AG Child Contact Services

We are a nationwide company, with teams across England and Wales. We have contact centres in Sussex, Essex and Suffolk but additionally primary areas for contact services are in London, the South East and East Anglia however we take on child contact work (CS) referrals in all counties. AG Contact Centres Ltd. (AGCC) is a sister company to AG Family Support (AGFS) Ltd. and it manages all our child contact centres in the country.

Please note that AGFS also provides local authorities and private clients with contact services in areas which do not come under the umbrella of our existing Contact Centres. This means that we are able to identify and hire any other suitable venue, nationally, to deliver a contact service from. Naturally, where so requested, we also offer community-based contact, including in a family home.

Supervised and Supported Child Contact Services in our Centres and, subject to location, in the community.

Yes, all our centres are fully accredited by the NACCC.

All our contact supervisors are also trained in Family Support Work. All are our direct employees and AGFS/AGCC is their direct employer. Before starting with us, all CSs must complete a robust selection, induction and training process with our company. The induction training includes online resources and in-person group training sessions. Our employees also have access to our in-house training resources, including on a number of specialist subjects, such as ‘Understanding and Working with self-harm’, ‘How to effectively manage challenging behaviours in children’, ‘Professional boundaries at work’, ‘Report writing’, and others.

Many of our CSs are professionals in their own right, and all have prior experience or qualifications in the context of working with children and families. All are exceptionally well supported by our management team and have access to regular training and supervision. All have current, Enhanced DBS checks. Some can speak other languages.

Training and support that our CSs have access to has been designed by our Directors, Emily and Arthur Gajewski. With their 50 years of combined experience in the areas of social work and mental health, they have ensured that our FSWs have all the tools they need to effectively, safely and responsibly engage with those they come in contact with, in line of their work.

Only if pre agreed with either the child’s social worker (where the local authority is the client) or with the other parent (in private cases), prior to your visit.

AGCC is an independent company. The cost can be met either by the local authority (retrospectively and within 30 days of the invoice issue) or by the private individual/s (typically a parent or both parents/carers, with advance payment at least 5 days prior a session due to commence), depending on the nature of the referral. All bookings, other than Public Law cases, are provisional until the payment is made 5 days prior to confirm the booking. Late payment can result in automatic cancellation of provisional bookings.

With enquiries about our rates and for referral packs please email your nearest contact centre. Contact Centre Managers details are given under the specific centre locations. If you are not sure which centre to contact, or seeking community contact not near one of our centres, please email us on contact.centres@agfamilysupport.com or call on 0800 999 1456 specifying the area where contact is being requested.

As part of a Private Law referral process, we ask that the two parties (typically the resident parent/carer and a parent who is to have contact with the child) make themselves available for separate 20-minute intro meetings with the centre manager. This is when contact requirements, expectations and boundaries are discussed and agreed. There is a fee for private family referral process

Please note, in Public Law cases we do not tend to facilitate intro meetings with the parties. This is because the local authority already knows the family well and the child/children have a case-managing social worker allocated to them. In such circumstances, contact sessions are a part of the local authority’s care plan for that child/children.

Whenever possible. We understand this is very important to children and families in regard to consistency and professional relationship building.

In many cases we can do much better than to involve an interpreter! Some of our CS’s are fluent in at least one other language (such as Polish, Lithuanian Romanian, Hungarian, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Spanish, French, Albanian, Nigerian dialects, Eastern European Roma dialects) and we therefore can supervise or support contact sessions themselves, without the need to involve third party- interpreters. Please see our blog article for more details on the subject of bilingual contact work.

Should we need to involve an interpreter, however, we are able to identify and contract one in from the National Register of Public Service Interpreters (NRPSI), pretty much for any language. They are professional-grade interpreters, and we then train them up to not only interpret but provide our supervisors with cultural consultancy where such may be required.

What we certainly do not do, is to ask an interpreter to consecutively interpret everything that is said in the session. We know from experience that such a mode of interpreting is disruptive and unhelpful to all involved. Instead, we ensure that the interpreter is aware of what to listen out for and how to discreetly convey the content to the supervisor.

Moreover, within our contact centres settings, we have set up technologies and procedures which enable our supervisors to have access to an online interpreting service, where an in-person interpreter’s presence is not possible. In such circumstances, the interpreter is often one of our bilingual contact supervisors.