Our Children’s Services teams

There are four service areas in Children’s Services.

1. Children Looked After (CLA)

 2. Family and Community Services

3. Disabled Children’s Team

4. Youth Support Service

Wandsworth Children's Service has been consistently high performing for many years now, achieving judgements of 'excellence' (4 stars) since the ratings were introduced.

Teams and Team Structure

Children’s Services in Wandsworth are well resourced. It is a borough with one of the highest levels of investment in family support services across London. For example, we have our own residential assessment centre for families that undertakes multi-disciplinary assessments of parenting capacity on behalf of children’s social workers. We have two other family centres that provide community based family assessments and solution focused family support.

We still have relatively small teams and we want to keep it that way. In addition to the team manager each team has a Principal Social Worker, who acts in the role of deputy manager. We have also introduced the role of Consultant Social Worker in order to extend the career grade for practitioners.

Click here to see the Departmental Structure Chart

Partnerships

We have good relationships with our partners, especially the police, schools and health services. This has been highlighted in successive inspections.

The Children’s Department has embraced the 'Every Child Matters' agenda and we are working with our partners to introduce holistic early years services, extended schools provision and the common assessment. Every primary school has a link social worker, who attends regular multi-agency planning meetings to discuss the needs of children causing concern. Recent feedback from head teachers shows just how much the contributions of social workers to those pre-CAF meetings are valued.

Technology

Social work practitioners are shaping they way we ‘do’ ICS in Wandsworth. The implementation of ICS in Wandsworth is led by a social work manager as practice transformation, not an IT technician as systems development.

Supervision

We believe that the success of Children’s Service in Wandsworth is rooted in a strong, long-standing commitment to supervision and professional development. We have an influential workforce development service dedicated to supporting continuous learning for social workers through high quality training. Staff feedback consistently cites this as a reason for joining Wandsworth and staying with us. We also still have a Social Worker Trainee Scheme.

Safeguarding

Another one of our strengths is our safe systems of practice. In addition to the support of your manager through regular supervision every two weeks and access to the training you need, we have a well resourced safeguarding standards unit and an excellent team of lawyers that are available to provide you with advice and consultation whenever you need it.

Accountability

We have a strong sense of service and professional pride in Wandsworth. We want to do our very best for children and families. This is underpinned by a robust performance framework, one that is rooted in identifying a problem and putting our heads together to come up with the best ideas for solving that problem. We use ‘Outcomes Based Accountability’ and a simple but powerful ‘Turning the Curve’ exercise to do this. Whilst we are held to account professionally through this process, we are not into the blame game.

Looking forward

In terms of the future, we are working to ensure that our partners use the CAF systematically and consistently, that no one sees a referral to ‘social services’ as the beginning and end of their own safeguarding duties.

We are investing in our Fostering Service to ensure that the right range of placements are available. We are strengthening our approach to helping children in care achieve emotional permanence.

We are also developing a schools and community psychology service to lead on the further development of Tier 2 child and adolescent mental health services. We want to improve the office accommodation and explore opportunities for co-location with partners.