Welcome from the Director

Your interest coincides with exciting times for us as we build on progress and continue our improvement journey; driven by our whole service commitment to outcomes for children and families. Children and families’ experiences of our services, and the results we achieve together really matters to us.

The team at RCT never fail to impress me with their compassion for families, resilience, skills and creativity. We have included in these webpages the information that we hope will help you get a picture of us, our vision, values, and the way we work.

During the year ahead we will embark on a significant endeavour as we roll out the RCT model of social work practice informed by an evidence bank of ‘what works’ in strengths-based practice. This will locate your expertise, and the importance of good social work practice at the heart of what we do. We know and understand that all of our staff need support. At RCT you will be able to access professional 1:1 support and a wide range of training and specialist professional advice. We have recently introduced Psychology led 'Reflective Spaces' and we are also rolling out Schwartz Rounds across the service.

RCT is continuing to develop evidence-based family support services that match our population needs and in addition to your social work skills, the families you will work alongside in RCT can access:

• Resilient Families Service – an open access social work led early help and step down service that includes a therapeutic offer.
• Advocacy and Parent Advocacy 
• Family Group Meetings.
• Therapeutic Families Team.
• Miskin (evidence based edge of care interventions).

RCT Children’s Services has good relationships with partner organisations, and we work well with our regional partnership board authorities too. We are a high performing authority that uses extensive data to provide early alert of changes in need or demand, and to provide assurance about preventing delay for children and families. We are implementing a learning approach based on a mission to understand the systemic issues when things go wrong. 

Foster care is our leading model of care for children who need to be looked after.  In RCT, 44% of children looked after are with relatives and the next phase of our new looked after strategy will see us step up the support for special guardians and kinship carers too. The Council provides its own residential care at 5 homes with practice rooted in the trauma recovery model and delivers sector leading outcomes for young people.

I hope that you find the information you need on these webpages. Why not get in touch to find out more about being part of an excellent team?

Annabel Lloyd, Director of Rhondda Cynon Taf Children’s Services