Report of Strategic Director, Care Health and Wellbeing

A report was presented on the changes to the Referral and Assessment Service. It was noted that previously the service operated a duty room which received a huge number of contacts from the police, the Referral and Assessment team then transferred cases at the end of the assessment to Safeguarding and Care Planning Teams.  The Safeguarding and Care Planning teams then held all cases, including; child protection plans, court work, children in need cases and LAC cases up to permanency.

The service felt that there were too many inappropriate police contacts being handled by the duty room, also there were avoidable transfer points between Social Workers and services. In addition, child in need cases requiring intense interventions were not able to be given the necessary priority.

In order to restructure the service the guiding principles were looked at. These principles included; limiting transfer points as far as possible, maintaining caseloads at levels which allow for meaningful interventions to take place.

From June 2018, multi-agency triage meetings are held daily, where there is representation from police, 0-19 service, Early Help and domestic abuse service. Police contacts are filtered out or redirected and signposted to alternative services. From January 2019 the Referral and Assessment Team became the Assessment and Intervention (A&I) service, emphasising the intervention aspect of the work. There are six A&I teams and a dedicated team manager post was created for duty work so that social workers are no longer working on a rota basis in the duty room.

Children in Need cases remain with the Service unless circumstances change and the case needs to escalate to Child Protection or LAC. In terms of the impact of these changes it was noted that staff seem to prefer the new approach, there has been 53% fewer contacts from the police, CiN assessments are completed sooner and there has been a marked reduction in re-referrals. In addition, there are also fewer cases transferring from A&I to Early Help and there has been 11.5% reduction in Child Protection Plans.  It was noted that re-referrals are used as a proxy measure, this has reduced to 55.5 per 10,000 which is a huge reduction. Step downs to other services have reduced, therefore this indicates that the correct CiN plans are in place.

It was reported that the Gateshead CAN model is an overarching systematic and strengths-based approach which recognises the interrelationships between Context, Action and Narrative. Some of the methods and models that Social Workers use were provided to the Committee including Genograms, Signs of Safety and Narrative techniques and tools from positive psychology.

It was questioned whether staff are happy with the changes to the service. It was acknowledged that staff were initially worried about not having enough time to do intervention work, however staff are now happy with the new arrangements. Committee was advised that the Council is not attracting as many Social Workers as hoped, despite comparable salary levels.

RESOLVED    -           (i)         That committee continue to champion the work

undertaken by the Council’s Children’s Social Workers.

                                    (ii)        That the content of the report be noted.

                                    (iii)       That Committee receive the annual evaluation in April

2020.