Family Solutions Service

Early help and statutory support for children and families in Oxfordshire.

The Family Solutions Service (FSS) supports families across Oxfordshire. Our work with children and their families includes Early Help support like Team Around the Family (TAF) and Early Help Assessment (EHA). It also includes statutory planning within Child in Need (CIN), & Child Protection (CP) frameworks. Where necessary, we undertake court proceedings to safeguard children.

Seeking support for your child(ren) or family? You can access help from your GP, school, or search for support on the Family Information Service website.

The service is delivered from eight Children and Family Centres and other venues

Children, young people and families are referred to the service from all kinds of different services that work with children and families. The Locality and Community Support Service help with this.

Family Solutions Plus Model

Family Solutions Service is founded on and overseen by a robust multi-agency partnership including District Councils, Public Health, key statutory partners and local voluntary sector partners, including Oxfordshire Mind, Elmore, Turning Point and Connection Support.

Our domestic abuse, mental health, and substance misuse adult–facing practitioners are embedded in our social work teams and have been directly commissioned by the local authority from voluntary partners.

Multi-Disciplinary Teams

Our multi-disciplinary teams work with families to get to the heart of their difficulties - our adult-facing practitioners work with parents/carers to support them with addressing unmet needs to increase their parenting abilites.

Strengths-based practice model

Our workers are trained in working with families to understand why we are involved and build on family strengths using motivational interviewing to build rapport and promote change.

Reducing bureaucracy

The family workbook enables holistic and purposeful work with families based on a modular approach to assessing parenting capability whilst reducing social workers' recording.

Relationship-based

Every family will be assigned one social worker who will work with them throughout assessment and intervention, one worker, one assessment and one meaningful intervention to ensure sustainable change.

We have created 17 locality-based multi-disciplinary teams across Oxfordshire, delivering support and intervention to families where they live.

Teams comprise social workers, adult-facing practitioners and children's practitioners, who work directly with children and their parents, delivering evidence-based interventions and programmes in response to assessed needs.

We are changing our focus to working with, not at or to, in line with our restorative practice principles. We engage families and promote change through motivational interviewing.

Our work with every family is reviewed, considered and evaluated in family group supervision to allow all practitioners involved an opportunity to review progress, define outcomes achieved, and collectively agree on current risks and needs, so that risk is shared.