CCInform's legal expert, Ed Mitchell, has provided the latest legislation update. 

• the meaning of "regulated activity" with children (the type of activity controlled by the Act),
• what employers need to do to comply with the Act (in terms of checking workers and making referrals to the new Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) where a worker has been, for example, dismissed),
• the personal obligations of social workers, and others working with children, to become 'ISA-registered'."

For the time being, 'What's new?' will reflect the recent Fortnightly Focus updates.

Just published:

Research review on child protection in sport

Guide to working with people affected by eating disorders

Reference manual on safeguarding disabled children

Coming soon:

Reference manual on disabled children and NSF standards

A guide to assessing the emotional harm experiences by children exposed to domestic violence from a domestically violent parent/ carer

Reference manual on fostering children in contact with the youth justice system

Instructions:

• Select: My updates (left hand navigation bar)
• Add email alert
• Rename title to suit the criteria i.e 'Adoption'; 'all content'; 'Domestic violence'
• Select article type: you have an option to select all
• Select article Subject: you have an option to select all
• Submit

Emails are generated and sent to your inbox at 2am, ready to notify you when you walk into the office the following day.

Articles published this week:

Reference manuals:

• Private fostering
  

Research reviews:

• Child contact in the context of divorce and separation: A research review
• Forced marriage
  

Guide to:

• The Child Abuse Investigation Command policing plan for 2008/2009
• What to expect from the court process - A guide for professionals

We have a few reference manuals due to be published shortly (within the next couple of weeks). These include:

• Intercountry adoption
• Institutional abuse
• Age Assessments

Also, look out for the research review on child protection in sport, due to be published this week.

CC Inform would like to introduce, Gary Brigden, our new webmaster to the CC Inform team. Gary will be involved with all things "techy" so if you have any ideas for developing the site, please send us your feedback! 

Gary until now, has worked on communitycare.co.uk, his new role will see him exapnding his role to include the development of CC Inform.  

A year on from our fledgling pilot launch, CC Inform has grown considerably. We have received positive feedback from CCI users and are busy introducing the site to local authorities across England and Wales.  

Over recent months, we have published:  

Reference manuals:

• Placement of children for adoption
• Teenage pregnancy
• Access to records for adopted people (pre-commencement regulations)
• Intermediary services (adoption)

Guides:

• Guide to anger management in children and young people
• Guide to fetal alcohol spectrum disorders
• Guide to bipolar disorder
• Guide to play therapy
• Guide to assessing and supporting non-abusing carer(s) in circumstances of reported sexual abuse committed by an adult in the family

Soon to be published:

• Private fostering
• Supporting children with learning disabilities through their life stages, including transition

The guide to PLO was also updated in April after publication in January 2008 on the site. so it's as up-to-date as possible.

Gary Vaux, Hertfordshire Council’s welfare rights officer, has updated the A-Z benefits section this week. In this update, you will now find the amounts payable for each benefit. This has come as a direct result of feedback from Inform users! We are listening to your views and want to tailor this service as best we can to meet your work needs.

We are now back on track with loading case law summaries in partnership with our legal publisher Lexis Nexis. We’ve loaded 80 case summaries over the past couple of weeks taking the total up to 380. We aim to have the target 500 on the site very soon!

At the beginning of the year we published a guide to the Public Law Outline. This can be found in the legislation section. It has been mentioned in a few training sessions, so I just thought it would be useful to bring to your attention that it is now available on the site. The guide includes: a proposed summary of changes; recommendations from the care proceedings review; the existing protocol – the key changes in relation to the PLO; the case management model template order; what the changes mean for local authorities; what the changes mean for CAFCASS and training arrangements.

We have also loaded lots more content which include:

Reference manuals
- A guide to child and adolescent mental health services
- Child protection in sport
- Children and young people who go missing
- Kinship care

Guide to…
- Lifestory work
- Obesity in children and young people

Research review
- Young runaways

We’re pleased to announce that Katarina Lurvey, from Cafcass York, has won a magnum of champagne! Her name was picked at random from the list of Cafcass staff who completed the CCInform online feedback survey.

