Children & Families

Children & Families Hub

Based in Colchester, the Children & Families Hub is the single point of contact for members of the public and professionals to raise concerns about the welfare and safety of children or make a referral.

Assessment & Intervention (A&I)

The A&I teams are the gateway for children, young people, parents and carers, and other agencies to gain access to our Children & Families services. The A&I team is there to undertake incoming assessment and short-term intervention work with families.

Family Support & Protection (FS&P)

Family Support and Protection work with families that have long-term complex issues. We’re talking about where there’s a need for more than three months’ intervention, and where children are subject to child protection or child-in-need plans, or where children can no longer live at home and care proceedings need to be initiated.

Leaving & After Care Teams

Leaving & Aftercare Teams concentrate on good outcomes for young people aged 16-25 who are in – or have left – care. They are multi-disciplinary teams made up on mental health coordinators and targeted youth advisors.

Children in Care

Our Children in Care teams work with children and young people up to the age of 18 who are in care – those who are either placed with foster carers or who live in residential homes. They work with the children and young people to ensure their experiences in care are good, and that they are prepared when leaving care or returning home to their family.

Family Centres

Essex Family Centres intervene to bring about positive changes within families, help adults provide positive parenting and increase the resilience of children so that they can stay with their families where it’s safe to do so.

Fostering & Adoption

Recruiting, assessing and supporting adoptive parents and foster carers, our team matches children to families and provides continual support.

Children and Young People with Disabilities (0-25)

The Children and Young People with Disabilities Service supports children and young people aged between 0 and 25 years old who have special educational needs and/or disabilities, and their families.

Safeguarding

Our Safeguarding service works across the entire Children’s workforce in Essex to support staff with safeguarding responsibilities. The team is responsible for the reviews of children in care, subject to child protection and complex child in need. Within the function, the service responds to feedback from vulnerable children and families, and leads on supporting the Children in Care Council.

Residential Services

Our Residential Service provides overnight shorts breaks to disabled children within a purpose built home, and short-term care in both solo and group home settings for looked after children and young people.

Our overnight short breaks enable disabled children and young people to gain skills and take part in enjoyable activities whilst giving their families a break from their caring roles, whilst our short-term care homes support looked after young people to develop the skills and resilience to return to their families, or onto longer-term care.

Quality Assurance and Safeguarding Service (Child Protection)

Our Child Protection Coordinators chair all child protection conferences in Essex. They also provide consultation and advice to the social work teams, and to multi-agency partners about child protection and safeguarding issues. The service makes a significant contribution to auditing and other quality assurance work within QAS and performs other safeguarding functions such as attending all Multi Agency Public Protection (MAPPA) meetings as the Children & Families representatives.

Youth Offending Service

Our Youth Offending Service works with children and young people who have offended to help prevent re-occurrence. Their success comes from working together with young people and their parents or carers, the victims of crime, and other agencies and organisations in the local community.

The Divisional Based Intervention Team Service (D-BIT)

This Intensive Family Support Service is designed for young people between the ages of 11 and 17 years old and their families, where the young person/family is considered by the local authority to be in crisis.

Family Solutions Service

Our Family Solutions service engages families with a range of issues on a voluntary basis for up to 12 months.

Family Solutions is our Early Help intervention service for families with multiple needs at a complex level who require intensive family support, but whose needs do not meet the threshold for specialist intervention. The 8 operational teams work on the basis of family agreement and can offer up to 12 months of support to families. They work holistically from offices based within the local communities, taking a strength based approach to enable and empower families to make and sustain significant positive changes in their lives. Each team has a Social Worker post and other Family Workers are alternatively qualified from multi-disciplinary backgrounds.

Emergency Duty Service

The Emergency Duty Service responds to statutory emergencies outside of office hours and deals with any Social Care situations raised about children and vulnerable adults which cannot be safely left until the following working day. Their task is to assess people’s needs for social intervention through a process of screening, assessment and response.
Where necessary the Emergency Duty Service will act under the supervision of the Duty Manager to keep service users safe, as well as satisfying the statutory requirements in the relevant legislation.
(Based out of Broomfield)

SGO & Connected Persons

The Special Guardianship Order (SGO) and Connected Person’s Assessment Team first started in April 2019 covering our North & Mid quadrants. Due to its success, the team expanded creating a second team covering our South & West Quadrants. The aim of the teams is to undertake robust, analytical assessments which focus on the trauma children suffered and how the proposed carer/special guardian can provide long term care.

From speaking to Special Guardians, we know that it is essential for them to be fully prepared and informed in order for them to make the right decisions going forward. As a result, we provide SGO preparation training days regularly to ensure that we give people the opportunity to learn and ask questions.

Access to Resources Team

The ART team source accommodation for the field team social workers.   ART supervising social workers carry out Assessments for Supported Lodgings Carers and present them to the Fostering Panels for Approval.  They also carry out annual household reviews, placement agreement meetings, SIA contract compliances and quality assurance visits to their accommodation providers.
The social workers in the team support the carers by offering them supervision and attending any meetings where they may need their support.
The ART senior practitioners provide preparatory training to supported lodgings carers and are involved in work streams for service development; they oversee duty placement searches and undertake Standards of Care investigations.

The Essex Safeguarding Children’s Board

ESCB is hosted by Essex County Council and has an independent coordinating and challenge role around safeguarding practice across its partner agencies in Essex including Police, Health, Community Rehabilitation Company, National Probation Service, Voluntary Sector, Education, Social Care, District, City and  borough Councils, Military Corrective Training Centre, UK Border Force, Youth Offending Service, CAFCASS, Public Health.
While the ESCB does not have the power to direct other organisations they do have a role in making clear where improvement is needed.
For further information go to the ESCB website: www.escb.co.uk

Schools Admissions

Our school admissions and education awards teams handle over 70,000 individual applications each year, from parents seeking school places for their children, as well as those qualifying for school transport or a free school meal.

Roles in these teams offer exciting opportunities to work with parents, schools and other stakeholders in providing these vital services so that children can access education