Case studies

Southend Council has created a new steering group to coordinate the fight against county lines, ensuring the two safeguarding boards, community safety partnership and health and wellbeing board (HWB) are working together. It has already led to a public awareness campaign being run and other projects are now in the pipeline. This case study is an example of how councils are tackling youth violence.

SFSC is led by the Race Equality Foundation, and had an excellent reputation locally. In Southwark, the SFSC programme had been adapted during Covid-19 lockdown to offer online sessions which parents found very useful.

The 2015 Care Act and 2014 Children and Families Act gave young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities more rights to support and for longer. Whilst being a much needed and well received pieces of progressive legislation, they presented severe problems in a system primarily driven by resource limitations.

Ensuring children and families have access to support to enhance SLC development when a concern is raised is important. However, access to therapy services in Torbay is currently lengthy for families. Early timely support can enable children to ‘catch up’ with peers. A pathway of support has therefore been developed alongside Early Years Settings, Health Visitors and Children’s Centres.

The Start Well Wheel is a tool for parents/carers to track all appointments and key milestones in their child’s life.

Staffordshire Libraries and Arts Service run a very successful annual Summer Reading Challenge. Early Years practitioners in Staffordshire reported a negative impact on the development of early speech and language as a result of the pandemic. The Mini Summer Reading Challenge seemed an ideal programme to support parents and settings with early speech and language in the home learning environment.

In many areas school-based immunisation programmes are run separately from 5-19 Healthy Child Programme services, but that is not the case in Stockport where the HPV, the teenage three-in-one booster and MenACWY vaccines programmes are delivered by the service. The approach has helped ensure high uptake of immunisations and meant the service was well placed to respond to the demands placed on it by the pandemic. This case study showcases the important role of school nurses in the education system.

Stockport proactively and strategically responded to the introduction of the mandatory National Transfer Scheme (NTS) in July 2022 in readiness to meet the demands of caring for increasing numbers of Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children (UASC). Stockport have worked in partnership to redesign their processes, including efficiently managing referrals, finding placements swiftly, and upskilling their teams.

The Story Buses were initially launched in January 2020. The buses arose from the need to replace the library vehicle fleet and resulted in two Story Buses, named Sam and Nelly by the children, with exciting exterior designs by illustrator Nick Sharratt and interiors with well-designed spaces to sit and read.