ROTH Update July 2025

This following is essentially everything that was included in the recent ROTH update sessions –

You can also download the accompanying slides from the presentation by clicking here.

Proposal

Develop and implement a multi-agency ROTH team co-located with the Youth Justice Service that coordinates, supports and manages children across all tiers of safeguarding who are deemed to be at risk of exploitation and extra-familial harm.

Rationale

Agencies and partnerships are increasingly having to respond to needs and risks that originate from problems and issues outside of the home. Traditional child protection procedures do not always prove to be effective in managing these risks and currently only focus on those children in the upper tier of safeguarding need. This means that children who may be susceptible to exploitation in its infancy are not identified at the earliest stage and provided with intervention at a point in their development when it may be most effective. We must be able to respond to these risks in a way that brings help, support and change across all service tiers. In these cases, the focus needs to be on the extra-familial causes of the risk, whilst remaining child and family centred and working with parents as safeguarding partners.

In Newcastle, our partnerships recognise the importance of working with and supporting the whole family. Children and young people do not exist in isolation, and it is important to promote whole family wellbeing and to be effective our approach must utilise the strengths and resources within each child’s family network.

Our approach to support intrafamilial risks and needs has been shaped by the concept of thresholds which set out expectations for when action should be taken and what response should be expected. Thresholds drive consistency of response and provide a tool for agreeing how best to intervene in any given situation. The suggested model for ROTH is built on this, the aim being to consider how and when we might respond and in what way when dealing with extrafamilial risk and harm.

Proposed Team Structure:

The proposed team would support children at all service tiers and include a mix of case holding and non-case holding practitioners. Senior Practitioners would case hold those children in the highest tiers of concern and provide support and guidance to professionals alongside this. This means the team will provide expert guidance to other teams without having to hold case responsibility for all ROTH cases.

The Team will be supported by tools to screen all children at potential risk to help identify the right pathway for each individual child, including signposting to Early Help and other Community based resources when a ‘light touch’ intervention is required. The Team Manager would facilitate a multi-agency panel to consider those with more significant concerns. The Panel would be chaired by the Team Manager or Assistant Team Manager. This model and approach is also aimed at mitigating the perceived risk of ‘burn out’ relating to workers involved with ROTH, based on the pressures of case holding this kind of work.

The current available data from Eclipse indicates that we are working with the following numbers of children experiencing extra-familial harm:

• Snapshot as at 21.03.25 – 46 children subject to ROTH CP plan.
• Since January 2025 IRS has been working with 14 families where ROTH is a concern.
• The CiC service has 18 open cases where the last return home interview indicated an exploitation concern.
• Early Help have 118 children open on either a Team around the Family or Early Intervention Conversation where the child has 1 or more of the following presenting needs: Missing From Home, Child Sexual Exploitation, Child Criminal Exploitation, Child experiencing Harm outside of the family, Risk of Crime & Involved in Crime.
• 626 completed Return Home Interviews for 315 children since June 2024 when Newcastle moved to Eclipse

Whilst there is the potential for some potential double counting because of some families receiving support from more than one service, this data still shows that ROTH is creating significant service pressures and that there is a need for a more focussed and specialised service response for these children across all tiers of safeguarding.