that shows what early intervention can achieve when it is practical, relationship-based and delivered before escalation. I visited the Western Trust up in Creggan, where the family response service uses its funding from the Department of Health and the Western Trust. It supports families during the week and at weekends, using youth practitioners alongside family support workers and social workers to build trust with the young people and their families. It does not wait until the family reaches breaking point. It works earlier on a whole-relationship, holistic approach with the child. It works with young people who are at risk of family breakdown, exploitation, antisocial behaviour and, indeed, paramilitary threat. The outcome of that work was really powerful. Families were linked into the community services. That even included connecting in with GPs and health visitors. Families then reported increased confidence in professionals, in social work and in their relationships with the social care system. Antisocial behaviour reduced, and threats against families were lifted. I met a really articulate young man and his mother who had taken part in that service. They told me that it had changed their entire world. Before that intervention, he was under threat from the paramilitaries. He was not engaging in school. His mental health was really poor. On the day that I met him, which was after that sustained, relationship-based support funded by the Department of Health, he was back in full-time education and the threat against him from dissident paramilitaries had been lifted. That is an incredible achievement through a joined-up working approach under the same roof, using all resources that were available to the Department of Health. Again, however, that is a postcode lottery. That is not happening across every trust. I saw a similar principle in the Southern Health and Social Care Trust. I visited early intervention work being done through the family support hubs. Youth justice created a route for children to get support before it escalates into formal justice intervention. That was funded through the South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust. That work has dealt with child-to-parent violence, school assaults, sexting, substance abuse and, indeed, mental health issues, but it focuses on family relationships, emotional well-being, community connection and support around a child. My point here is simple: when we have models of really good practice across other trust areas and intervene early, we can reduce risk, stabilise families and prevent children from being drawn much more deeply into the crisis systems. For me, those models should not be exceptional. They should not be based on a postcode lottery. There should be a standard that we can learn from for families in North Antrim. The Department's Together for Families model is a really positive opportunity. The proposed level 2.5 enhanced family support service would sit between that community early intervention help and the statutory social services, which is precisely where, too many families have told us, they fall through the gaps. If it is delivered really well, it could strengthen family support hubs. It could embed family support workers and provide earlier multidisciplinary help. It was welcome to finally hear today the Finance Minister announcing the Together for Families model being funded by the Assembly and by lottery funding. The original timeline was for it to be up and running by September, but that will not be possible given that the funding for it has only just been announced. Can the Minister give us a timeline for what the beginning of the process will look like and what the implementation of the model will look like? Finally, my ask to the Minister tonight is, I hope, simple: will he ensure that early intervention and family support in North Antrim is visible, accessible and properly resourced with a clear pathway from that first concern right through to support? It needs to have a serious focus on poverty, given that his Department is part of the Executive and part of the anti-poverty strategy. Will there be rural access and a commitment to learning from the models that I have mentioned, such as the Western Trust's family response service and the Southern Trust's diversion pilot? The debate is directed towards the Health Minister, but I recognise that it does not fall on the Health Minister alone. It lands at everyone's doorstep, but I encourage the Minister to use the Children's Services Co-operation Act 2015 to find willing Executive partners to pool resources and invest in the early intervention that, we know, works.

2,067 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:41 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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