Intensive Family Support Services
Our Intensive Family Support Services is managed by an experienced Social Worker with extensive experience in frontline Children Services in both Child Protection and Children with Disability Service. We aim to support children, young people, and their parents to build their parenting capacity and skills to enable them to manage appropriate boundaries and prioritise the needs of their children. This service is also available to young people over the age of 16 years who are in Care of the Local Authority and aim to live more independently. Our Intensive Family Support Service is appropriate where there are significant issues around the safety of children and young people in their environment.
Child Support Services
Our Family Support Service offers 24-hour support to families with whom we work and aims to bring about sustainable changes to minimize risk and assess/inform Children’s Services in their care planning and identifying ongoing support needs as appropriate. Input is intended to be time-limited, though it is recognized that there are some families who require extended periods of longer-term family support.
Our Team works with families who are in need of some additional support to achieve desired outcomes as defined in CIN/CP plans. We ensure that our focus is to help parents or carers to make positive changes in their family lives. We believe that parents and carers often want to make changes too, and that working together gives a greater chance of progress. We work use empowerment and motivational interviewing model to allow families to remain together and develop better routines, boundaries and alleviate concerns of significant risk or harm. We work within the family environment by supporting and helping changes to be made and sustained. This might include helping clients with parenting, establishing routines and debt management. Helping to set-up important appointments and support families in attendance, eg with housing, health, schools, looking at budgeting etc. We help families to understand children’s behaviour and suggest ways in which behaviour can be managed more effectively. Work will be based on a plan of interventions and support which will be developed in partnership with the client and the referrer. The plan of work is regularly reviewed and updated long as required to effect positive change, enabling a better environment and future for the whole family.
We offer 6 to 12 weeks intensive support packages depending on the care plan and complexity of needs and risk of children being taken into the care of the local authority. The purpose of the intervention is to help inform and therefore manage risk more effectively. To avoid short periods of unplanned ‘accommodation’ of young people, high levels of intensive support are used to reduce risk factors. Areas of work are normally identified within the child protection plan/agreed with the social worker/manager. We allocate key workers who will become an active member of the core group and would normally attend as appropriate. Allocated Key worker would maintain regular contact with the social worker with agreed levels of reporting (usually weekly via e-mail). CP concerns and significant events reported outside of this.