What is our Children’s Services Plan?

All services have their own plans, but our Children’s Services Plan is where we have all the actions where Schools, Social Work, Health Services and other services have to work together so that children and young people get the support they need.  It’s especially about vulnerable children.  Vulnerable children can be affected by poverty; they might be disabled; they might be looked-after; they might have mental health problems; they might be young carers; they might have parents with drug/alcohol problems or mental health problems.

What does this look like?

A child who is looked-after, for example, needs Social Work to make sure that they have a safe, stable place to live.  They need Health services to make sure that they are getting the health care that they need.  They need schools to understand that their learning might have been disrupted if they have had to go and live with other family members or foster carers.  It’s very difficult for a child to go into school and learn happily, if they don’t feel safe, and they don’t know where they are going to be living, and their health has been neglected.   All the services involved need to work together around the child to give them the help they need.  Our Children’s Services Plan is about how we improve the way that all services work together to do this.

Our current Children’s Services Plan ends in March 2026 and we are developing a new one. You can find out about our current Children’s Services Plan here. There is an Easy Read version and a short video about the plan with British Sign Language interpretation.

What do parents and carers think is important?

We need to decide what to focus on in the next Children’s Services Plan for Dumfries and Galloway. We want to hear what families think is important. You can use the online form here to give us your views.