At Expert Social Work Assessments (ESWA) our mission is to work with children and families to enable, empower and support them in their journey to create safe, nurturing, and resilient environments where children can thrive. We provide a variety of assessments and reports, which are expertly written and quality assured for Local Authorities, solicitors and the family court for all levels of identified risk and support within child protection, Private and Public Law Proceedings.

We understand the challenges faced by Local Authorities, we know this as we too have experienced the competing demands within service delivery with constraints in resources within our leadership roles. We recognise that this is a challenge nationally. Our aim is to take away the uncertainty of commissioning independent social work assessments, whether this is due to capacity within the service, second opinion assessments or your model of practice, we guarantee that all assessments will be of exceptional quality with robust triangulated evidence based recommendation and analysis, all delivered in a timely manner.

Children and families deserve the opportunity to, and have the right to live together where it is safe to do so, we offer solutions to vulnerabilities whilst utilising a strengths based restorative approach. Not all children will be able to live safely within their families, therefore timely permanence decisions need to be made. Our ethos is every day counts.

Responsivity
With our network of independent social workers conveniently located throughout England with can provide response solutions to meet the diverse needs of children and families across England and Wales. In recognition of promoting diversity in our workforce and recognising its significance to our service, our social workers and experts come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, enabling the children & families we work with to have their needs individually identified and met.

Quality
We will get the assessments right, the first time. We will match the skills of our independent social workers to the needs of the children, family and service request, we follow this through from our panel of quality assurance experts who all have leadership experience within Local Authority. We will ensure oversight from the point of allocation through to completion, filing to the court and providing expert witness evidence. Whilst our social workers are independent, they are part of a team who will ensure that children and families are worked with restoratively to optimise their potential, we are not just assessors but will offer meaningful suggestions to challenges and vulnerabilities for the Local Authority to enact. We pride ourselves on creating a culture of radical candour for our team to then provide that for children and families.

Timeliness
With leadership oversight at the point of allocation, midway reviews and final reviews in addition to supervision, we will ensure that we meet the timescales required. We recognise that every day of a child’s life is important, therefore timely decisions need to be made in accordance with that child(ren)s timescales. Once you receive our assessment it will be ready to file to court. Through our final review discussion you will have the opportunity to discuss the findings of the assessment in order that we ensure complete transparency in outcome prior to court filing (where applicable).