Improving Social Care Services in Suffolk

Suffolk County Council social care services

The key elements making up social care services in Suffolk are: the Family Support Services that work alongside schools, health services and other organisation to provide Early Help Assessment and bring together help around a child and family. 

The Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub, which is where initial decisions are made about keeping children safe in response to contacts made by schools, health, police, the public and other organisations. 

Local social care teams undertake assessments of need and support families under children in need plans, child protection plans and child in care plans.

Our corporate parenting services including fostering and adoption, residential care, leaving care services provide homes and support for children in care and care leavers

Service Development and Strategies

We continuously improve our services in response to our quality assurance and performance processes, feedback from young people and families and inspection of our services by Ofsted

We support government initiatives, often through the Department for Education (DfE) that seek to improve social care services nationally. We are currently closely following the developments arising from the government's Children's social care: stable homes, built on love.

 We publish a number of documents that together comprise our corporate parenting strategy

Working together with children and families

We work closely with children and families to improve social care services in Suffolk. You can read about the work of the Engagement Hub and how it supports children and young people. 

Some of the improvements to the way we work that have been inspired and lead by young people are shown as you said, we did on The Source website. 

Inspections and evaluations of Social Care Services in Suffolk

Ofsted inspect Children’s Services in Suffolk every 3-4 years. In between these major inspections a Focused Visits and/or Joint Targeted Area Inspection may take place.

You can see the previous reports below: