Children's Social Care at Sutton

Our Vision

In Sutton Children’s Services, we believe in building trusting relationships with children and families to support them in living their best lives. We aim to be more than just a service; we want to be a beacon of hope and excellence in the care and support we provide. Through restorative and trauma-informed practices and effective teamwork, our approach is holistic, focusing on the all-round wellbeing of the children in our care, ensuring they receive outstanding services tailored to their individual needs.

                                         Please watch this video to hear the views of our service users and their expectations of our social care practice.

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Our Ambitions

We believe that children living in our care should be kept safe and encouraged to succeed.

Work with children and young people

• Empowering children and young people to have their voices meaningfully heard and their wishes listened to.
• We are committed to protecting children from harm. This includes conducting thorough assessments and interventions where necessary to ensure every child's safety and wellbeing.
• We recognise that some children have unique needs and challenges, therefore we offer specialised services for those with disabilities.

Work with families

• Respecting that every family is diverse. This means we have to be adaptive and creative in how we work.
• We aim to work closely with families and their communities to provide the support they need before any serious issues arise. We believe that earlier intervention can empower and uplift all families that are navigating challenges.

Work with each other

• Collaborating to keep children, young people, and families’ choices central to the decisions we make, whenever it is safe for us to do so.
• We are striving to embed a restorative and trauma-informed culture in Sutton Children's Social Care.  As a service, our work requires a consistently high standard. We use the 'high support, high challenge' approach to promote this. High support/high challenge is a restorative practice approach. Often likened to a balancing act, this approach involves pushing team members beyond their comfort zones (high challenge) while providing them with the necessary resources and emotional backing (high support) to meet these challenges. We would work with both families and staff in this way.

Work with our partners

• To learn from each other to ensure that children and families receive the support they need. Sometimes that means holding ourselves, and our partners accountable and learning from one another's mistakes, whilst also celebrating our successes.

We are dedicated to making Sutton a shining example of how children's social care can make a difference. Our work is guided by the principles of respect, empowerment, and innovation. We are working to meet the needs of today, by shaping a brighter future for all children in our care.

Careers in Sutton

Find more information on the teams and roles within Children’s Social Care here

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Children's Social Care at the London Borough of Sutton have partnered with London Social Work for Children, to showcase our employment and professional development opportunities available to both practising and prospective social workers in London.

‍Find more information on our work with London Social Work for Children here.

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We want Sutton to be a Beacon of Excellence in Children’s Social Care and nationally recognised as an example of best practice for:

• working to continue to grow, adapt, innovate, and improve.
• partnering with local schools, colleges, and organisations.
• continuing to invest in workforce development and quality assurance.
• ensuring that we continue to learn from families and children using evidence based research to strengthen social work practice.

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Sutton has an Assisted and Supported Year in Employment, typically known as the ASYE Academy for newly qualified social workers. This is a joined-up programme for children and adult social workers offering the opportunity to develop your social work practice and knowledge from a whole family perspective.  Sutton supports the Step Up to Social Work postgraduate programme and the Social Work Apprenticeship. See below a video of one of our staff members that enrolled on the programme.

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We constantly look at ways to improve the services we deliver but already have very strong foundations. Our most recent Ofsted report indicates that our social care practice is rated "Good with outstanding features for the impact of leaders on social work practice". In our most recent Local Government Association (LGA) Workforce Surveys, we received high scores for having a strong and clear social work framework, where staff felt valued and supported by their managers.

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Join us at Sutton, where you’ll be equipped with the tools, skills, and knowledge to make a meaningful impact on the lives of children and families. Together, we can create a community where every child is valued, supported, and loved. Your journey to making a difference starts here.