Our Multi Agency Support Team (MAST) offers advice and support to families as part of Sheffield’s Early Help offer.
What help we can offer
Every family has difficult times and sometimes needs support. We work with families around lots of different issues including:
- family relationships and communication
- child or adult emotional and mental health issues
- accessing learning, employment and training
- domestic abuse and healthy relationships
- positive parenting strategies to support challenging behaviour
- children missing school
- providing a safe home environment for children
We work with families to recognise and build on their strengths, to find solutions that work for the family. We want to meet their needs with support from relevant professionals and the family’s chosen safe network.
How we work
Once we have received a referral for your family we will identify the type of support we will offer depending on your strengths and needs. It could include:
- organising a meeting with you, your support network and other people working with your family (eg school, health)
- providing advice and guidance to you and your family by telephone, home visit or meeting at school
- allocating your family a prevention worker to do a specific piece of support work with your family
- allocating your family an intervention worker to provide more in-depth support to your family including working with you to develop an action plan and holding regular meetings with your family and significant others that support your family
We will contact the referrer and the parent/carer(s) in the family to let them know what support we can offer.
How to get help
To receive support from MAST you will need to complete a care support needs assessment.
You can self-refer, however, we suggest that the services already involved in supporting your family are best placed to work with you to undertake a whole family assessment. We can work out what is going well, what support needs your family have and what services already involved can do to support you.