Separation Services
Children’s Contact Service (CCS)
Together, we'll find a way to help children have healthy connections with those important to them.
Overview
RAQ’s Children’s Contact Service (CCS) helps families have supervised visitation, handovers, and forge healthy relationships for children where their parents may have separated, or there may have been a history of conflict.
Who is this service for?
CCS is for children, who are looking for safe and healthy ways to spend time with the important grown-ups in their lives. Particularly when there might be a history of conflict that makes those relationships tricky.
Those grown-ups might be their parents, carers, family, or community.
The aim of CCS is to help these grown-ups learn to manage their own contact, whether that’s arranging their own handovers, or their own supervised visits. So, along the journey, our team of friendly practitioners might help refer them to some supporting services, such as Family Dispute Resolution or Family Counselling.
Your care and work truly went above and beyond.
I wanted to thank you and all staff at our CCS service for the excellent support provided to the children and parents. Your care and work truly went above and beyond. It was especially great that the talks had with the kids and their views after visits were recorded, as well as the details of their father’s efforts with nice food, drinks and gifts for the children, and the kids’ reactions and behaviours during the visits was extremely helpful.
Thanks to your service’s work and efforts, the children have been able to enjoy time and a relationship with their father.
Mary, 30
,
CCS client
How can I access CCS?
You can access CCS voluntarily, or you may have been referred by the Courts. However, it’s important to remember that we aren’t an extension of the Courts. We are a private, not-for-profit organisation that only look to help children have healthy, positive relationships with those important to them.
That means that we:
- Conduct our own background checks, to ensure it’s safe for us to facilitate any supervised visits or handovers
- Provide separate intakes for each parent/grown-up
- Conduct regular reviews with each parent/grown-up
- Can support face-to-face, or virtual sessions where necessary
- Have qualified professionals oversee all sessions, to help everyone have a positive time.
What do I need to know about the Children’s Contact Service?
We Are Led By the Child
We move at the child’s pace, with their comfort and safety our top priority. This can sometimes feel a little slow for the grown-ups, but in our experience, gives everyone the best chance at positive, happy outcomes.
We Aim to Move You to Self-Management
Everything we do comes with the hope that your family can manage things yourselves, with the right support and information.
We can offer handovers, supervised visitation, low-monitored visits, and even community-based visits. By conducting our own assessments, we can approach each case with the right steps, ensuring we’re progressing everyone towards self-management.
CCS Isn’t Mediation
We don’t directly offer mediation or counselling as a part of CCS. We will, however, refer you to services we think will help everyone move towards healthy relationships and self-management.
