Locality Development for Children’s ServicesWe are moving towards a new way of providing localised services for children across areas of education, health and social care to provide better support for children, young people, their families and their carers.
We have divided Southwark into four localities
- Bermondsey and Rotherhithe
- Borough, Bankside and Walworth
- Camberwell and Dulwich
- Nunhead, Peckham and Peckham Rye
What this means for children's services
We believe that providing local, dedicated bases for children's services will lead to a number of significant improvements. Services will be
- More efficient
- More closely based on local need
- Simpler to understand
- Able to meet children's needs earlier giving them a better chance to succeed
- Able to provide specialist support when and where it is most likely to have an impact
Where appropriate, our providers of services to children, young people, their families and carers will be expected to work in these local networks, to deliver a joined up service that has the needs of children and young people in the local area at their heart.
Background
The Children and young people’s plan (pdf 615kb) identified the need for a coordinated development of community networks, extended schools and children's centres as one of the five service development priorities.
This is in line with the  Children Act 2004, which required local authorities to make arrangements to promote cooperation between agencies and other appropriate bodies in order to improve children's wellbeing, and required key partners to cooperate in those arrangements.
For key documents and latest news visit our webpage on locality development resources.
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Locality Integrated Service Teams (LIST)
The children’s services department has taken important first steps to embed Every Child Matters across Southwark. The establishment of LISTs in each of the four localities provides a robust framework for the creation of more accessible, coordinated, sustainable local service provision that will better support the needs of children, young people and families within Southwark.
The LIST will
- Help build capacity of schools and other universal service providers to intervene early to address needs
- Provide a multi-disciplinary resource in each quadrant to support localities to develop capacity
- Ensure early coordinated interventions which improve outcomes
What LIST will mean for schools
A Single Local Point of Contact (SLPoC) for each school that will
- Provide advice and guidance to support a child or family with additional needs
- Signpost to support services
- Support the use of the Common Assessment Framework (CAF)
- Support the use of Team Around the Child (TAC) approach
- Provide a single access point for level two preventative services including behaviour support, education welfare, educational psychology, and shortly, social care and health
The locality teams will operate across the 0 to 19 years agenda. Joined up multi-agency and multi-disciplinary working will enable and encourage professionals to work together, includiong the adoption of common processes, such as the CAF, to deliver frontline services that are coordinated and built around the needs of children and young people.
Who will be in a LIST?
The teams will initially be made up of a number of professionals from different fields, including Social Workers (SW), Educational Welfare Officers (EWO), Educational Psychologists (EP), Behaviour Support Workers (BS), Sure Start Early Years (SS), Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), professionals and School Nurses (SN). We hope our partners within the police and other agencies will be adding professionals to these teams as they develop.
Download the current locality team list (pdf 15kb).
Locality awareness and training programme
A series of sessions have been arranged for staff working with children and young people to find out more about the main areas of the change programme and how they are being introduced in Southwark. This programme is being delivered on a locality basis. You can find details of the programme on our training page.
Contact
Abigail Walsh
Tel: 020 7525 3039
abigail.walsh@southwark.gov.uk
Locality development
15 Spa Road
London
SE16 3QW |