Careers in Children's Services

Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH)

The Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub is Lancashire's 'front door' into Children's Services and the first step to achieving positive outcomes for children, young people and families.

We are a team of co-located safeguarding partners, whose primary role is to search for and interpret information to determine thresholds and necessary action to safeguard children and young people.

As part of the service redesign and early help strategy, Lancashire County Council has launched a discreet early help team within the MASH to support one front vestibule into Children's Services, combining a request for support into both statutory services and Child and Family Wellbeing services (early help).

We look for committed team members who have established experience in the MASH service, experience in a safeguarding role, sound knowledge of legislation/ principles and confident threshold application.

This is a fast-paced role that requires the practitioner to be organised, efficient and the ability to apply appropriate threshold and risk analysis based on limited information. Effective communication is crucial in this role – the ability to work with partner agencies but also to engage families during telephone calls; to offer reassurance and support, whilst also effectively communicating risk and causes for concern.

Duty and assessment

The Duty and Assessment Team receives referrals from the Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) and completes the first Child and Family assessment to identify what support may be needed. We are committed to delivering a service that enables families, children and young people to actively participate within these assessments and plans, recognising that we are often the first point of contact during what can be a very difficult time. An ability to work with other professionals and agencies within this process is key to keeping families together wherever possible and achieving the best possible outcomes.

No two days are the same in this team.

If you enjoy fast-paced work, relationship-based practice, and working with children and families to identify together what support they may need, then this is the team for you!

Extra Familial Harm Team

Extra Familial Harm describes harm that occurs outside of the family system – children who are at risk of or are already experiencing harm caused by people outside of their family and/or children who are at risk of or are already causing harm to young people outside of their family.

The Extra Familial Harm Team is a newly developed service working with young people aged 13 to 18 years who are experiencing harm outside of the home. We utilise a Contextual Safeguarding approach to understanding and responding to young people's experiences of significant harm beyond their families. This approach recognises that the different relationships that children form in their neighbourhoods, schools and online can feature violence and abuse. Parents and carers often have little influence over these contexts of extra familial harm, and this can undermine the parent-child relationship.

Therefore, children’s social care practitioners, child protection systems and wider safeguarding partnerships need to engage with individuals and sectors who do have influence over/within extra-familial contexts, and recognise that assessment of, and intervention with, these spaces are a critical part of safeguarding practices. Contextual Safeguarding expands the objectives of child protection systems in recognition that young people are vulnerable to abuse beyond their front doors.

We are looking for social workers who don't give up on young people, who think creatively and who are comfortable with managing young people and plans in alternative ways. Our social workers deliver intensive interventions to young people to reduce risk within a contextual safeguarding framework. If this sounds like you, don't hesitate to get in touch!

The Contextual Safeguarding Team (Exploitation) 

The Contextual Safeguarding Team is a multi-agency team co-located with the police supporting the needs of young people believed to be at risk of both sexual and criminal exploitation.

Social workers have a non-case holding role and their responsibility is to support and compliment statutory social workers by assessing and reviewing a child or young person's risk levels and implementing a plan of support where required to disrupt unhealthy relationships, support the young person to recover from what has happened to them and work collaboratively with the police to bring the perpetrators to justice.

This team seeks to draw on contemporary research and best practice to ensure children are safeguarded from exploitation in all its forms. Our work is trauma-informed, strengths based and involves building trusted relationships with children and young people to build self-esteem and confidence around themes such as safe relationships, diversionary activities and education.

Child and Youth Justice Service (CYJS)

The Child and Youth Justice Service team's aim is to prevent and reduce the risk of offending and to reduce the harm that children may present to themselves or others. They  work with children and young people aged 8 to 18. They strive to achieve their aims by working in line with our core principles of: Child First, Trauma Informed and Restorative approaches.

CYJS is a multi-agency team, made up of Social Workers, CYJ Workers, Young Person's Training officers, Probation officers, Police officers and Health specialists, including Child and Adolescent Mental Health workers, a Health Safeguarding Nurse, Speech and Language Therapist consultants, 'We are With You' Substance Misuse workers and Consultant Clinical Psychologist.

