As you can see, the ‘Level of Need’ diagram in front of you, we have different sections. We start with the green section which is ‘Universal’. Now what this says, basically, is that there’s lots of agencies that are available to every single person when we need them. So, education being one. Although parents do have the right to choose if they want to electively choose to home-educate their child. Other things include the police, if there’s an emergency we’re able to contact them. If, with our health, we could go to the pharmacist and gain advice from them. We could go and see the GP, or if it was more severe that that then we could go to A&E. But they’re available to all of us when we need them.

When we move through to the yellow section, the ‘Additional’ section here on the board, here we’re looking at the extra need that somebody would have. So, if you see me, depending on how large the screen is, you’ll notice that I have got glasses. Therefore, I’ve got a need to go and see an optician. I’ll go and see the optician, they’ll assess my eyes, work out whether my prescription needs to change, and that’s that. They’re the agency that helps me there. I could also have another need, which I have with asthma, and I will go and see my asthma nurse and, again, they will work out what’s needed with my prescription. Currently, my asthma nurse does not need to speak to my optician because they’re not worried about me, it’s not like I need a multi-agency support mechanism. Other things within education that could be classed within ‘Additional’ are things like behaviour support, if English is an additional language, there could be counselling services that children are accessing Child and Adult Mental Health Services, speech language therapists, educational psychologists for assessment. They could have a diabetic nurse, asthma as we said, anything like that. But it’s just the single agencies, you can have multi-agencies working with you, but it’s just not on a multi-agency approach, it’s on a single agency approach, because we’re not concerned about the individual.

Where we start moving on to the orange section here, at this point we are concerned about the individual, the child, the adult, the family. And what happens within this orange section is that we will have support from Early Help, it could also be the Team Around the Family, or parent support. Those are the three main ones in here. All those are covered usually within Children’s Services and will come under different names for different authorities. And it’s well worth just checking what it is, again in your area, that provides that title of Early Help / Support there. The difference between the yellow and the orange is that bit that, now, agencies need to work together. And when we work together, we need to work together towards a shared endeavour, shared goals. What is it that the family actually want support with, how can we support them with what they want and to achieve it? And the whole idea is that once we’ve provided that support we can then remove it and the family will be strong enough by themselves. If we can intervene as early as possible (we’ll talk about this a little bit further in the module) we tend to get better results than if we do wait and intervene at the last minute, generally, when it’s coming to the red section.

Again, the Team Around the Family is less intrusive than Care and Support. Care and Support is a recognised package by Children’s Services and does involve more involvement from a social worker. An example could be, for this, that one person within the family has recently lost their job, therefore now they’re struggling financially, there’s difficulties with feeding the family. They could be looking at support from food banks, uniform banks (helping with clothing), and so on. They could also need help to decide how to access any benefits that they’re entitled to, as they’re not sure how to access those. Because of the lack of money it could be a housing issue, worried about paying the rent and concerned that they’re going to be evicted. With that, there could also be an attendance issue. Because, previously, the parents used to bring them to school in a car, or would pay for a bus journey for that child to attend. So, we can see there, that there’s more than one thing going on in the family. There could also be mental health or substance misuse in there as well. And what child practice reviews, and previously to that – serious case reviews, told us was that if we just worked in our silo nothing improved for the family, because we were all fighting against each other, families were having to repeat things numerous times. Therefore, they were ending up not engaging with agencies, where if we do work in a multi-agency approach we can all hear things at the same time in the meetings that we have and then work with that family to improve.

The main section, where it passes into the red section, this, if you’ve done the ‘Laws and Guidance’ module, is your child or adult at risk and also your child that is looked after. Now your definition of your child or adult at risk is that they’ve got needs for Care and Support and that they’re at risk or experiencing abuse. For an adult, due to those risks or needs, are unable to protect themselves. Notice the change in terminology with the child that is looked after. Previously, you might be used to the term ‘looked after child’. But the feedback we’ve had from children with lived experience of this is that they don’t like the term. Two reasons. One, because of the acronym, it used to be ‘LAC’, and again it felt very much like a label. And then, the second thing is that now we are actually putting the child first. ‘Child looked after’ rather than a ‘looked after child’. The main difference between them is consent. Parents have got rights, as you read, with human rights, and they’ve got the right to choose. With the orange and yellow, if we want to put a referral in for support, we must do that with the consent of parents. Agencies do vary, some will want an actual physical signature, some are happy that you’ve had a conversation. Just check with the agencies what it is that they require. With the red section, then it does vary. What we want is that people do have a conversation with the family, because again we’re being open and honest, apart from if it puts the child at risk, if it puts a member of staff at risk if there’s a chance of violence or aggression there, and also if there’s a chance of destroying any evidence. The new one that came in in Wales is Gillick competence and we’ll talk about those reasons in another module.