Our job is to work with children and their families to make sure they are safe and supported, and address any concerns or significant difficulties you may be experiencing.
If we contact you, someone is concerned about you or your family.
Social work may call or visit you and your family because we will have received concerns about you or a member of your family from a member of the public, someone who knows you, a professional, or you may have contacted us for help.
The best way for us to find out what is going on is to talk directly to you. If we meet with you, this will most likely happen in your own home.
This first meeting is usually called a Duty Call or Visit.
We will also need to speak to other people, such as teachers, police, health visitors, school nurses, housing staff, and any other support workers you may have. This is to see whether your children or family require any extra help to deal with the current difficulties or worries that have been raised. Using all the information we have gathered, we will work out the best way to help you and your family.
- We may decide that you do not need a social worker and that the people already in your life, such as your health visitors and/or teachers, can help you when you need it.
- We may decide that you do need a social worker and you will be given a worker who will work with you and your family to help decide what changes are needed and how we will work together to get to a point you no longer need social work involvement.
If we think that you or someone in your family is at risk of serious harm, we, along with police officers, will investigate immediately.
We will probably call a meeting called an Initial Referral Discussion (IRD) which will include a Social Worker, Police, Health, Education, and other professionals who may be able to help us make good decisions. Working together, we will all discuss the difficulties or worries with you and plan to investigate these further.
If a crime has taken place, the police will investigate this. You and/or your child may be interviewed by a social worker and a police officer. This is called a Joint Interview, and it lets children have a chance to tell us their story. This interview will also be used as evidence in any court proceedings if a crime has been committed.
This video shows how a joint interview takes place:
We may ask you to agree to a safety plan.
This may include asking someone we have concerns about to leave the home until an investigation takes place. This is to keep children safe. We will always try to keep children at home where possible.
If you are worried about what you are being asked to do in the safety plan, you have a right to say no and ask if there is a different way to keep everyone safe. We really want to work with you to make the best decisions to keep children safe.
A safety plan is voluntary unless we have a legal order, and we have to get that from a sheriff or a children’s hearing and would make you aware of this.