Children’s Advice Team Daily Meeting Information

The Children’s Advice and Assessment Service (Children’s Front Door) are responsible for taking and responding to all enquiries about welfare and safeguarding issues relating to children and young people in the City of York.

Process

In order to establish how to respond to each enquiry we hold a meeting each day at 9 a.m. Cases are presented by the team members who took the enquiry the previous day and along with the duty social worker and Practice Manager (Children’s Advice Team) we discuss and agree what level of response is required.

Safeguarding referrals are passed directly to the Assessment (SW) team as soon as the decision is made and do not need to wait to be presented at the Daily Meeting.

Visitors

We welcome all practitioners to this meeting so that you can see

  • what type, quantity and quality of referral information we receive
  • contribute to the response from your own agency perspective
  • see first hand decision making and implementation of thresholds

Practicalities

The meeting starts at 9 a.m and is held in the meeting room on the first floor at 10/12 George Hudson St, York. On arrival please go to the lobby and call extension 1900 from the internal phone and someone will come down and let you in (or 551900 from an external number).  The meeting usually lasts up to an hour but can be longer or shorter depending on what has been taken on duty the previous day.

We do not have guests at the Monday meeting but you can come Tuesday to Friday.

Confidentiality

By booking to attend the daily meeting you are agreeing to keep confidentiality about all case specific information that you hear or see.

Car parking

There is an NCP car park on Toft Green and the nearest CYC parking is on Nunnery Lane.

Context

The Children’s Advice team are responsible for handling all enquiries about the welfare of all children and young people brought to our attention.

We have 7.5 full time equivalent advice workers. Each day we have 3 people on “duty” where they take all the phone calls, emails, faxes, letters and then decide how to respond to each contact. There are three options for response:

  1. The advice or signposting required has been provided and there is no further need for any other intervention and so we enter the details onto our system and close the contact.
  2. Vulnerabilities have been identified and the case needs a management decision about the type and level of response. These are the cases that are presented to the daily meeting. If it is decided that the case be dealt with by the Children’s Advice team, the agreed plan is recorded along with the tasks to be undertaken. These will focus on sharing concerns/issues with parents, asking for consent to speak with all agencies involved and then brokering the appropriate support.
  3. If the case is to be passed to the Children’s Assessment team reasons for that escalation are clearly recorded.

Links with Integrated Working

Where practitioners are sharing concerns with the advice team we will be asking if those of you involved with the child/young person have a full understanding of the child’s needs (assessment ) and subsequently if there is a plan in place to address those needs.  We will also ask if you have shared your concerns with the parents.

We are very happy to offer any advice we can about any situation with a child or young person. However we would encourage all practitioners to consider ensuring that they have a good understanding of current needs and have tried to work through this with the family and others involved before considering making a referral for social work intervention. This obviously does not apply to those situations where an immediate child protection issue needs responding to.

We would also encourage professionals to inform us if they have an integrated working/CAF process on going with a child or family so that we can log that information on our database in case there should be a further enquiry about that child and for reporting purposes.

Roles of the Advice Workers

Apart from running the duty service, the advice workers:

  • Will broker all the cases they are responsible for, ensuring that practitioners in the field are enabled to work effectively with the family
  • Deliver the Integrated Working training course
  • Are linked with all schools and partner agencies. In this role their purpose is to ensure that those in that setting who are working with vulnerable children and young people are fully equipped and confident at dealing with the issues that arise. This covers safe information sharing, engaging with families, undertaking and coordinating a common assessment and developing a plan. Advice works will deliver bespoke sessions to groups of practitioners in agreement with the named link for that setting.

To book in to observe the daily meeting, find out who your link worker is or make any contact with the service contact childrensfrontdoor@york.gov.uk or call 01904 551900