It’s been an exciting start to the new year. The content on the site is growing by the week and we are busy responding to your suggestions by commissioning more articles.

Over the last week, we have published 4 reference manuals:
• Child neglect
• Emotional abuse
• Medical examination of children for the purposes of child protection enquiries
• Phyiscal abuse

And 2 guide tos…
• Guide to obesity in children and young people
• Guide to the Public Law Outline

CCInform has had a really positive year, thank you to everyone who has piloted the site over the summer months and to CAFCASS and the Met who are piloting the service at the moment.

We are really looking forward to 2008 and watching the website reach its full potential, offering users a one-stop-shop for all your information needs.

We have now added a new "guide to..." tab to the main content types. This is a really great development, and will serve as another level of practical guidance for pratitioners in their working lives.

Over the past couple of weeks we have published:

Reference Manuals:
- Information sharing and data protection
- Interviewing children for the purposes of child protection investigations

Guide to...:
- Guide to depression
- Guide to therapeutic assistance for children and young people recovering from sexual abuse
- Guide to working with gangs and other delinquent groups
- The impact of loss and bereavement on children

Research review:
- Breastfeeding and substance misuse
- Females who sexually abuse children and young people

From all of us on the CCInform team, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Over the coming months, we will be visiting all local authorities who have signed up to Inform to train users on how the content is displayed and what you can expect to find on the site.

It is a really great chance for us to get your feedback.

Many thanks to everyone who has attended training sessions already. For CAFCASS users piloting the service, many thanks for volunteering to use the site. You will have access til mid-December. Please use it as much as possible, to really get the true value of Inform in your working lives.

Content is rolling in, this week we have published:

Reference manuals:
- Child contact in family proceedings: policy, practice, the law and the role of mediation (found in the Family support browse reference manuals menu)
- Domestic violence: financial support

Research reviews:
- Females who sexually abuse children and young people
- Neglect
- Safeguarding children and young people
- Sexual exploitation and abuse through prostitution
- The impact of child sexual abuse

Guide to: (found in the practice section)
- Conflict resolution
- Complaints against social workers

The following reference manuals will be published shortly, they first need to be peer reviewed and legal checked:
- Physical abuse
- Emotional abuse
- Neglect (revised)
- Children sexually exploited through prostitution

We have been busy loading author biographies onto the "sources" page (on the left-hand navigation bar), this is a useful page to keep you informed with who is writing each article published on the site.

Remember to let us know what you would like to see on the site!

Reference manuals:
• Disabled children – multi-agency family support
• Safeguarding in Education
• Safeguarding in Health

Guides to:
• Common Assessment Framework
• Conduct disorder
• Self-harm
• Young people and sexual health

The guides to are really coming along. We have commissioned in excess of 40 guides as a result of feedback from local authority pilots. We are in the process of commissioning many more, so if there is subject you would like us to focus on, please contact us with details.

Feedback from Inform users this week has suggested you would like more information on multi-agency risk assessment conferencing (MARACS) and Stockholm syndrome in domestic violence cases. We are looking into this for you, and will let you know when these are commissioned.

Due to the success of these guides, we are in the process of adding a tab to the content types, at the top of the search results page, to accommodate these articles.

Rest assured this will not impact on our long-term goal of adding a tab to direct you to your individual local authority procedures.

You may have noticed Community Care magazine re-launched the magazine earlier in the year, and as a result changed some of their content. We are now able to publish the new Research Realities and Proven Practice articles in the Inform practice section.

Research Realities looks at the latest research findings on social care analysed by a team of researchers.

Proven Practice provides information about evidence-informed social care practice, it looks at the latest evidence underpinning practice across all social care subject areas.

Look out for both types of article alongside the risk factor, practice panel and expert articles that are regularly published on the site.

We are making good progress with the “guides to…” section of the site (also found in the practice section for the time being). We have recently published a guide to teenage pregnancy; sexually transmitted disease/infections and a guide to street drugs.

