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The Families And Children Transformation (FACT) programme is a multi-agency partnership building on the considerable progress already made to ensure the services which safeguard and support children and young people work together in a coherent and structured way.
We are always seeking to improve the services we provide for our children and young people to help them live safely, healthily and happily in their own families and communities.
What the FACT programme will change
This is a wide-ranging programme to streamline and improve the way we work by taking a whole-system, holistic approach with corporate partners, staff, children, young people and their families.
We will promote multi-agency integration which will make us more efficient in providing our services and more effective at helping families and children achieve positive outcomes.
As part of our shared vision and shared Practice Framework, professionals will maximise the time spent with families, providing early support to prevent escalation and ensuring that our children thrive in their own communities.
FACT is a joint programme with our partners with five driving principles:
Resilient communities with equal opportunity to thrive. We want all our children and young people to reach their full potential and especially those who are disadvantaged through poverty or vulnerability. We will support families in overcoming difficulties in being able to care for their children and each other. Where it isn't safe for children to live in their immediate or wider family we will ensure they settle quickly into a welcoming, stable and permanent home.
Help when you need it. We will provide support early to prevent families' difficulties getting worse; we'll listen and take action the moment families say they need help.
We are Better Together. As a partnership, we will spend wisely and within budget. We'll do this by getting rid of duplication in our work, simplifying how we do things and work more closely together across the partnership.
More time to be with Families. We will spend as much time as we can directly with children and their families as we know that's what families want and it improves the chances of making things better. We'll also help families make connections in their local communities so there is more support available from friends and neighbours.
Investing in our Staff. We will ensure we are an effective confident workforce who know what to do to help and how to do it well.
Projects the programme is delivering
Transitional Safeguarding is an emerging discipline that seeks to provide an approach to safeguarding practice for adolescents crossing into early adulthood (defined as aged between 10 and mid-20's). Traditional models of children's safeguarding do not adequately recognise that adolescents need to experience an element of risk enablement but instead offer protection and mitigation whilst adult safeguarding models assume that adolescents moving into early adulthood are able to exert choice and control in their situation and have achieved a certain level of maturity in decision making.
Through the FACT Partnership, it has been agreed that relevant partners will commit to developing, trialling and evaluating new ways of working with a defined cohort of young people/adults who are most vulnerable in the context described above as well as looking at how we might achieve wider whole system change related to Transitional Safeguarding.
The cohort is defined as:
Young people/adults aged 16-25 who are known to be engaged in, or are highly vulnerable to, criminal and / or sexual exploitation who are unable to access services or where the current support plan provided by services is not achieving a positive change, reducing risks or meeting identified outcomes.
Young people/adults aged 16-25 who display highly chaotic, risk taking behaviours and who are unable to access services or where the current support plan provided by services is not achieving a positive change, reducing risks or meeting identified outcomes.
The partnership will be applying a 'Proof of Concept' methodology during the period Autumn 2021 to Summer 2024 to develop and test ways of working.
Wiltshire is developing it's multi-agency Family Help arrangements to enable children, young people and families to access the right help at the right time through a co-ordinated approach to prevention and early intervention through:
a co-ordinated approach at a whole population/universal level to prevent needs from arising and to build resilience across all residents
a robust multi-agency approach to spotting any additional needs at the earliest point and providing effective joined-up support that prevents the needs from escalating further
There is a planned rollout of Wiltshire wide developments including training and development opportunities as well as further developing the Wiltshire Together platform with Wessex Community Action through the launch of the All Together brand in autumn 2023. A pilot will also be carried out from Autumn 2022 to Summer 2024 in a defined geographical location to understand needs and improve outcomes and social mobility for children, young people and families.
