Children and family care
The council ensures that children in need (CIN), as defined by the Children Act, have the best chances in life so that they can achieve their full potential.
This means working in partnership with health, police, probation service, the voluntary sector, and with children and their families to:
- Ensure that children are brought up safely by their parents or carers and supported into adulthood
- Ensure that children with additional needs are educated and looked after in Barnet wherever possible
- Ensure that our services are accessible and appropriate to the needs of all the most vulnerable children in the borough.
To achieve this, we:
- Provide timely assessments of need leading to more integrated services
- Protect children from all forms of abuse and neglect
- Ensure stable, secure, safe care for all children
- Create better life chances for children in need
- Improve the educational, health/developmental and social outcomes achieved by children in care (“looked after” by the council)
- Meet the specific and often long standing needs of disabled children
- Enable young people leaving care to lead successful adult lives
- Promote customer choice by actively including children, young people and their carers in care and service planning
- Collaborate with our “partners” to provide or commission integrated, child-centred services based on multi-disciplinary assessments of need
- Achieve “best value” in everything that we do.
Read more about the work and role of the Supporting Families Division
Children, young people and families
