How social workers support families

This means we focus on building relationships with children, parents and carers, and helping strengthen their support networks. This relationship focus also means, alongside our colleagues from various agencies, we can have really brave conversations, helping children stay safe and reach their potential.  

Making a difference in County Durham transcript (PDF) [146KB]

Our teams include

Children with disabilities

Working with children and young people with complex health needs and disabilities 

Emergency duty

Working outside of our normal working hours to help people who need immediate support 

Families first 

Working with children, young people and families  where we are concerned a child is at risk, or where a family needs support to enable the children to thrive

First contact/MASH (Multi-agency safeguarding hub)

A multi-agency team, working with referrals that are made into Children's Services 

Fostering and connected carers

Working with foster carers and kinship carers to ensure children are cared for in a safe and supportive environment

Adopt Coast to Coast

This is a cross county team that recruit, assess and support adoptive parents to provide children with a forever family

Permanence 

This team ensures that children who have a plan of adoption are able to be matched and placed with their adoptive families without delay

Children in care

Where children and young people cannot live with their birth family, this team supports them to thrive in foster care, residential homes or within kinship arrangements whilst maintaining lifelong relationships with siblings and extended family where it is safe to do so

Pre-birth 

Working with families who have had extensive Children's Services involvement previously and normally have had children removed from their care. They identify if a safe plan can be made for the child to remain with their parents when born. If this is not possible, they work to find a permanent home for the child as early as possible

Unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people (UASYP)

This team works with young people who have come to the UK seeking asylum

Care leavers service 

Young person's advisors work with care experienced young people supporting them into independence up to the age of 25 

Adolescent sexual exploitation team (ASET) 

This team work with young people who are at risk of, or are experiencing, harm outside of the family home, including child exploitation, mental health, radicalisation and homelessness.  The team negotiate and advocate on their behalf to achieve positive outcomes

Full Circle 

Full Circle is a specialist therapeutic service for families of children and young people with complex backgrounds and negative childhood experiences, who are not doing as well as we would expect, even though they are now safe from harm

Rapid response 

Working with children and families where the child has complex mental health needs 

Supporting solutions 

A countywide supportive service that works alongside our social work teams with family time, where children go missing from home, edge of care 

Supporting family time 

We support children to have family time with their family when they are in our care 

Erase 

This is our dedicated specialist team working and supporting children at high risk of sexual or criminal exploitation suffering harm outside the home (contextualised safeguarding)

Pause 

Our service to support mothers who have experienced multiple children removed from their care 

Children's homes 

We have a number of children's homes that provide a warm and stable home for children who cannot live in family based care