Our everyday practice

Everyday

We are rated Good in all areas after being recognised in our Ofsted report of January 2023 as having transformed Norfolk Children's Services. Read highlights from our Ofsted report.

Our £12-15 million plan has achieved great things and we are continuing to move forward with innovative schemes, including our Targeted Youth Support Service and No Wrong Door schemes to support young people.

What to expect from our everyday practice

Our operating model is designed specifically to support social workers and frontline practice. This includes:

• Dedicated support staff for every social work team to reduce admin
• Dedicated court work facilitators to support social workers
• Continuous development of professionals including domestic abuse specialists, homebased support workers, child mental health practitioners, child and family therapeutic workers, and substance misuse workers to support our case-holding social workers
• Streamlining our paperwork requirements to enable social workers to spend more time with families than with files

Our Children's Advice and Duty Service (CADS) quickly triages cases to the right teams so you can focus on where you can make the biggest difference. Ofsted have described CADS as consistently strong. We have reduced contacts, referrals, and the number of assessments which do not lead to ongoing work.

We've successfully trialled combining assessment activity with family intervention activity which has enabled us to manage cases better, reduced hand-offs between social workers and given those in assessment the opportunity to get involved in direct work and vice versa.

We've introduced a new Family Therapeutic Service, offering intensive support for families with complex needs.

We've developed a new approach to the recruitment of our own in-house foster carers through a value-based approach and we are already seeing a significant rise in enquiries.

And we've secured £120million of investment to improve our educational provision for children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND).

Our approach

We have built a sustainable system placing practitioners and relationship-based practice at the heart of what we do.

Through Vital Signs we work as one system across a partnership and with whole family networks. It is a whole system and whole family practice approach which is relationship based, strengths orientated, and outcome focused.

Relationship based

You'll have the time to focus on doing direct work with families and being the intervention, rather than referring onto other services.

Strengths orientated

You'll recognise the strengths that exist in families and their networks and build on these and the resilience they create

Outcome focused

You'll focus on the outcomes and overcoming barriers to achieve the best possible outcomes for children and their families.

Our approach means our children are prepared and able to learn, they can build positive and long-lasting relationship and receive family-based care.

Join us now and be part of the innovation.

Inclusive employer

We are committed to equality and inclusion and welcome applications irrespective of gender identity, disability, marital status, ethnic origin, age, pregnancy status, religion or belief, or sexual orientation. We are proud to have achieved Carer Friendly Employer Status, Disability Confident Leader Status, the Employer Recognition Scheme award for the Armed Forces Covenant and to be one of the authorities piloting the workforce race equality standard (WRES).