The Children and Families and Young Offenders Service provides targeted specialist social care assessment and support services to children, young people and families living in Gateshead, as well as statutory youth offending services. To do this we rely on our staff team of over 400, including social workers, support workers, specialist YOT workers, residential care officers, managers and business support staff.
As an authority we demand the highest standards for all our children and young people.
We were one of the first authorities nationally to introduce “Signs of Safety”, an innovative strengths based approach to child protection, now firmly embedded in our practice. We have recently been successful in obtaining funding for co-location, which will seek to bring together our Referral and Assessment Team, Youth Offending Team, Police Child Abuse Unit and Child Protection Nurses by 2011. This will help strengthen our multi-agency safeguarding response, developing closer working practices around child protection cases and ensuring a holistic response to improving outcomes.
Gateshead Children’s Service works at the cutting edge of innovative practice, which has been clearly recognised in our successful bids to pilot new ways of working, always aiming for excellence in service delivery. We are one of only six local areas in England to be selected to pilot individual budgets for families with disabled children and as a “Pathfinder” for short breaks, it has meant that we have had a head start in transforming our short break service. As one of only 15 authorities nationally to be a Think Family Pathfinder, we are developing the way in which adult and children’s services work together, linking closely with the Intensive Intervention and Family Intervention projects as we address problems of families with multiple risk factors, sometimes spanning generations.
Whilst the children and young people in Gateshead benefit from a service which has clear strengths, we know that there are still many challenges. Therefore, in the last eighteen months, we have reviewed and transformed our service to improve quality and increase choices for children, young people and their families. We have developed a dedicated LAC service and specialist Safeguarding and Care planning teams, to improve care and permanency planning and the service to looked after children. We have reshaped our Referral & Assessment Service to provide one point of contact, ensuring consistency in service delivery and thresholds and assessment quality and planning. Some Family Centres have been realigned and co-located in Children’s Centres with joint referral meetings and we are developing joint working arrangements with our local area integrated teams offering a range of universal and targeted provision.
Our 5 area-based teams provide a one-stop shop for targeted services to improve outcomes through early intervention and prevention, linking closely to our specialist social care services.
Our service overall is adopting a strengths based approach with young people and their families, promoting children’s resilience by focusing on their strengths and achievements. Our strategy aims to ensure that children and young people are safeguarded, protected and looked after to the highest standards and that they enjoy the care, stability and opportunities to achieve the best possible outcomes.
The latest CAA rating (which included services for children and young people in Gateshead) assessed our overall performance in safeguarding children as “good” with “improvements being made”. (December 2009).
Our vision for children and young people in Gateshead is for them to be:
“Empowered and supported to develop to their full potential and have the life skills and opportunities to play an active part in society.”
You can read more about our partnership strategy for achieving this vision in the latest review (2009/10) of Gateshead Children and Young People’s Plan. Link to www.gatesheadcyptrust.co.uk
