Duty and Assessments

We are the largest commissioned provider of managed social work services in the UK, completing over 12,000 assessments in the last three years. We handle referrals from MASH, completing Section section 47 enquiries, producing Child Protection/Children In Need Plans and dealing with the new initial court work when necessary.

Xyla Health and Social Services provide a more cost-effective solution to dealing with influxes of demand at the front door. We deliver an external, fully-managed Assessment Service to support Council with dealing with front-line interventions over anything from 13 weeks to 18 months.

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Our tailor-made services offer:

  • Diagnostic work (looking at trends, themes and patterns which may emerge)
  • Enhanced, multi-agency working to ensure cases are progressed in a timely manner
  • Creating SMART Plans for children, young people and their families
  • A hand-picked team of skilled children’s social workers to progress cases throughout the lifetime of our intervention
  • A dedicated Project Lead and Account Manager to provide advice and guidance on managing referrals and cases

Utilising Managed Referral & Assessment Services -the Benefits:

All of our projects are aimed at reducing internal workloads in your social work departments, ensuring that we work effectively with all agencies whilst holding all professionals to account in the promotion of individual’s needs and priorities. Our interventions lead to significantly reduced social worker caseloads, and we have worked with clients to reduce workloads by up to 50% across internal Council teams.

In addition, our services offer the following benefits:

  • Undertaking backlogs of assessments and work on a cyclical duty model
  • Management oversight of all allocations to social workers with clearly defined caseloads
  • Management oversight throughput the child’s journey, evidenced on the child’s record
  • Identify clear transfer points in partnership with the Local Authority to ensure timely throughput
  • A consistent social worker to implement the intervention and progress each case
  • Met 95% of all completed cases within timescales
  • Increased number of cases stepped down to Early Help
  • Increased throughput of cases (in previous projects by up to 40%)
  • Feedback and cascade of learning back to social work teams through Service Development and management meetings
  • Weekly Performance Reporting including case turnaround, RAG Assessment bandings and contributing towards internal Council key performance metrics (KPIs
What our clients say

“Not dis-similar from the national picture, Surrey County Council’s Referral, Assessment and Intervention Service (RAIS) was experiencing drift in statutory timescales. This was being compounded by the caseloads of social workers becoming unsustainable and the need for a more effective ‘front door’ and screening process.

Internally, action was being undertaken to build a more robust Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub and we required a proactive, short-term solution to ensure that children were being seen in a timely manner and risk was being assessed.

Throughout the project the team were extremely proactive in managing performance and communication to maximise benefits for ourselves and Surrey’s children and families.

Cases were managed and completed in an extremely efficient manner and to a high standard. Feedback from our social workers has been extremely positive. Overall the project has been a success with the impact being felt across the Social Work teams.”

Kevin Peers, Assistant Director
Children’s Services and Safeguarding, Surrey County Council

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