Children’s Social Care aims to support all children in Barnsley to grow up safely and achieve as much as they can in life. To do this we work very closely with parents and colleagues in other agencies, such as education, health and housing. We usually get involved with families where children’s needs are complex and additional support is required beyond that provided by services such as schools and health through the Common Assessment Framework or where children are believed to be at risk of significant harm.
Contact details for all Children’s Social Care teams are accessible from this link.
There are two assessment teams which undertake initial and core assessments with families to identify what the needs of the children might be and agree a plan for future work if necessary. If there is a need for continuing work, a social worker from one of the following teams may become involved:
- family support teams who are involved where the contact is likely to be fairly short-term and who work with children, young people and families to prevent children and young people coming into the care of the local authority or becoming subject to a child protection plan.
- children in need teams who are usually involved where there are child protection concerns, court action is required, or where children need to be looked after by the local authority at least for a time.
- children with disabilities team who support children with permanent and substantial disabilities. This service is usually involved with families where a common assessment form has already been completed and children have more severe and complex needs.
Social workers making assessments with families often need to gather information from other agencies or from other publicly available sources to help them give the best advice and support. Usually they will gather this information with consent from family members, but in some cases, specifically where children are believed to be at risk of harm; information may be requested and shared without consent. Social workers also gather information about families which can be used more generally to inform service planning or to report back to central government. In such cases, families and children are not individually identifiable.
Information sharing in Children’s Social Care is covered by the privacy notices which you can access via this link.
If you have a compliment about Children’s Social Care or you wish to make a complaint about the service, please follow our compliments and complaints procedure.
