The council’s family support team celebrated their one year anniversary last month, and have supported 195 vulnerable kids across the region during that period.
Operating with two senior social workers and 13 support staff working closely with families, the team deals primarily with early intervention cases for children who are facing problems at home such as neglect, poverty, physical abuse, sexual abuse, drug/alcohol misuse, or poor parenting capacity.
The council agreed in July last year to invest £535,000 per annum over three years to fund the family support work.
At last week’s social work committee, council leader Elaine Murray said: “Obviously this investment is to deliver for vulnerable families, it’s not to save money.
“Although at some point we hope that by investing in families early on we prevent them from going on to other destinations, whether that’s having to be in care, or possibly later on people ending up in the prison system.
“It might be helpful though, as people are seeing large sums of money being invested, to get some sort of estimate of – if we weren’t doing this – what would be the cost to the public purse.
“Not because that’s the most important reason for doing this, because it isn’t.”
Stephen Morgan, a senior manager with social work’s children and families section, replied: “We can absolutely provide data on the number of families that we’ve diverted from statutory social work interventions, and give you a cost range in terms of what that would cost for an average journey through the care system.”
He added: “I think it’s important to emphasise that this service is really about cost avoidance. What we mean by that is we are likely to avoid significantly higher costs in the future, as opposed to making savings immediately.
“With us starting during the pandemic and the impact the pandemic has had, especially on vulnerable people – then this service has been absolutely phenomenal in terms of our response to that, and how we move forward.”
Sarah McGarva, who leads the council’s family support services team, told the committee: “We feel the early intervention is working really well. We’ve got evidence of families where there’s possibly been future things that have come up for them after we’ve ended our work with families, but we’ve not had to pick that up again.
“That’s because they’ve followed the strategies we’ve developed with them, used their networks, and made really good progress.”
