Partners in Practice

Project Description

The East Riding of Yorkshire Council (ERYC) Partners in Practice (PiP) programme is part of a Department for Education funded initiative aimed at improving outcomes for children, young people and their families known to social care services by ensuring that the quality of social work provided is as good as it can possibly be. The programme is focused on developing more direct social work interventions and to allow for exploration and definition of the unique and critical contribution of the social worker within a wider multi-agency system.

The growth in the number of young people with significant problems of emotional and mental health is well charted and widely acknowledged. A survey of staff working in the Youth and Family support service revealed that 80% of cases involved issues of emotional health, 40% of the young people involved had self-harmed (151 individuals), and 24% (87 individuals) had had suicidal thoughts.
There is a personal cost associated with the commitment to the well-being of children and young people that is routinely demonstrated by social workers in the authority. There is a need for specialist support for social workers engaged in working with cases that are particularly associated with high levels of trauma. Thus there is a need to make specialist provision available to the social work teams so that provision for improving mental health is available primarily for young people but also for staff.

The social work role over recent years, under severe pressure and often in a hostile public spotlight, has increasingly tended to a more risk averse and commissioning approach, often preferring to look to ‘other specialists’ rather than to use social work knowledge, expertise, professional mandate and relationship skills to directly intervene where that is appropriate.

The PIP programme aims to address this challenge by transforming children’s social work in the East Riding of Yorkshire with the establishment of a Multi-Disciplinary Support Team (MDST) to encourage a change in practice across all services. The Service will be a centre of excellence in dealing directly with and supporting staff to address the emotional and mental health of children and young people from two specific cohorts. These are: 1) re-referrals and 2) cases involving high levels of adolescent risk.