CYJS has strategic lead managers for Education/Training and Employment and Restorative Justice and Health.

CYJS provides a service to the Youth Courts and as required in Crown Court.  CYJS delivers statutory court-ordered work and non-statutory diversion and prevention services. All victims of children referred to CYJS are consulted and offered a restorative justice approach.  Referrals for statutory work are from the Police or Courts.

The prevention service offers support to children to prevent offending behaviour, referral are considered from social workers, schools and police on a case by case basis. All children and parent/carers referred to CYJS are encouraged to contribute and feedback within their assessment, intervention planning and review meetings.

Family Safeguarding does what it says on the tin. The child is the centre of our work, but it's also about a whole family approach.

Alongside the social workers in our team, we have specialist team members who work with the adults in the family around issues such as domestic violence, substance misuse and mental health.

Our focus is on keeping families together and supporting them when it's safe to do so, whether it be under a Child in Need plan, a Child Protection plan or within the court arena.

Our team members are trained in using Motivational Interviewing and working with the Cycle of Change and due to the breadth of the work, they are able to gain valuable experience and skills.

If you’re looking for a challenge and to develop some excellent social work skills, then Family Safeguarding might be the right fit!

The Permanence Service is made up of Children in Our Care teams and Leaving Care teams. We dare to have big goals, huge ambitions and aspirational dreams for our children and young people, to support them to achieve and believe in themselves. Our children and young people are at the very heart of absolutely everything we do, and we include them in the decisions we make.

We work creatively with children in our care aged 0-18 years and care experienced young people aged 16-25 years.

We undertake visits to and directly work with our children and young people, review and implement multi-agency care and pathway plans and undertake assessments. We promote our children and young people's health and wellbeing, relationships and education. We also work closely with carers and other professionals to support all aspects of our children and young people's lives.

We strive to promote a sense of security, continuity, support and stability for children and young people to achieve permanence in their lives.

If our values align with yours, why not join us?

The Fostering team's purpose is to provide the best alternative family homes to children and young people who are in our care where they cannot live with their birth parents. 

This includes the following teams:

• Assessments with Families and Friends Team, who assess and support family members and friends to care for children and aim to keep children within their extended family. 
• Mainstream Recruitment and Assessment Team who assesses, trains and prepares our next generation of foster carers to ensure that we always have foster families for our children who cannot live with their birth family. 

• Support to Permanence Teams who support and supervise our foster carers, once approved, to ensure that they have the skills, training and experience to provide the highest calibre of care to some of our most vulnerable children and young people. 

• Additionally, our specialist SCAYT+ team, which specialises in emotional health support, helps carers using attachment-focused therapeutic principals.

If you're looking to make a positive difference to the lives of vulnerable children and young people in Lancashire, consider a career within the Fostering Team today!

Lancashire County Council is the host authority for the Regional Adoption Agency (RAA), which provides a comprehensive service to families in Lancashire and Blackpool.  

The RAA delivers recruits and assesses prospective adopters and supports adopters through family finding, matching and bridging up until the adoption order is granted.

The Recruitment and Assessment team is actively involved in marketing campaigns as well as adoption preparation training.

Our family-finding team is responsible for identifying a suitable adoptive family for a child with a plan of adoption. This includes completing profiles of children, using Link Maker, attending adoption activity days and subsequent matching meetings.

Finally, our adoption support team undertake adoption support assessments of families and oversee subsequent support and intervention. The team facilitate support groups, workshops and events for adoptive families, as well as working closely with multi agency partners and complete access to records for adoptees.

We are passionate about matching loving families with children and young people who need them most – are you? Join us!

The residential and outreach team is made up of the following;

• One outreach service, which is a highly adaptive service to the needs of families
• One adolescent support unit, which offers both outreach and planned respite
• Seven mainstream children's homes accommodating 6 children
• Three complex homes offering accommodation for three children who would benefit in being in a smaller home
• One solo placement, which is used for the more complex children
• Three short break homes, which provide essential care to children with disabilities

We work tirelessly to meet the needs of the children placed within our homes and provide the best possible outcomes for them as well as keeping them safe from harm.

