Woking Close Family Assessment Centre

Woking Close Family Assessment Centre provides a community-based parenting service.

The centre works with families where parents need extra help to ensure their children's long-term welfare needs are met. It also provides a safe environment for looked after children to have supervised contact with their parents, siblings or other family members.

“Our Team aims are to work together with families to ensure they have every opportunity to come together and to show that they can care for their child/ren. Our work is based on compassion, respect for family life; good practice; sound evidence; careful thinking and the best use of our knowledge of human development.”

The Family Centre services are accessible through referrals made by Children's Social Care, social workers and family support workers.

Services include:

• Parenting Assessments
• Domestic Abuse Programmes
• Positive Parenting Programme (Triple P)
• Video Interaction Guidance
• Attachment Style Interviews
• Family Group Conferences

Woking Close Family Assessment Centre provides community-based parenting assessments and interventions, including Family Group Conferences for families with children within the Borough of Wandsworth. The Signs of Safety approach is used to map the referrals with the allocated Social Worker to identify the areas that the assessment would address. Through this process, we are able to contribute to the formulation of questions that make up the Letter of Instruction for cases in Care Proceedings. Before the start of an assessment a Work Agreement Meeting is held with the parents and the allocated Social Worker where the plan of work is agreed.

Woking Close works with families in a variety of ways including individual key work sessions and observations either within the family home, in the community or in contact sessions. Assessors liaise with other professionals such as GP’s, Health Visitors, Teachers, and Mental Health and Substance Misuse Services. Assessors also consult with a Clinical Psychologist, a Parental Substance Misuse Social Worker and Educational Psychologist. Specific details of such ‘specialist’ input are discussed and decided at the Work Agreement Meeting with parents and may be reviewed as the assessments progress. The assessment may also include elements of teaching and assisting parents in developing their parenting skills.

All this is put together in a report with clear recommendations for the future along with answers to any specific questions that have been raised by commissioning agencies or parties.

The assessors will use a variety of methods to gather information including questionnaires, genograms, and chronologies of family histories, observations and play sessions. Woking Close have staff accredited to use evidenced based tools such as Parent Assessment Manual Software (PAMS), Triple P Parenting Programme. Additionally, there are staff who are trained in conducting Attachment Style Interviews (ASI), Family Group Conferences Video Interaction Guidance (VIG), New Beginnings and Preparing for Change Intervention Programs for victims and perpetrators of domestic abuse respectively.

The team use evidence-based research to inform assessments such as:

• Reunification, An Evidence-informed Framework for Return Home Practice, NSPCC (Wilkins, M and Farmer, E. 2015),
• The Framework for the Assessment of Children and Families, 2000
• HM Government (2018) Working Together to Safeguard Children: A Guide to Inter-agency Working to Safeguard and Promote the Welfare of Children, Crown Copyright
• Signs of Safety in England: An NSPCC Commissioned report on the Signs of Safety Model in Child Protection, NSPCC Bunn, A. (2013)
• C Change, Capacity to Change Assessment Manual: Platt, D., Riches, K. Bristol University (2016)
• The assessor is the author of the final report and the work is quality assured via group and individual supervision. The assessments are completed in ten weeks however those that require the use of Parenting Assessment Manual, PAMS are completed over twelve weeks.

Leila Hassan Farah

Centre Manager