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Children's Services - Integrated Working

Working together with children, young people and families

There are new ways of working together to help your child improve their life. Where help is needed, a range of practitioners, such as teachers, social workers or health visitors will work together with you, your child and your family to resolve any issues they may have.

There are four main things that will help us work better together:

1 - Sharing information

  • Better information sharing between you, your child and your family and the professionals working with you.

2 - A Common Assessment Framework (CAF)

The Common Assessment Framework is:

  • A national and common way to make a first assessment of your child’s needs
  • To find out in a quick way any additional needs your child may have
  • To make sure that services respond to the needs of your child in a joined up way
  • To ensure that there is one person who you communicate with and who is responsible for ensuring the needs of your child are addressed

3 - The role of the lead professional

This is a role taken on by one of the professionals working with your child or young person in order to:

  • Act as a single point of contact which you, your child and your family can trust, and who is able to support you in making choices and navigating your way through the support on offer
  • Ensure that you, your child and your family get appropriate interventions when needed, which are well planned, regularly reviewed and effectively delivered;
  • Reduce overlap and inconsistency when more than one practitioner is working with your child ContactPoint

4 - ContactPoint

ContactPoint is a national system which identifies all the services that every child in England is receiving.

  • ContactPoint will provide a quick way for a practitioner to find out who else is working with a child or young person, making it easier to deliver more coordinated support. This basic online directory will be available to authorised staff who need it to do their jobs.

Useful links

Information for practitioners

Find out more information for practitioners on this page.

If you have any queries integrated working, please email integratedworking@richmond.gov.uk

Integrated Working questionnaire

The Integrated Working questionnaireis now closed. Thank you to everyone who completed the questionnaire, which was very helpful in order for us to gauge the level of understanding of these new ways of working. We will run this again in 2009 in order to assess our progress in getting the message across.

If you would like a report of the 2008 survey, please email integratedworking@richmond.gov.uk and we will be happy to send one to you.