Working in partnership
The Council’s children’s services have been bolstered. The frontline has been strengthened, more social workers continue to be recruited and caseloads have been reduced to manageable levels.
Our response to child sexual exploitation is being delivered by strengthened, multi-agency teams and initiatives. These include:
Evolve – the multi-agency specialist team tackling child sexual exploitation
The Evolve team respond to and safeguard children who are or likely to suffer harm through child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. They aim to provide ‘wrap around’ support and protection to children and their family, with a team of people from a variety of support agencies. This includes social workers, a child sexual exploitation specialist nurse, a Barnardo’s social worker, a children’s social care operational manager, business support staff and police officers.
In 2021 the Council approved additional investment in the Evolve service to extend the provision to include specialist family support workers. The service works with community groups, schools, colleges and health services to raise awareness of spotting signs of exploitation and support the delivery of one to one support, groupwork, and outreach & engagement activities working with young people and families.
Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH)
The strengthened Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) provides a central point of contact for people to share safeguarding concerns. Staff from children’s services, police and health work together as part of the team. This has led to better information sharing between agencies - essential to help protect vulnerable children and young people.
