Early Help Reshape in Devon County Council

Devon County Council is pleased to announce that the reshape of Children’s Social Care Early Help services has now taken place, with the new service configuration going live from the 1 September.

These changes have been introduced in response to their last full ILACS inspection carried out by Ofsted in January 2020, as well as the subsequent monitoring visits that have taken place over the intervening years.

They have designed the services around holistic teams that work across the age range from 0-19 (and on to 25 for care experienced young adults and those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) and will support the development of Family Hubs for Devon.

These changes have centred around the Family Intervention Team, Youth Intervention Team, REACH Team, the Locality Delivery Team, and Family Group Conference service. The Bridges, Y-Smart and Youth Justice services have not been affected.

The new model will meet the priorities and vision found within Devon County Council’s Strategic Plan including:

  • Be ambitions for children and young people and
  • Work together to ensure that all children are safe, healthy and can thrive with opportunities to fulfil their potential.

It is underpinned by three core principles of:

  • Consistency of practice, quality, and communication.
  • Capacity to meet demand and deliver safe, timely, and good quality services that improve life chances for children.
  • Configuration of resources, to ensure they have the right number of people in the right places to meet demand across the county.

The reshape process has resulted in a number of vacancies within new teams which Devon County Council are aiming to fill in the coming weeks.

 

The New Service Teams

The reshape changes have centred around the Family Intervention Team, Youth Intervention Team, REACH Team, the Locality Delivery Team, and Family Group Conference service.

Of these teams, the Youth Intervention Team and REACH Team have been combined to form Links. That means that the four new service teams are:

  • Family Intervention Team
  • Links
  • Locality Delivery Team
  • Family Group Conference service.

More information about these teams is set out below. As the Bridges, Y-Smart and Youth Justice services have not been affected by the changes, they are not detailed below.

 

The Family Intervention Team

The Family Intervention Team (FIT) is Devon County Council’s Level 3 targeted early help support team offering intervention to families with children in the 0-19 age range.

They have increased the size of the family intervention team from 4 teams to 8. The teams will be locality based across the Mid/East, Exeter, South/West and North localities.

The team offer interventions to families, working alongside them to help build on their strengths while helping them to overcome some of the concerns, difficulties, challenges, or obstacles they may have in their lives.

FIT uses a whole family approach involving everyone in the family network who wants to be involved. FIT aims to reduce the need for statutory intervention, improve better outcomes and ensure all children and young people are thrive, but also to identify those families where change and improvement are more difficult to achieve and sustain.

How to access

Referrals to FIT are made via the Request for Support to the Front Door

Contact Information

The remaining Team Manager posts are currently vacant.

 

Links

Links is Devon’s new targeted Level 3 specialist service which will work to increase safety and reduce risk and harm to children, young people, and some young adults outside of the home. Links brings together the expertise of staff within the Youth Intervention Team (crime prevention) and the REACH team (missing children and exploitation) to form an offer of intervention and support to children and young people who may:

  • Have gone missing from home (any form of home)
  • Are at risk of being exploited
  • Are involved in increasing anti-social behaviour (ASB) and offending which may increase vulnerability to exploitation and/or exposure to youth violence

Links can work with children and young people from the age of 10, and young adults 18-25 who are care experienced. Links can work alongside lead professionals where there is already a plan of support in place, and can sometimes take the role of lead professional where the primary concerns are risk and harm outside the home.

How to access

Referrals to Links are made via the Request for Support to the Front Door.

Internal referrals for children/young people or young adults already open to a social worker/ PA – agreement from Team Manager to request Links support, and then a discussion with a Links Team Manager to confirm referral meets Links criteria and type of support. A Safer Me assessment must also be completed/ updated prior to requesting Links support.

Contact Information

 

 

Locality Delivery Team

There have been a few changes to the locality delivery teams. They have appointed a new Team Manger to oversee a team of 4 Locality Partnership Leads and 4 Navigators who will mobilise and support the multi-agency professional network within a given locality to provide high quality early help to children, young people, and their families.

The locality delivery team support Early Help work and supporting partnership services and organisations to fulfil their associated responsibilities. This will include being a go to ‘expert’ in Early Help with a strong working knowledge of the Early Help Right for Children IT system.

They will support the development and implementation of the Family Hubs approach across Devon work as part of an integrated Family Hub Team and Family Hub network partner. Family Hubs will operate as part of the wider Early Help offer in Devon, where children and families are placed at the heart of what they do. Family Hubs are intended to be a local innovation developed to meet local needs and better support families.

Locality Triage will continue to available, but Devon County Council will be making changes to their current offer to the partnership over the coming weeks and as Family Hubs develop further.

The Locality team also support the twice weekly SEND consultations available to their education partners.

How to access

Triage can be accessed by submitting a Requests for Triage discussion to the relevant Locality Mailbox. Triage take place once a week.

If you need any help with Early Help, please, in the first instance, consult the Early Help pages on the Devon SCP website to see if you can find the answer you need.

If you need help with Right for Children, please email the business mailbox at business.rightforchildrensecure-mailbox@devon.gov.uk.

Contact Information

 

Family Group Conference

They have appointed two Team Managers to oversee the development and delivery of the Family Group Conference offer.

The team will continue to offer a restorative family group conference approach that puts extended family and friends’ networks at the centre of planning for their children. FGCs are available to children in Devon at all stages of their social care journey. They are available to children receiving support through Targeted Early Help, Child in Need and Child Protection.

FGCs continue to be useful if children are in court proceedings to ensure that the family’s voice is heard, all options are explored for children to be safely cared for either by their parents or other family members. For children who are being cared for by the local authority, FGCs can play a role in supporting reunification back to family members. At all stages FGCs are an important way of promoting the participation of family in decisions for their children and strengthening relationships between professionals and families and within family networks.

How to access

The Family Group Conference team are current access directly from the internal DCC Childrens Social Work Teams through the agreed process.

Access to Family Network support from the wider Early Help partnership is currently being designed. Further comms will be provided in due course.

Contact Information


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