This article has been brought to you by Slough Borough Council's Jatinder Matharu, Education Safeguarding Professional on behalf of Slough Children First's Communications Officer, Andrew Scott. This is for the attention of all professionals working closely with children, young people and families.
Slough Children First are pleased to announce that the Slough Exploitation and Youth Justice Service has now gone live and the team will start to take direct referrals from the Referral and Assessment Service from Tuesday 1 June 2021.
We are however currently providing a consultative and mapping service for all social workers who are currently working with young people who have risks and concerns associated with exploitation. If you do have a concern, please make a referral using a MARF form to sloughchildren.referrals@sloughchildrenfirst.co.uk with EXPLOITATION in the subject box.
Jennifer Cail is the Exploitation and Youth Justice Manager. If you want an informal discussion please either email at Jennifer.cail@sloughchildrenfirst.co.uk or call on 01753522702.
Brief Information about the Team
- The team will sit within and alongside the Youth Offending Team as part of the Referral and Assessment service, and will be the new face of preventative work which the YOT used to deliver.
- The team will be a multi-agency team comprising social workers, YOT workers, outreach workers, substance misuse workers and virtual support offered by health including CAMHS, police, speech and language and CSE.
- All referrals will come through the MASH and will be triaged using the child exploitation screening tool.
- If applicable, cases will be allocated to the exploitation team, although the intention is to keep caseloads low and manageable in order to be able to deliver intensive social work.
- Any sibling of a referred young person will automatically be referred to Early Help for support and intervention for a maximum of six months.
- Intervention and assessment will start from day one with an intensive level of support offered by the social workers, providing daily contact with young people (including weekends) and having face-to-face contact at least three times per week for the first four weeks.
- Assessments will be aimed to be completed within a 25 day turnaround where possible.
- Cases within this team will predominantly be held as CIN, however there may be some occasions that we hold CLA (remand in custody cases if linked to exploitation).
Maximum six months worth of intervention will be delivered by this team. If risk cannot be reduced then usual CP or step down processes will be followed.