Children and family services – learn the benefits of pathway children’s services

At The Access Group, we understand the diverse needs of families to strive by offering a holistic range of local government software to nurture, protect, and empower communities that both facilitate adult social care services as well as children services to create smoother transitions between the two.

Understanding the wide range of local government support delivered for children and families enables better collaborations with neighbouring local authorities, community and voluntary organsiations, as well as schools, youth justice services, and healthcare services, to create a supportive environment to enable every child to thrive.

Whether it is managing school admissions, providing efficient youth justice services, offering SEN transport, or delivering early childhood development programs and children's social care support, there are many ways local authorities can help.

But, how best can local authorities manage all this data, workflows, and processes? And how best can local authorities digitally transform their children’s services to ensure the voice of the child is always heard to achieve the gold standard?

By the end of this article, you will learn about the benefits digital solutions have on local government services for children and their families to help build brighter futures for children and young people, improve accessibility to resources, to deliver positive differences in the lives of our youngest community members.

This article will explore the legislation local authorities must follow to deliver children and families services that are high-quality, reliable, and supportive. We will explore the different challenges children’s services can experience and the best ways to overcome them to make managing children and family services easier, more effective, and most importantly deliver support catered to the individual child.

What are children’s services?

Children’s services in local government encompasses a wide range of support, legislation, and programs aimed at promoting the welfare, safety, and development of children and young people.

Primarily designed to ensure every child has the opportunity to grow up in a safe, nurturing environment, and have access to resources that support their physical, emotional, and educational development, children’s services offer support in a variety of fields including:

• Social care
• Youth Justice Services
• Education
• Child Protection
• SEN and Disability support
• Early Years
• CAMHS

By offering a wide range of services to cater to multiple different needs for both children and their families, your local authority can ensure you are constantly creating a safe environment enabling children to flourish and reach their full potential.

By offering a variety of services there are multiple guidelines, frameworks, and legislation that must be followed. This can be challenging for lots of local authorities and often children’s services can be siloed leading to lots of duplication of data, plenty of manual tasks, and high risks of data being lost.

Children’s service examples – How do they differ across the UK?

Children and family services examples can differ across the UK due to the legislation each nation follows. Whilst some children and family legislation across England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland share common goals there are also distinct differences reflecting the nature of governance in each region.

All legislation across the UK follows four main aims:

1. Protect and safeguard children from harm and abuse
2. Promote the welfare and best interests of children
3. Ensure that children’s voices are heard in matters affecting them
4. Provide support for families to create stable and nurturing environments for children

The table below demonstrates the key differences in legislation across the UK.

Whilst it’s clear the goals of UK children and family services are consistent, approaches vary by nation. Scotland and Wales emphasize children's rights, Northern Ireland focuses on Safeguarding Boards, and England seeks flexibility. Increasing demands and limited budgets necessitate innovative solutions to maintain service standards and achieve the best outcomes.

Children and family services – Are children’s services the same as social services?

Children's services and social services are related but distinct. Collaboration and data sharing between them is encouraged to find innovative ways to better plan, commission, and deliver support to children and their families, especially vulnerable ones.

Children's services often fall under social services but extend beyond social care to include youth justice, school admissions, and SEND/home-to-school transport.  This, in turn, requires a comprehensive and integrated approach where specific teams work hard to deliver optimal outcomes for children and their families.

Inspection of children's services – how do they work?

To ensure local authorities support children and families effectively, they must be prepared for service inspections to meet legislation and community needs. Established in November 2017 and updated in April 2024, the inspecting local authority children’s services framework helps inspectors maintain consistency while adapting to individual circumstances.