We have recently won a national award for the best "Council Service Team" with the MJ Awards for the work our homes did to continue running safely during the pandemic.

If you feel you have the skills to work with us to support these children and young people, get in touch!

The IRO service is dual role, meaning that we chair Child Protection Conferences and hold a caseload of Children Looked After. This means you can work with children and families right through the service, developing positive and meaningful relationships. We have now embedded strength based Child Protection Conferences, ensuring we are working with families to understand their risks and develop their child protection plans in a co-produced way. We work diligently to  ensure that children in need of protection and Children looked After have timely, person centred plans which result in safety, stability and permanence.

The IRO service also provide additional services in terms of Reg 44 visits, meaning that you can develop relationships with our in-house residential service and get a true understanding of what life is like for children and young people in our care.

We also undertake audits, again this offers the opportunity to understand social work practice and feedback how we can develop the service.

If you feel you have the skills to work with us to support these children and families, get in touch!

The Children and Family Wellbeing Service offers early help and support to children, young people and their families across Lancashire.

The service responds as early as possible when a child, young person or family needs support and this helps to prevent concerns escalating.

By working together with the child and family we are able to provide an enhanced level of practical support to address needs directly. 

Sometimes our family support workers meet with individuals or families on a one to one basis, and sometimes they bring children, young people and families together in groups. We focus on strengths and protective factors, and build a positive relationship with the family where their voice is heard and they feel listened to.

The role of our neighbourhood based workers, who largely deliver support through our network of neighbourhood centres, is wide and varied.  This may involve supervising family time, delivering group based programmes, or working alongside other agencies and providing advice and support.

Family support workers within the Family Intensive Support teams undertake Early Help Assessments and work closely with children and families and other professionals to deliver a multi-agency plan of support that the family are on board with. Youth Workers deliver group work programmes to our young people in the community and may also provide one to one support.

Children's Social Care (CSC) and the Children and Family Wellbeing Service (CFW) have employed a Principal Worker to ensure that transitions across Social Care and Early Help are consistent, that we are applying the same thresholds, and that the services are aligned to ensure that children and families are supported to receive the right services by the right people at the right time.

The Children with Disability Service is part of the Inclusion Service and comprises a team of Social Workers, Consultant Social Workers, Child and Family Practitioners and Leaving Care Personal Advisors. We are a progressive and innovative service to work within.

We support children and young people from birth to age 18 and care leavers up to age 25 who have severe and profound disabilities, as well as their families. Working long term with our families enables us to fully embrace and be on the journey with the children and young people we support and see their achievements at different stages of their life to ensure that they have good positive outcomes and that their voices are heard. We take a strengths-based approach to supporting children and young people, to ensure we achieve the best for the children and families we support. No day is the same with the Children with Disability Team – so if you want variety, challenge and an incredibly rewarding social care job, then this is the service for you.

The Children with Disabilities Social Work Service has six teams supporting families across the whole of Lancashire. We are a generic social work service undertaking all aspects of social work for children and young people who meet the criteria for support from our service. This includes undertaking assessments, direct work, supporting children in need, children in our care and care leavers, undertaking safeguarding and court work and supporting transition to adulthood. The service offers the opportunity for the development of a wide range of practice experience and skills and career progression within the service.

Multi-agency working is key in supporting our children, young people and their families. We work closely with multi-agency partners and other teams across children's and education services to provide joined-up support that makes a real difference and improves outcomes for the children and families we support. We recognise the importance of working creatively with our children and young people. We focus on our children and young people as individuals, getting to know them, learning to communicate with them and support them and their daily experiences to be one that is positive. Our long term relationships with children and families enable us to keep them together and prevent concerns escalating by providing individualised packages of care and support.

Our aim is to ensure children and young people with disabilities are supported to achieve their full potential, reach their goals to ensure that they lead a full and inclusive life and be given the same opportunities as their peers. Come and join us on our journey to make a difference to the children and young people we support who really are at the heart of what we do - we feel it is an honour to be part of their lives.