Luton Borough Council

Approximately 54,700 children and young people under the age of 18 years live in Luton, 26 per cent of the 214,000 population.

There are high levels of child poverty, compared with regional and national averages - around one in five children are entitled to free school meals.

Children and young people from minority ethnic groups account for 61 per cent of all children living in the area, compared with 22 per cent in the country as a whole, while the proportion of children with English as an additional language is around 50 per cent, three-times national averages.

In 2016, children's services was rated "requires improvement" and a recent Ofsted focused inspection praised the "significant transformation programme" that has taken place since then, including the introduction of a whole-family model of safeguarding.

Family safeguarding approach improves support for vulnerable children

By Amanda Lewis, corporate director for people, Luton Borough Council

Luton Council adopted the Family Safeguarding programme in October 2017. We were one of four councils awarded a share of £11.6m from the government's Children's Social Care Innovation programme to implement the model previously developed by Hertfordshire Council.

It is a profoundly different approach to working with vulnerable children and families. It supports the whole family and includes parents more proactively in the solutions to their difficulties that put children at risk.

Teams of mental health, domestic abuse and substance misuse practitioners now work alongside children's social workers to collectively address the root causes of problems affecting parents.

This shared ownership model of practice is critical to its success. It has brought our professional expertise together into an integrated team, and helped everyone value the different professional views brought to the table.

The five Family Safeguarding multi-disciplinary teams are co-located. The teams use an electronic workbook to record information about children and families in one place which also reduces bureaucracy.

When I've heard the multi-disciplinary teams present the families' stories you get a far more rounded perspective and get a good understanding of what needs to change from the child's perspective.

Social care staff have said how much they have enjoyed working with mental health and other practitioners; it has made children's social work more rewarding in that you can affect change. We've moved from a monitoring and compliance role to one of enabling change. It is also helping keep children at home, which reduces the cost to the public purse.

We have seen a fall in the number of children in need and maintained our looked-after children population. Also, more than 40 per cent of the children the multi-disciplinary teams are working with are aged five or under which means we are able to intervene earlier to achieve long-term outcomes.

The next stage of the Family Safeguarding model development is to better integrate the principles of the theoretical framework to strengthen practice further so that it is fully embedded across our whole system when the government funding ends.

The model can only really be effective if caseloads are kept at a manageable level. They are heading in the right direction but are not where I want them to be yet. Family Safeguarding teams work with 15-20 families, but we aim to bring that down to a maximum of 17.

Being able to work within a Family Safeguarding Team and practice effective and enabling social work is an important approach to support both our recruitment and retention of our staff.