Here inspectors take appropriate action to comply with Ofsted’s duties under the Equality Act 2010 to focus on the effectiveness of local authority services and arrangements including:

• to help and protect children, and enable families to stay together and get the help they need
• the experiences and progress of children in care wherever they live, including those children who return home
• the arrangements for permanence for children who are looked after, in stable, loving homes, including adoption
• the experiences and progress of care leavers
• the effectiveness of leaders and managers
• the impact they have on the lives of children and young people
• the quality of professional practice delivered by a workforce that is equipped and effective

Recent updates emphasises family involvement in decision-making, stability, permanence, as well as the need for strategic leadership. They also detail how local authorities should cooperate in parenting and work with partners to support issues, allowing children to live safely at home.

For more information on local authority children’s services inspections and recent updates, visit gov.uk.

At The Access Group, we understand the legislative requirements and challenges in managing demand across the different services your local authority delivers, whilst meeting national digital transformation targets. The remainder of this article reviews these challenges and the best digital solutions to improve outcomes.

Roles and responsibilities of children’s services

At The Access Group, we know and understand the different services local authorities provide to facilitate the children and family services needed. We also are aware of the different interventions required within each service, and the guidance, frameworks, and legislation needed to help local authorities deliver their roles and responsibilities of children's services.

We are knowledgeable about the necessary guidance, frameworks, and legislation. Our digital solutions support crucial areas, including educational services, youth justice, social care, and health care, including mental health services. The table below outlines these roles and responsibilities.

Challenges of children services

Local authorities face multiple challenges in delivering children and family services, primarily rising demand and limited budgets. This can overwork staff, leading to higher staff turnovers, inconsistencies, and longer support waiting times, negatively impacting children, young people, and families, especially in mental health support. The table below highlights specific challenges and their impacts on local authorities and communities.

Pathway Children Services – How can technology help?

Technology can help local authorities address challenges in children's services by leveraging various digital solutions. Investing in these tools can transform services, to enhance efficiency and responsiveness, and ultimately improve outcomes for children and families both now and in the future.

Digitally transforming children's services fosters digital maturity, improving service accessibility, data management, and cost efficiency. The remainder of this article will further explore the benefits digital transformations have for local government's children and family services.

The benefits of digitally transforming educational support services

1. Better management of school admissions

Digitally transforming educational support services enables better communication and collaboration among local authorities and stakeholders, ensuring adequate school placements whilst accommodating personal preferences.

Access's Education Management System enhances information sharing, streamlining school admissions across various entities.

Utilising Access Synergy, customers witness up to 98% online application rates, boosting accuracy and efficiency. This year, Access Synergy facilitated over 580,000 primary and secondary school applications in England, representing nearly half of all school applications across the country this year.

2. Enhancing Accessibility

Investing in digital solutions optimises home-to-school and SEN transport, to enable students to thrive in their education by offering safe travel.

Through using Access Adam Transport, Milton Keynes City Council expanded its provider base by 31% and has saved over £750,000 with our system efficiently managing transport routes for over 1,400 children with SEND needs to enhance their educational opportunities.

3. Effective management of diverse needs

Digitally transforming educational support services enhances data sharing between education and social care providers.

With Access Mosaic, seamless updates to student social care records and direct referrals are possible, saving time and avoiding duplication across systems. This integration ensures efficient data sharing and outcomes-based commissioning, delivering better personalised and coordinated care for children and young people.

The benefits of digitally transforming Youth Justice Services

1. Improved efficiency

Digitally transforming your Youth Justice Services offers increased efficiencies through automating workflows to reduce administrative burdens, and allow staff more time to focus on direct support and rehabilitation efforts.

Derbyshire County Council’s investment into Access Core+ has facilitated better support for young offenders, fostering positive education and employment outcomes within a unified system providing a unique and sophisticated solution for integrated youth support.

2. Better data management and insights

Delivering regulations for all Youth Justice Services enables regular reporting and data analysis to better identify at-risk young people of offending or reoffending to ensure more targeted rehabilitation support.

Our Youth Justice System ensures compliance by equipping your service with customisable reporting tools to empower your local authority to generate tailored reports, enabling efficient interventions for young offenders whilst saving time and costs.

