In relation to your staff members who are (or were) involved in the actual process of assessing the care and support needs of disabled children and their parents for the purposes of the Children Act 1989 and the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970 (referred to as ‘assessors’), please provide the following information for each of your authority’s last three financial years (for which you have published accounts) concerning the training courses that these assessors have attended that were specifically directed at ensuring that they had adequate understanding of the care and support needs of disabled children, namely:
a. the name of each course;
b. the duration of each course;
c. the number of your authority’s assessors who attended each course; and
d. a copy of the training programme for each of these courses.
Our response to points a and c can be found on the Training spreadsheet
Information about how long each course was (b) or the course summary (d) is not held.
2. Please provide a copy (in printed or electronic form) of the written guidance that your authority provides to its assessors, for assessing the care and support needs of disabled children.
Guidance for assessors; Eclipse Child Assessment form, Short Breaks Assessment form; Short breaks plan however we do not hold specific short breaks guidance. We provide the following guidance; If the child has a disability then reference should be made to Safeguarding disabled children.
3. If your authority has a social work team that has specific responsibility for assessing the needs of disabled children please provide the following details, namely:
a. the name of this team
Disabled Children’s Service
b. The number of full time equivalent social workers who currently work in this team.
23 FTE Social Worker posts