1. The Child’s Journey Forest of Dean GSCB Road shows 2012 Karen Goulding
Service Manager FOD
Karen Watson – Service Manager within Children services.

2. How well do you know your Locality
Forest of Dean

4. How many children live in the Forest of Dean?
b) 17320
c) 14430
Answer a)

5. How many CAF’s have been completed on children living in the FOD since April 2012?
Answer – a) 50

6. In the last 12 months how many contacts were about children in the FOD?
Answer- C 2310

7. Of those contacts how many needed to have an initial assessment?
b) 725
c) 935
Answer – a 515

8. How many children have a child protection plan in the FOD?
b) 85
c) 105
Answer b - 85

9. Recommendation 10
LA’s and partners to secure sufficient provision of local early help for CYP

10. “Safeguarding a child is best achieved by responding to need at the earliest stage. The best protection is often secured by providing the appropriate help in the most appropriate way at the most opportune time”
Lord Laming
Proposals
Build services around families
Intervene early
Improve accountability

11. The case for early help
Prevention will do more to reduce abuse and neglect than reactive services
Co-ordination of services is important to maximise efficiency
Good ways of identifying those children who are in need of early help and support.
Services offering early help are not aimed just at preventing abuse and neglect but at improving life chances for CYP.
Early help is an ambiguous term – referring to both early help when the child is young , but also the emergence of a problem at any stage of a child’s life.
The moral argument to minimise adverse experience for CYP endorsed by UN rights of the child. Itis difficult to reverse the harm done to CYP development. It is cost effective – preventing more serious problems which are more expensive to put right.
Research tells us that many features of family life are associated with adverse outcomes, mental health substance misuse, domestic abuse. How do we identify these children?

12. The ‘windscreen’ – A continuum of need, assessment and service delivery  
Talk through the windscreen
Universal
Vulnerable – may have unmet need at a low level – small levels of support may meet these needs – eg speech and language therapy
Complex – needs will be more difficult to meet – will require several agencies to work together to meet these needs. This works best when they are working from a single plan – CAF.
Acute – this is when needs have reached a high level and will often require specialists to work alongside other practitioners to resolve need, for example CP, Youth Offending etc.

13. What Children and Families say
Parents, children and young people told us that when there are problems, they want to be able to get advice easily. They have also told us that they want to be able to get specialist support before things become a crisis. (Gloucestershire’s Children and Young People’s Plan 2009 – 2012)

14. What are we already doing?
FLAG – local partnership group
Families First
GCC services organised around the locality.
Lead Professional Forum’s

15. What next?
How well do we work together in the FOD? Are we able to offer and provide early help? What can we do next?