Contact Swindon - The front door for the Council’s children’s social care services
Contacting the Council about other services
These Contact Swindon pages are for the Council's children's social care services. If you wish to contact us about other services, please see a selection of other helpful pages.
Contact Swindon is the new ‘front door’ for the council’s children’s social care services, and will be available for families, residents and professionals across the borough.
From this date, anyone who has a concern about a child, or wants to request help from the service, should:
The questions and answers below may also provide further support.
Contact Swindon is a new way to contact our children’s services and provides a single point of contact to request help and support for families, or to report safeguarding concerns for a child.
Contact Swindon is available for families, residents and professionals across the Borough.
We know that currently children, young people and families can wait too long for support when they need it and we also know that we are simply not working as well as we should be with our partners.
Contact Swindon is part of our wider improvement work following our Ofsted inspection and has been developed to ensure that families and children get the right help, at the right time, from the most appropriate teams.
Anyone who has a concern about a child, or wants to request help from the service, should:
Messages to the former number and email will be automatically forwarded for six months to try to ensure no contacts are missed, but we are undertaking a significant piece of work to ensure all our key partners and public are aware of the new number and email.
We’re confident Contact Swindon will deliver improved, targeted support and safeguarding decisions for our children, young people and their families through a multi-agency integrated approach and will help us achieve our vision of supporting children and young people to grow and flourish within their families where it is safe to do so.
Contact Swindon is part of a three-stage transformation approach. We’re also launching new integrated locality teams and local panels which will see us work more closely with our partners to ensure children, young people and families get the right help and support faster, from the right teams.
Contact Swindon will provide:
a central point of contact for public and professionals for children's targeted support and safeguarding needs
a team of professionals from our core partnership agencies who will deliver an integrated service, including information, advice and signposting to appropriate services
an agreed process for analysing and assessing risk based on all the information known across agencies to determine if the child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm
a confidential, shared record of activity available to wider teams and agencies to support work with the child or family
All initial requests for help and support will be screened first by the Contact Swindon team.
If the request relates to a safeguarding concern, the Request for Help and Support will be moved immediately to our Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub.
All Early Help contacts that require a multi-agency response will be booked into one of our new Locality Panels via Contact Swindon.
Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) requests for information will be processed by dedicated team members.
Our new Locality Teams will consider requests that come through Contact Swindon, providing a multi-professional forum that will:
provide consultation and a solution-focussed approach, pooling skills, experience and local knowledge
promote multi-professional decision-making to support children and family needs, avoid duplication and remove silos, to ensure the right support is provided at the right time
simplify the process of accessing support from Early Help services through cluster-based panels as part of Contact Swindon
enable appropriate use of Contact Swindon and avoid overwhelming the Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH)
New multi-agency panels will meet each Friday morning in our three identified localities - North Swindon, West Swindon and South Swindon.
If the Request for Help and Support made through Contact Swindon meets a level of need for targeted support (Level 3) this will be submitted to the relevant Locality Panel for multi-agency decision making and appropriate action.
Our partners are a key part of our panels and will include health visitors, health professionals, mental health services, school nurses, social care youth services and YJS.
Panels will also include young carers’ services, family support services from schools and communities, wellbeing professionals, financial support/benefits advice and housing, police and community support officers, family learning providers and schools, including nursery, primary, secondary, colleges and specialist provision.
By changing how we work we will:
work together more effectively to pool resources and meet need
ensure children who need help get the right help, at the right time, in the right place
enable professionals to build better relationships
work to a single plan of support for the family with the child at the core
reduce overlap and inconsistency in the services received
meet families’ needs at the earliest stage to avoid crisis point
Yes, we have posters and flyers. Please contact Scott Jones – Head of Early Intervention, Youth and Community: sjones4@swindon.gov.uk