REMINDER: Please ensure Social Care are aware of non attendance of vulnerable children

Reminder to all colleagues:

If you have children who have any kind of Social Care involvement; Child in Need, Child Protection and Looked after Children as well as any children with disabilities that have a social worker, please can you make sure you are clearly reporting to Social Care if they are not attending school at the moment. This is in regard to more than typical absences with reasons provided but where this is long term, for example parents giving covid-19 as a reason for their child/ren not returning to school. 

There have been a couple of situations where schools and Social Workers have spoken and it has been mentioned that the child is not in school but the social worker has perhaps not been aware of the extent of this absence and the length of time a child has not been seen. Of course no one is to blame, but the we just wanted to request that colleagues make sure this is really clear when informing Social Care. It's really important that in these cases there can be a clear multi-agency plan to make sure the child is being seen where necessary and it might be helpful for you to just check this with the social worker if you don't think this is in place.