Solutions is a service that helps prevent children from entering care or enables children to return home from care, when this is part of the child’s plan. We can support you and your family to rebuild or strengthen relationships.
Children aged 10-16 can be referred to Solutions for support when:
- they are on the ‘edge of care.’
- children are on the ‘edge of care’ when relationships are at breaking point and the family feels unable to manage their child’s behaviours and are considering care as the only option left to them
- these children will be receiving support through a Child in Need Plan and their care plan is for the child to remain living with their family.
- they are in a care placement and their care plan is to ‘return home’ to live with their family.
The focus of Solutions is to enable families to strengthen relationships. Bringing a psychologically informed understanding of the lived experiences of children and families. This enhances reflective thinking and fosters a culture of trust and shared understanding across teams and with children and families.
How we work with your social worker
When we receives a referral, a consultation meeting will be arranged for us to meet with the social worker to understand the child and family’s situation and develop a collaborative plan of support. Then the solutions team will continue to liaise / meet regularly with the social worker:
- as part of the ongoing intervention
- for attending required meetings such as Children in Need or Children we Care for Reviews
How we work with you
Solutions provide interventions with children and their families with a systemic and holistic approach. We will meet the child and their family, and agree a Service Agreement in collaboration with your social worker.
When children are on the ‘edge of care’ Solutions aims to identify and understand the needs within the family that are contributing to the breakdown in relationships. We consider a coordinated and flexible range of support to enable change within the family and rebuild or strengthen relationships.
For children who are in care and have a plan to return home, Solutions aims to understand what needs to happen for the child to return home. This helps develop a collaborative returning home plan with your social worker, the family and the child’s carer or key worker.
As agents of change, team members focus on solutions focused methods, taking a strengths-based and relationship approach underpinned by trauma informed planning and interventions. We will talk to key members of the professional network (e.g. education, youth justice) to gain an holistic understanding of current family life and key past experiences that exacerbate or strengthen family dynamics.
We can provide support across the whole family using a solution focused approach to enable a family to agree what they want for their family relationships, and the support they feel they need to achieve their goal. Whole family sessions can include wider family, friends and community support and can continue at a pace set by a family to provide a supportive environment to work through relationship difficulties. It can take a “whole village to raise a child”. Support can also include whole family activities aimed at rebuilding relationships and developing relational skills.
Typically, we will meet with the child to understand their strengths and areas of need, with a specific focus on the relationship with their family and contributing factors important in developing a shared understanding of what has led to the breakdown in relationships. This trauma-informed understanding draws on the child’s social care assessment to consider and agree a range of interventions that are tailored to the individual child and the child’s broader needs (e.g. learning and/or social communication needs, experiences of trauma).
Our interventions focus on relationships across the child’s day to day experience through making sense of unmet needs to understand maladaptive behaviours. They can include emotional literacy and regulation work with an aim to help build a young person's relational resilience.
We also provide direct support to parents or key family members. This is a flexible level of support that can be as intensive as each family needs. For example, they could have weekly structured sessions or see a worker several times a week or talk on the phone daily in times of crisis. Each intervention aimed at building confidence and skills that will result in strengthened family relationships.