You may wonder why we commissioned a guide to street drugs. This arose from a conversation with a piloteer during a feedback session. The social worker explained to us that when they have to work with family members who substance misuse, they need to be aware of the effects different types of drugs have on the individual. They also need to have an idea of how much different types of drugs actually cost. This is important as it provides the social worker with a rough idea of what the drugs cost the parent on a daily/weekly basis and the financial implications this has on the family.

More content is expected to be loaded this week, look out for the series of reference manuals; guides to and research review on safeguarding.

And a research review by Dr Andrew Durham on the processes of sexual abuse and why children and young people find it hard to tell.

Just to give you an idea, we have recently commissioned 46 reference manuals that will trickle in over the coming months. We have published the names of the forthcoming manuals under the reference manual tab, to give you an idea of when they are due to be published.

We have also commissioned 31 practical guides to cover a wide range of children and families work.

We won’t stop there either! We are continuously commissioning more and more content – the beauty of working on the web – no limits!

Are you happy with what you have seen on the site so far? Do you have anything you would like to raise with the team?

We will be at Community Care Live Children and Families on Thursday 11th October 2007, at the Business Design Centre, Islington if you would like to make further suggestions for content ideas. Remember Community Care events are free for delegates to attend.

The editorial team have been extremely busy commissioning work suggested from feedback sessions over the past months.

You may have seen our new series of articles called “guides to…” These articles are intended to provide practical guidance for social care professionals around a wide range of subjects and can be found in the practice section of the website. So far, we have published guides to: attachment disorder; foetal alcohol syndrome and shaken baby syndrome.

We are now looking into commissioning guides to street drugs; Webster-Stratton and Solihull approach to parenting; Othello syndrome; the impact of cannabis smoking on pregnant mothers and their children; the complaints procedure against children and families social workers; the impact of divorce and separation on children; self-harm; non-compliance issues for social workers working with children in hospital; conduct disorder and many many more.

For the CAFCASS pilot, we have commissioned guides to: conflict resolution; mediation and family group conferencing.

With the local authority pilots coming to a close, can I just take this opportunity to welcome the Eastern region of the Child Abuse Investigation Command of the Met Police who have agreed to pilot Inform. Please send us your feedback through the contact us page with any suggestions you have for content and we’ll be more than happy to consider commissioning this work.

Inform’s publishing director, Trevor Parker, picked Donna’s name at random out of a possible 60 names. Donna was thrilled to receive the prize but with too many experiences to choose from, can’t quite decide what to go for. Donna, keep us posted!

We have now been to a few feedback sessions with piloters across the 8 local authorities, which is really fantastic. You are all very positive about Inform and can see its potential.

Some piloters have raised the point that you do not have time to logon to inform, but those who do, once they are on the site find it extremely useful. With the pilot phase nearing the end, we really do urge you to practice using Inform as your first point of call when searching the internet for information. Eventually, Inform will be a one-stop-shop for all your information needs.

Good news, we have published 30 more case law summaries on the site.
It has been brought to our attention that you would like to see a summary of the case in the search-results page before you click through to the specific case law. We think this is a really valuable comment and will be working with our development team in the near future to see if we can implement this.

The team have been really busy loading lots more practice articles covering all areas in social care, along with another reference manual on care planning and reviews for looked after children and a research review entitled “Therapy with children after sexual abuse, and the impact on non-offending parents and siblings”.

Remember, there are only a couple more weeks left of the pilot phase. If you can spare some time, to send back any more comments, as ever, we will be truly grateful.

Many thanks!

We agree with your comments that this project needs to become a multi-disciplinary service to mirror multi-agency working. Our vision for Inform intends to do just this, however, as the saying goes “we must learn to walk before we can run”. We need to ensure we get it right for you, before we branch out. The great thing about the pilot phase is that it gives us a chance to find out exactly what you want from this service.

This week, we have published the following:

Reference manuals:
• Local safeguarding children’s boards

Legislation:
• Guidance on Carers touching on: Carers (recognition and services) Act 1995; Carers and Disabled Children Act 2000 and Carers (equal opportunities) Act 2004
• Guidance on parts of the Chronically sick Act 1970

Research review:
• Supporting parents with learning disabilities and their children: a review

It is really exciting to see the content grow on the website!