About the Children and Family Services
We aim to make Leicestershire a better place for all children, young people and their families by creating a safe and inclusive environment where they can achieve their potential, and have their health, wellbeing, and life chances improved within thriving communities.
The Road to Excellence plan outlines our commitment to building on our solid foundations to provide consistently high standard services to vulnerable children and families and sets out what is important to us.
Understanding trauma
We are committed to becoming a trauma-informed department where we believe “we are stronger together”. This means understanding trauma, recognising how it can affect children, families and carers we work with, and knowing how to respond.
We know that our work with families who have experienced trauma can deeply affect us too, positively in terms of seeing families succeed and achieve their goals, and sometimes negatively with staff being at risk of experiencing vicarious trauma, through supporting families who have experienced trauma, and so we are committed to recognising this and supporting staff.
Training, learning and development
We pride ourselves on being a learning organisation. We value our workforce and understand the importance of supporting learning and development, therefore we provide a wide range of training for practitioners and managers, focused on trauma-informed practice.
We are committed to standing up against racism and ensuring equality of opportunity for all.
We use Signs of Safety, Stability and Success as our practice framework when working with children, families, and professionals with Social Care and Early Help Services. This strengths-based model is focused on working with children and families towards shared aims and goals and building on what is working well for them.
We recognise the importance of training, knowledge, and skills for practitioners to be able to best support families, including motivational interviewing, systemic practice and culturally competent practice. Our staff receive thorough and comprehensive training in the use of the approach, alongside resources, toolkits, and the use of our Practice Excellence team who offer one to one coaching and support.
Our teams
Within the Children and Family Services Department, we have two directorates:
Children’s Social Care and Targeted Early Help
Children’s Social Care includes and number of different services based within Glenfield and across the county. This service provides support to children and their families where children are in need of support and also at risk of harm. This service also supports children who are in foster care and who are in adoptive placements.
The Family Help Service provides targeted Early Help services to a child, young person or family, where they are experiencing difficulties that cannot be supported by universal services, such as schools or GPs alone. The service provides support to those who have, or still are, suffering from domestic abuse or with their mental health and wellbeing, or need some extra help with SEND, parenting or supporting vulnerable young people, including those who are at risk of crime.
Find out more about our teams.Education and SEND
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Early Years Inclusion and Childcare Service consists of:
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Education sufficiency - high-quality early years childcare places (including out of schools and holiday provision) to enable parents to go back to work or study
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Education quality and inclusion - advice and guidance to providers to deliver high-quality care to ensure that young children have the best start in life
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- Early Years Inclusion and SEND Team - working with parents/carers and early years providers to support young children with identified and emerging SEND. Educational advice is provided as part of statutory assessment which may lead to an Education, Health and Care Plan.
- Inclusion Service - working with schools, families, children and young people who are not accessing mainstream education to build their resilience and cope with worries, so that they can go back into school.
- Special Educational Needs Assessment Team (SENA) - helping children who are having difficulty at nursery, school or college, or have a disability.
- Specialist Teaching Service (STS) - providing support and advice for schools and families about specific areas of SEND.
- Leicestershire Educational Psychology Service - supporting inclusion and learning, wellbeing and positive futures for all.
Meet our colleagues
If you want to work for a progressive, forward thinking authority where you can grow and develop to be a really good practitioner, come and work for Leicestershire County Council.
Person:Gill, Children and Family Services
The best thing about being a social worker, is that you can make a difference… you can go into a situation where it looks like there is no hope, and where families are in real crisis and feel like there’s no way out for them. But a social worker can go in and help to make a real difference, settle things down, help families to look at a situation with fresh eyes, and hopefully come up with solutions to help families remain together.
Person:Dawn, Social Worker Team Manager
Listening to our staff and celebrating their practice
Our staff is our best asset and we cannot hope to make a positive difference to the lives of children, young people, and their families, if we don’t have a strong and resilient workforce.
Each year as a department, we run a ‘health check’ for all staff where we ask you about your experience of working in the department. This is your opportunity to contribute to wider learning and to create the culture we all want to work in.
We have an active practice development group who contribute to the development of practice, policy and procedure across the department. We have 3 annual conferences to grow and develop together, alongside sharing learning and feedback. We also have our annual Pride in Practice awards each year where we come together and celebrate our achievements.
Learn more about how we are responding to trauma, taking pride in practice and celebrating our achievements in social work.
Our job roles and services
We have a wide range of job roles ranging from those who work directly with children and families, to office-based roles supporting staff, developing policy or contributing to improving services. Each role is supporting some of the most vulnerable children and families and providing rewarding challenges for staff, for example:
- Social workers and Senior social work practitioners
- Other professionals who work directly supporting families such as family support workers, support and assessment workers, family intervention workers
- Early Years professionals
- Educational Psychologists
- Business Support officers
- Quality Assurance or improvement officers
- Specialist teachers
- Occupational Therapists
- Youth workers
- Workforce improvement professionals
- Early Years SEND advisors and managers