Please note that our face to face child contact service is currently suspended due to the government guidelines.  We continue to offer virtual services to families  during this time.

What is Child Contact?

Contact is the time a child spends with a significant person who no longer lives with them. Usually this is a parent or carer, but this can also be grandparents, siblings and other family members.

Contact is not just an allotted time between children and adult; we believe it is more helpful to think of contact as 'family time for children' with an emphasis being on the quality of that time. The focus during this time is on the adults meeting the child's needs as best as they can to ensure the time is of value to them and the child.

Child Contact Venues

Child Contact Venues can be helpful when there are safety considerations that need to be explored, or when adults or children need support from staff to help re-establish trust with another person.

We strive to ensure that our child contact venues are child friendly and welcoming and we work in partnership with NACCC to ensure our venues meet the required child contact centre standards. We also put ourselves forward to be inspected by the FJYPB to ensure that we get children's views about our venues.

 Subject to risk assessment, contact activities can be centre based or external, such as a Cafcass office, or they might take place in the community; allowing for the flexibility to support families in various settings and enabling them to move on in a safe and supported way.

Staff working in our venues support parents to consider future arrangements and adults are be expected to take part in dispute resolution work as part of our child contact activities and work on a contact plan to enable things to move forward.  

Contact Activities:

 Impact Family Services offer a range of child-centred contact activities to help children better understand their unique situation and support children to re-establish key relationships, were it is safe to do so. 

We do this work in partnership with the significant adults in the child's life. Sometimes individual sessions with the adults or child may be appropriate, or it may involve joint sessions with the adult, child and staff member. These activities aim to support parents and children, giving them ideas to enable and sustain safe and beneficial unsupervised contact, establishing a way forward without the need for longer term court intervention or professional input.

Children and parents are supported by experienced and trained members of our Family Interventions Team.

For a detailed explanation about the different contact activities that we provide, please see our information leaflet below:

Impact_Contact_Activities_Leaflet_2019.pdf 

How to Apply:

Families can be referred by Cafcass - in this instance the referral will come to us via Cafcass and the sessions are free of charge. We will contact you quickly once we receive your referral to discuss this with you.

Adults or professionals can also make a referral and pay to use or child contact services. To do this they would need to complete the referral form  below and email it to: [email protected] 

IMPACT_Contact_Activities_Referral_Form_2019_.pdf

Contact Us:

To get in touch with a member of our Family Intervention Team; please email them at [email protected] or call 07375788819 and we will be happy to help.