Children’s Social Care has 4 core service areas, each managed by a Service Manager.

All our social work teams comprise of managers, social workers and support workers. Excellent partnership working is a feature of all our services with well-established professional relationships within BCP Council services, partner agencies, other areas of children’s services.

We use a Child Centred Practice Model and all staff are offered training and support to embed this into their work with children and their families.

Watch our Youtube video about Paul from the Early Support team, who talks about his role and why he wants to keep working with us:

Our Teams

The Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH)

MASH involves working alongside colleagues from health and the police, and our Early Help service. It ensures that children, young people and families are signposted or referred quickly to the right service to meet their needs.

Assessment teams

Triage all cases to screen those as requiring statutory Children Act 1989 S.17 and S47 responses as children in need using the single assessment. The team also provides short term interventions where appropriate to ensure that the "window of opportunity" for change with families is not missed. The team has children allocated once they have been assessed by the MASH.

Complex Safeguarding Team

Complex Safeguarding is a term used to describe criminal activity (often organised) or behaviour associated with criminality, involving children and adults, where there is exploitation and/or a clear or implied safeguarding concern.

The context for Complex Safeguarding is that children and adults are targeted and subjected to serious harm, which is primarily, although not exclusively, outside the family. In the Council’s Complex Safeguarding Team (CST), a specialist social worker is allocated alongside the child’s existing social worker. The CST worker provides targeted interventions for complex safeguarding only.

Out of Hours team

We have our own Children’s Out of Hours team who operate in the evenings and at weekends to ensure that that children and families in crisis can continue to access support.

Children and families first

Our teams offer statutory social work service to help and support vulnerable children, young people and families who are experiencing difficulties that are complex or serious in nature and need planned assessment and interventions over a period of time at Level 4 Children in Need, Child Protection or Permanency through legal intervention and court work.

Private fostering

We undertake assessments of placements to ensure the safety of children and young people who stay in nonfamily arrangements for longer than 28 days such as host families for language schools, or other private arrangements.

Children in care team

Our Children in care team provide a service for children and young people in the care of the local authority up to 16-18 years of age. The team has specialist Health, Education, CAMHS and Psychologist support.

Child health and disability team

Our child health and disability team support all children with disabilities.

Care experienced young people teams

Our care experienced young people teams provide a service for young people aged 16 to 25 years who are due to leave care or have previously been in care and include services for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. They are supported through individual Pathway plans to achieve their aspirations in education, training or employment.

Fostering and supported lodgings team

Our fostering and supported lodgings team recruit, assess and train foster carers for our children in care. Once approved by the Fostering Panel foster carers are provided with ongoing support supervision and training to ensure that they are able to provide the highest standards of care.

Family assessment team and contact service

The family assessment team and contact service provide additional parenting support and specialist assessments for the social work teams and help to support family time between parents and children who are in our care.

Aspire adoption

Aspire adoption is our regional adoption agency that we host and work closely with relevant teams across the whole of Dorset to provide a full range of adoption services for children, prospective adopters and all those affected by adoption, as well as Special Guardianship.

Dorset combined youth justice service

We host Dorset combined youth justice service who are a multi-disciplinary team who work directly with young people who have committed criminal offences to help them make positive changes and to reduce the risks to them and to other people. They also offer the chance to take part in restorative justice processes to help repair the harm they have experienced.