Edge of Care is a specialist service to support our children and young people at risk of needing to be looked after by the Local Authority. We aim to ensure the right care and support at the right time is provided, keeping children and young people with their families.

This service will occasionally operate outside of core working hours and staff will be available to support our children and families when they are in crisis.

The team will be multi-disciplinary and will work closely with key partners including Health and Police colleagues ensuring that collective responsibilities are properly met.

This team will be working to prevent drift for our children who have been identified as having a care plan to exit care via a Special Guardianship Order, Child Arrangement Order, Placement with Parents, Discharge of Care Order or reunification, ensuring risks are managed effectively and reduced to enable children to safely leave care.

The wishes of the child or young person will be central to this process. We will provide support for our children in our care to enable them to reach their potential and benefit from the opportunities life has to offer.

This is a brand-new service and developed to ensure that our children have quality family time with their parents, carers and siblings in a safe and nurturing environment. This will occur, when children are not residing with their parents / carers, for an array of reasons, and supporting parents / carers at the same time is crucial, as well as promoting children and young people’s identity.

This is part of our commitment to ensure our children in care and care leavers are supported in the best way possible and is specifically designed to support our young people from aged 16 on their journey to independence. Given that all our children and young people are individuals with their own needs, experiences and hopes for their lives, we are looking to develop a specialist team to support and enable opportunities so our young people in care can gain independent housing, employment and aspirational outcomes – encouraging and enabling them to aim high.

Our Duty and Assessment Team are usually the first service to work with our children and families where there are concerns about a child’s safety and welfare. Our Duty and Assessment workers are skilled at quickly developing relationships and identifying risk with our children and families who are often experiencing points of crisis in their lives. They assess the needs of our children and families and identify what needs to happen to keep them safe and cared for. This will sometimes include undertaking enquiries where our children have experienced significant harm or are likely to if nothing changes. This will often include working with other professionals in children’s and adults lives to make sure they receive the right support at the right time.

For a family that has been referred to ICART getting the right support at the right time is essential, this can ensure (where appropriate) an early approach to escalating need and a prevention of need for critical interventions. Through a robust approach to assessment, access to skilled and experienced Social Workers, Team Managers through supervision, critical reflection, support and challenge is offered at the earliest opportunity meaning assessment of need is accurate and of high quality. If the assessment accurately reflects the family’s need then the right support can be offered at the right time in the right place. 

To enable families to explore support within their own wider family networks. The coordinator will form a relationship with the family and support them to develop their own plan of family support, so as to ensure any risks identified can be mitigated / reduced by family support. This will be a shared resource across the teams and will support our approach to family help.

Supporting children to safely stay at home with their families must be our priority. Providing swift and effective early intervention and sourcing support will enable this to be achieved for more children and young people. Ensuring that full use is made of our strong early help offer in Halton will help to reduce the number of children needing statutory support and intervention, giving better outcomes for children and their families.

Halton’s Children in Need and Child Protection service identify a child’s needs, they work with a child their family, and any other agencies to improve the child’s welfare. Practitioners in this service are always assessing and managing risk, providing / sourcing support to work towards improving outcomes for children and families. Our dedicated Children in Need and Child Protection Teams work hard to keep children with their families. Where difficult decisions need to be made about our children and young people not being able to live at home our teams endeavour to make sure that the right plan is in place to help them reach their full potential and keep them safe.

Our Contextual Safeguarding team use this approach to understand and respond to young people’s experiences of significant harm beyond their families. By recognising that different relationships that young people form in their neighbourhoods, schools and online can feature violence and abuse, the team can intervene and provide support where it is needed to keep children safe. The team works with partners from lots of different agencies so that the right support is provided at the right time to reduce risk and increase safety.

Inglefield Children’s Centre in Runcorn is where short breaks are provided for children who often have complex disabilities. This is a vital service for children and families in Halton. The home gives parents and carers some respite whilst allowing children to enjoy time away from home where they can have fun and enjoy new interests in a safe and supported way based on their physical or learning needs.

The safeguarding unit provides a vital service to some of our most vulnerable children and young people. They are the service that independently reviews plans for some of our children who are at risk of significant harm or not able to live at home. They are there to make sure that we are doing everything we can to keep children safe and cared for. They ensure that our children’s views, wishes and feelings are heard and acted upon where safe to do so. If there are worries about the progress of our children’s plans they provide scrutiny and challenge to social workers and other professionals to help move things forward and keep our children at the heart of everything we do.   

In Halton we want to make sure our children are kept safe in all aspects of their life, not just at home, and that people who work with our children are safe to do so.  Where there are worries about professionals who work with our children and young people, the safeguarding unit investigates and reviews these concerns alongside partner agencies, including the Police, and that action is taken where it is identified that they pose a risk.

Halton’s Children in Care Team are responsible for children and young people living with Foster Carers or in a residential home or setting.

The team works with families to develop the best plan for children and young people who are not able to stay at home. The team identify the needs, wishes and feelings of our children and young people whilst they are not living at home and work with them, the people who are important to them and professionals in their lives to help them reach their full potential and achieve their aspirations.

The team also recruits, trains and retains fostering families that can support children and young people coming into their care in lots of different ways. By giving our foster carers the skills to understand and respond to our children’s needs they are more likely to have stability and care in their lives that helps them to grow up happy, healthy and achieve.

Halton’s Care Leavers Team provides support for young people to transition to independent living after they leave care. 

Just before a young person turns 16, they are provided with a Personal Advisor (PA) to help identify what they need to help them move in to adulthood through their pathway plan. 

PA’s will support our care leavers to reach their full potential as adults and provide help, advice and guidance on things that really matter to them such as having somewhere to call home, accessing education or employment and building skills to help them manage in day to day life. If needed, PA’s will work with our care leavers until the age of 25.

Halton’s newly established Social Work Academy is led by a team of skilled Social Work specialists and provides a complete package of coaching support and development.

Social Workers in their Assessed and Supported Year (ASYE) can prepare to transition into the world of work. Social Work professionals and associated social care roles can continue their learning and development through the academy too.

Our Social Work Academy is dedicated to supporting the workforce to achieve better outcomes for our children, young people and families. Whether you are a newly qualified social worker, children’s social care practitioner or an experienced manager, the Social Work Academy is  available to provide support, advice and guidance on developing practice and keeping our children at the heart of everything we do.