The benefits of digitally transforming children's social care

1. Increased Visibility

Digitally transforming social care improves visibility for workers and families, enabling real-time updates and pattern recognition to optimised visits and support.

Oxfordshire Children’s and Families Service, with Access CM, monitors support hours to ensure needs are met.  Spotting issues early for proactive adjustments, Oxfordshire can now safeguard children's welfare effectively before something more critical happens.

2. Better data and risk management

Local authorities increasingly ‘spot-purchasing’ children's homes from the private sector, often taking place at higher costs and with data coordination challenges making it harder for local authorities to compare data locally, regionally, and nationally.

Digitally transforming social care enables local authorities to have a system that can effectively forecast and commission services. Investing in Access PAMMS harmonises datasets to allow sharing of spending and placement information both regionally and nationally, to foster more strategic commissioning and conversation with providers. The Regional Market Position Statement tool provides local authorities quicker insights on quality, risk, demand, anticipated spending, and commission intentions, as well as provider failure, to aid cost-effective commissioning and timely intervention for children's welfare.

The benefits of digitally transforming children’s healthcare

1. Improved Collaboration and Transparency

Digitally transforming children’s healthcare enhances collaboration and transparency, ensuring personalised care through seamless communication among stakeholders and sharing platforms to enable real-time updates among healthcare providers, caregivers, and specialists for more coordinated treatments.

 The Access Group offers virtual wards for home recovery, reducing hospital pressure and discharge delays. Their interoperable solutions enable smooth transitions across care settings, ensuring quality and integrated care for children and families, by enabling clinicians full access to patient data and health information to improve the visibility of bed capacity and patient care across physical and virtual wards ensuring better personalised and coordinated care is delivered amongst the wider care circle to get the best outcomes for children and their families.

The benefits of digitally transforming children’s mental health support

1. Increased Accessibility

Improving children and family services, especially mental health support, is crucial as 75% of affected children don't receive the help they need.

Digitally transforming mental health services can enhance accessibility and reduce waiting times.

Social prescribing, beneficial for adults, is now being adopted for children, with the potential to free up 3 million appointments in England, according to Bernado’s recent report.

Access Elemental Social Prescribing streamlines referrals and data management, fostering collaboration among stakeholders for better, data-driven interventions, and ensuring improved mental health support for children and young people.

Through offering integrations with leading clinical software and capturing all social prescribing data in one place, primary care, voluntary, charity, and high educational stakeholders can follow a population health approach to create a preventative approach that establishes safer referral pathways for children and young people catering to their individual needs, especially during critical transitions, such as moving to university.

This digital transformation ensures improved mental health support for children and young people by concentrating on what matters to them and addressing the wider social determinants of health.

Summarising the importance of children and family services in local government

In conclusion, children’s services across local authorities play a critical role in ensuring the safety and wellbeing of every child. At The Access Group, we recognise the challenges faced by these services, from managing increasing demand and limited budgets to ensuring the voice of the child is always heard.

This article has explained what children and family services are, why they are important, as well as the different legislation and frameworks that must be followed across the different nations in the UK to be better informed and prepared for inspections whilst improve the quality of their service delivery.

Through evaluating the roles, responsibilities, and challenges local authorities experience delivering the diverse services for children, young people, and their families, we have explained how our comprehensive local government software solutions are designed to digitally transform children and family services, fostering better collaboration, data management, and service delivery.

Here our digital solutions support a wide range of services including education, youth justice, social care, and healthcare, integrating seamlessly to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

By centralising information and streamlining processes, we help local authorities meet national targets, reduce administrative burdens, and provide better personalised, high-quality support to children and their families. Our systems enable better data sharing, improve accessibility, and support timely interventions, ensuring every child has the opportunity to thrive.

If your local authority is looking to enhance its children and family services, contact us today to learn how our local government software can help you achieve digital maturity.

Together, we can build brighter futures for children and young people, improving outcomes and creating a supportive environment for your community.