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Children & Families Services
About Devon
Devon County Council is the second largest local authority in England. The area covered by us includes a range of market and coastal towns, the city of Exeter and a mass of rural villages.
About Devon Social Services
Our Social Services Directorate was awarded Two Stars for performance by the Social Services Inspectorate - a rating which has recently been refreshed. We are constantly striving for best practice and have an excellent track record on innovation and strategic development as well as operational management.
How we are Organised
Devon Social Services is currently in transition from being organised into eight Districts matching District Council areas to three Localities, each spanning two of the six Primary Care Trusts in the County. This is enabling us to ensure seamless service delivery with the NHS and our staff are co-located with Health staff on 51 premises throughout the County. We have a presence in every major settlement in Devon.
Exeter & East Devon Locality
Exeter is the South West’s regional capital city and has a population of approximately 111,000. It is situated in the heart of Devon with easy access to the coast and countryside. Exeter is a relatively prosperous city with high employment but there are several wards with high levels of disadvantage.
East Devon covers a large geographical area with small market and coastal towns in the east and the larger town of Exmouth in the west. Although the population includes a large proportion of elderly people, there are also 24,600 children in the District which makes East Devon amongst the largest districts in the County.
Northern Devon & Mid Devon Locality
Northern Devon spans the District Council areas of North Devon and Torridge, with the North Devon PCT covering the whole area. The main towns are Barnstaple, Bideford, Ilfracombe and South Molton, with an overall population of approximately 150,642. North Devon is an attractive environment in which to live and work, with over 850 square miles of some of Britain’s finest countryside and coast - particularly popular with surfers. The boundary stretches from the coastal borders of Lynton and Lynmouth to Hartland and up into the rural areas of Holsworthy, Eggesford, Dulverton and Simonsbath.
Mid Devon covers an area of 353 square miles. It has a population of 104,000 of whom 2,000 are children under 16 years. It is predominately a rural area but includes four major towns, Tiverton, Cullompton, Crediton and Okehampton. The boundaries stretch from Exebridge in the north to Cheriton Bishop in the south, Okehampton in the west and Hemyock in the east.
South Hams, West Devon and Teignbridge Locality
The South Hams & West Devon covers a large rural area, the main towns being Totnes, Dartmouth, Kingsbridge, Ivybridge and Tavistock. The boundary stretches from the borders of Plymouth up onto Dartmoor and east towards Newton Abbot. It is a beautiful area with stunning coastal and moorland scenery plus a number of picturesque rural villages.
Teignbridge encompasses some 250 square miles of beautiful Devon countryside and is home to 116,000 people. The district includes the seaside resorts of Dawlish, Dawlish Warren, Shaldon and Teignmouth, as well as a large part of the Dartmoor National Park which comprises many rural villages well known to holiday makers. These include Widecombe in the Moor, made famous by Uncle Tom Cobley, and Buckland in the Moor, looking like a picture postcard with its old thatched cottages and farms. There is no shortage of outdoor and sporting activities in the area.
Care Management in Devon
Devon has received national recognition for it’s method of responding to the challenges of the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their families. It has introduced a new differentiated approach to children’s care management, which is delivered via a Help desk and Personal Care Management Service in each District.
The Help Desk provides help (signposting), advice and information. It takes referrals and undertakes all initial and core assessments. Cases are therefore held in this service for approximately eight weeks. The Help Desk also manages ‘review-only’ cases that do not require social casework intervention.
The Personal Care Management service provides a social casework service to all Children in Need and their families who require a named allocated worker to ensure the safe and effective implementation of their care plan. Cases are predominately children on the child protection register or looked-after children.
Specialist Teams and Services
Joint Agency Teams for Children with Special Needs
Devon Social Services is actively pursuing the modernisation and integration agenda with the NHS. At the cutting-edge of this joint work are our joint agency teams for Children with Special Needs.
Joint agency teams are flourishing and being developed across the County. They combine Social Services staff with Health staff such as paediatricians, clinical psychologists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, school nurses, health visitors and community psychiatric nurses. They are also linked to the County Council’s Education Directorate via close arrangements with educational psychologists, pre-school advisory teachers and special education staff.
Joint agency team managers are directly accountable to a senior officer in their relevant Primary Care Trust and are line managed by this officer and a senior Social Services manager. Joint agency managers meet fortnightly with lead officers from Social Services, Health and Education and service development and monitoring arrangements include forums for parents and young people along with development of an independent advocacy service for young people.
Fostering Teams
Devon’s Fostering Service provides a recruitment, training, supervision and support service to foster carers and a placement service to childcare social work staff.
We have three locality teams offering these services based in Exeter, Barnstaple and Totnes. In addition we have a county wide Family Care Worker Service which provides carers who foster some of Devon’s most troubled young people.
The fostering service aims to provide high quality placements for looked-after children. We have an ambitious programme of training for foster carers and also offer NVQ opportunities to carers. We are improving our promotion and recruitment of carers by the development of a fostering promotion post and posts offering direct support to foster carers.
Adoption Team
Devon’s Adoption Team works from three local bases in Exeter, Barnstaple and Totnes.
The Team:
- undertakes the recruitment, assessment, preparation and support to prospective adopters
- works with the South West Adoption Consortium and the national Adoption Register to provide and secure adoptive placements for looked after children
- offers advice and support to children’s social workers in family finding
- operates a letterbox system for post-adoption contact
- co-ordinates a county-wide birth records counselling and support service for adopted adults and their birth and adopted relatives
- acts as a point of contact for all kinds of adoption support enquiries
- co-ordinates and supports the work of the adoption panels.
- The volume of adoption work has roughly doubled over the past four years and the unit has expanded to keep pace with this, both in terms of the number of staff employed in the unit and the range of activities undertaken.
Staff Care
Devon County Council and its Social Services Directorate take staff care very seriously - our staff being our greatest asset. All staff benefit from a comprehensive range of measures to help them maximise their career and personal development potential, and support them in their daily working life. These include:
| Staff Accord |
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| Appraisal |
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| Supervision Policy |
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| Acceptable Behaviour |
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| Employee Welfare Service |
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| Pay and Conditions |
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| Work-life Balance Policy |
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| Trades Unions |
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| Reducing Stress Policy |
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| Risk Management |
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| Managing Absence |
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Standards for Learning and Development
We have put in place comprehensive and robust standards as follows:
- Learning requirements
- required training linked to experience
- other mandatory training at a specific time
- additional time for learning and development.
- Four days per annum to be available for most staff in order to meet learning and development needs identified in the annual appraisal.
- All training courses are competence-based and linked where possible to national standards.
- A process for accreditation of prior learning is being developed to ensure that attendance at training courses is based on need.
- The Post Qualifying Child Care Award - training has recently become available to Devon Social Services via a regional Child Care Award Programme covering the far south west of England. Social workers in child care services are able to access both the the entry requirement (PQ1) training and be nominated for a place on the Peninsula Child Care Programme. A departmental strategy is being put in place to enable qualified child care social workers to achieve the award as part of the commitment to continuous professional development and the future registration of social workers within the General Social Care Council
Joint agency team managers are directly accountable to a senior officer in their relevant Primary Care Trust and are line managed by this officer and a senior Social Services manager. Joint Agency managers meet fortnightly with lead officers from Social Services, Health and Education and service development and monitoring arrangements include forums for parents and young people along with development of an independent advocacy service for young people.
