Leicestershire County Council

About the Children and Family Services

We aim to make Leicestershire a better place for all children, young people and their families by creating a safe and inclusive environment where they can achieve their potential, and have their health, wellbeing, and life chances improved within thriving communities.

The Road to Excellence plan outlines our commitment to building on our solid foundations to provide consistently high standard services to vulnerable children and families and sets out what is important to us.

Understanding trauma

We are committed to becoming a trauma-informed department where we believe “we are stronger together”. This means understanding trauma, recognising how it can affect children, families and carers we work with, and knowing how to respond.

We know that our work with families who have experienced trauma can deeply affect us too, positively in terms of seeing families succeed and achieve their goals, and sometimes negatively with staff being at risk of experiencing vicarious trauma, through supporting families who have experienced trauma, and so we are committed to recognising this and supporting staff.

Training, learning and development

We pride ourselves on being a learning organisation. We value our workforce and understand the importance of supporting learning and development, therefore we provide a wide range of training for practitioners and managers, focused on trauma-informed practice.

We are committed to standing up against racism and ensuring equality of opportunity for all.

We use Signs of Safety, Stability and Success as our practice framework when working with children, families, and professionals with Social Care and Early Help Services. This strengths-based model is focused on working with children and families towards shared aims and goals and building on what is working well for them. 

We recognise the importance of training, knowledge, and skills for practitioners to be able to best support families, including motivational interviewing, systemic practice and culturally competent practice. Our staff receive thorough and comprehensive training in the use of the approach, alongside resources, toolkits, and the use of our Practice Excellence team who offer one to one coaching and support.

Our job roles and services

We have a wide range of job roles ranging from those who work directly with children and families, to office-based roles supporting staff, developing policy or contributing to improving services. Each role is supporting some of the most vulnerable children and families and providing rewarding challenges for staff, for example:

- Social workers and Senior social work practitioners

- Other professionals who work directly supporting families such as family support workers, support and assessment workers, family intervention workers

- Early Years professionals

- Educational Psychologists

- Business Support officers

- Quality Assurance or improvement officers

- Specialist teachers

- Occupational Therapists

- Youth workers

- Workforce improvement professionals

- Early Years SEND advisors and managers