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Growth and Change

Children, Schools and Families (CSF) was set up in April 2001 bringing together education and social services to provide an integrated approach to provide the best possible levels of education, health and development for the county’s 250,000 children and delivering the Every Child Matters agenda.

• Preventative services remain central to our work, so that all children are given the opportunity to develop their full potential. ‘Keeping the child at the centre’ represents our strategic vision.

Hertfordshire has established its children’s trust arrangements and one of our key priorities now is to achieve far stronger integration of CSF within these arrangements.


The CSF Board

The board’s role is wide-ranging and complex. Its members share collective responsibility for the overall work and performance of CSF. The board is led by CSF director John Harris who also chairs the executive group of Hertfordshire’s Children’s Trust Partnership arrangements, and includes five deputy directors who each head a portfolio management group which consists of a number of teams and services:

• Learning and School Effectiveness portfolio - provides school places and promotes high standards of education for all children. Hertfordshire has over 500 schools and has a key role in two national education pathfinders, involving extended schools and specialist secondary schools. It also provides other services, like the youth service and adolescent support service.
• Integrated Children’s Services portfolio - focuses on integrating services with our many partners in order to deliver the children’s trust agenda. We have six designated children’s centres and, by the end of 2008, will have 50 centres up and running.
• Libraries, Heritage and Arts portfolio - Hertfordshire Libraries provide learning support and more for families, as well as children and young people, and free access to the internet.
• Commissioning, Performance and Resources portfolio - provides secure infrastructure and support to enable local delivery and outcomes to be achieved as effectively as possible.
• Social Care portfolio - brings together the range of services for vulnerable children and families to help them achieve their full potential. It leads on assessment, social support and care for children in need, child protection, fostering and adoption services, the provision of residential homes and respite care and support for care leavers.

Focusing on Social Care

We are working with others to move our emphasis from crisis-intervention to a more preventative approach. The aim is to prevent children and young people experiencing negative outcomes, such as social exclusion, not getting on in school and involvement with crime.

The children’s services reforms currently taking place will have far-reaching impact. It is an enormous agenda that will take several years to complete. In Hertfordshire, we have already undertaken much of the hard work by integrating children’s services in 2001 and the children’s trust arrangements are well established.

The teams within the social care portfolio include Youth Justice, Social Care and Community Services, Placement and Provider Services and Policy, Practice and Quality Assurance. The work includes:

• assessment and case management of children in need and Children Looked After.
• long term work with children in public care, eg in helping to maximise educational achievement.
• providing parental support.
• work with troubled adolescents.
• providing care leaving support service to young people who have received long term care to help them make a successful transition to adulthood.


Social and Community Services - the priority is focused intervention.

Assessment teams - complete initial assessments and undertake short term intervention with a view to providing speedy and effective support to families unlikely to require longer term intervention.

Children Looked After teams - have specialist skills to work with children and young people placed in our care. They take responsibility for children who have been looked after for over four months, and where any legal proceedings have been concluded.

Locality teams - focus on medium to longer term work with children and families living in Hertfordshire’s 10 districts. Local partnership working and knowledge of the local community is essential in order to help families access services near their homes. The teams often deal with cases where a child needs to be safeguarded or work with families struggling to cope. Their work typically includes court work, permanence planning, short term intervention for children who have recently been accommodated, core assessments, re-assessments and work within child protection procedures.

Family Support Service - provides support to children under 10 who are in need. Two teams focus on different aspects of work according to the family’s needs - a preventative team and a focused intervention team.

Community teams - have a key role to play in the delivery of services in partnership with a wide range of agencies, working together at children’s centres and extended schools. The team’s role is under review but currently includes supporting high quality childcare, developing ‘out of school hours learning’ opportunities, ‘adult and community learning’ and ‘family learning’ and supporting the local roll out of the extended schools and children’s centre agenda.