Disabled Children Team
- What we do
- Contacting the team
- How the team works
- Threshold Criteria for the Disabled Children's Social Work Team
- SEN Transport Services
- Parental involvement
- Key contacts
What we do
Haringey Council’s Disabled Children Team provides support for children and young people who have a permanent and substantial disability, and their families. Our social workers will work with families to support them in ensuring that the children are safe, happy and making progress.
The Disabled Children’s team provides advice and assistance to families with children who have severe and complex disabilities.
The team aims to ensure that these children and young people are:
- safe and protected from neglect and abuse
- secure within their families or in alternative family settings if they are children who are looked after
- supported to achieve their full potential
- supported in the move to adulthood and to transfer to Adult Services if appropriate
How the team works
The Disabled Children’s team is part of the Children’s Social Care Services within the Children and Young People’s Directorate.
The team works closely with colleagues in health and education services to ensure that the best outcomes are achieved for these children and young people.
The team works with children and their families with the highest level of need and thus an assessment takes place before any social work service is offered. If the team are unable to offer a service, they will advise as to other possibilities for where a family may go for receive support and/or resources. Families, or other professionals on their behalf, can make referrals to the team.
The team aims to promote the care of children within their own families and communities by providing short breaks if appropriate. Again, an assessment will be undertaken to determine the level and type of short break best able to meet the child or young person’s needs. More information can be found on the short breaks page.
Threshold criteria for the Disabled Children's Social Work Team
Disability is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. The Disabled Children’s Social Work team is a specialist service which is part of the Children and Young People’s service. The Disabled Children’s Team is therefore one part of a range of services for children with a variety of levels of additional needs and disabilities that are provided through the teams identified above.
The Disabled Children’s Social Work services are specifically arranged to offer a specialised service to those children who have an undisputed disability that can be defined as permanent and severe as outlined in the Equality Act 2010 in that:
- They have a physical impairment
- The impairment has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on the person’s ability to carry out normal day to day activities.
Children who have a physical or learning disability that is substantial/severe and will have a lifelong effect on their ability to carry out day to day activities, will usually have the level of need that meets the criteria for a service from the DCT.
Within this context, this will mean that more than one of the following will apply:
- The child uses specialist equipment for mobility.
- The child requires support for all self-care functions when this is no longer age appropriate.
- The child’s needs mean that they require constant supervision throughout the day and for prolonged periods at night, when this is no longer age appropriate due to their learning or physical disability;
- The child has highly challenging behaviour resulting from a severe disability that causes a serious risk to themselves or others (including but not exclusively, self-harm);
- The child has communication needs which, without support, severely affects their personal safety (i.e. is deaf, blind or without speech);
- The child has complex feeding issues (for example, the child may need to be fed non-orally, i.e. through a gastrostomy tube); as part of the pattern of needs as described above
- The child has been diagnosed as having a profound and multiple learning disability.
- The child has a long-term health condition which is life limiting or life threatening which mean that a) and b) conditions above are met.
A child or young person with an Education Health and Care (EHC) plan may be eligible for a range of support services to minimise the impact of their special educational needs on their access to activities of daily living. Being eligible for an EHC plan, however, does not mean that a child will be eligible for the Disabled Children’s Teams services, in the absence of conditions described above. For children with special educational needs, services will be offered to them that are proportionate to the impact of their disability.
More information about the Children and Young People's Service Offer can be found in The Children and Families Service Offer for Children with SEND (PDF, 402KB)
SEN Transport Services
The council can provide transport to support your child to attend a special school if you live outside the distance requirement, which is a walking distance of two miles from your home to the special school if your child is under 8 years or three miles if your child is 8 years old or over. However, for a child with Special Educational Needs or a disability, the nearest suitable school may well be further away than for other pupils, and walking may not be an option.
In this case, the council provides a home to school transport service for pupils. For more information please see our SEND travel policy 2018-2020 (PDF, 201KB)
Application form
The button below will take you to the transport application form if you have not applied before. If you have applied and received transport before, you are only required to submit another form if your details or circumstances have changed.
Transport application form(new applications)
Parental involvement
As you may know we have been trying to improve parental involvement in developing the SEND offer and systems and we engaged an organisation called Amaze (external link) to help us do this. Amaze were commissioned to undertake a review of parent participation in Haringey and report on their findings.
The report has been delayed due to Covid-19 but Amaze have now completed the report, and it will be published in the coming weeks on the Local Offer page and in the September newsletter.
Key contacts
- Christa Ncube is the Service manager for DCT.
- Beverley Hendricks is Assistant Director, Safeguarding & Social Care with responsibility for DCT.
- The Team Administrators are Mezan Ahmed and Maria Haros.
For other SEND Services:
- Nathan Jones and Dennis Scotland are the Heads of Service for Integrated Service for Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.
- Paul Sutton is the Assistant Director responsible for Early Help, Youth and SEND
Contacting the team
The Disabled Children's team duty team office is open from 9am-5pm Mondays to Fridays (for contact by telephone only). The telephone numbers are 020 8489 3671 or 3672.
In emergencies outside these hours the emergency duty team can be contacted on 020 8489 0000.
The team is based at Alexandra House in Wood Green. There are no reception facilities at the office so visits to the office are by appointment only.
2nd Floor Alexandra House
10 Station Road
Wood Green
London N22 7TR
