Missing Children Practitioner

About the Team

Warwickshire County Council – The Family Adolescent Support Team (FAST) is a multi‑agency service specialising in supporting children and young people aged 11+ who are at risk of harm outside the home. The team brings together Social Workers, Family Practitioners, Family Support Workers, a Youth Worker, Homelessness Prevention Worker, Compass Worker, Education Support Worker, a Transitions Social Worker, an NRM Coordinator, and a dedicated team of Missing Children Practitioners who play a central role in our contextual safeguarding approach.

Our Missing Children Practitioners lead the countywide response to children and young people who go missing from home, care, or education. They provide Return Conversations when a young person is found, working sensitively to understand the push and pull factors influencing missing episodes. Alongside this, they deliver targeted, relationship‑based interventions designed to reduce the frequency and severity of missing incidents. Their work is integral to identifying hidden risks linked to exploitation, criminality, peer influence, or other extra‑familial contexts where harm occurs.

FAST is co‑located with the Police, Barnardo’s, and Youth Justice across three sites—Nuneaton Justice Centre (North), Bloxham Young People’s Centre (East), and Leamington Justice Centre (South). This co‑location ensures strong communication, timely information‑sharing, and a coordinated safeguarding response, which is especially critical for missing children where risks can escalates quickly.

FAST supports young people experiencing various extra‑familial risks, including exploitation, peer‑on‑peer harm, gang involvement, harmful online contact, and radicalisation. The Missing Children Practitioners often act as the first point of contact for identifying these risks, with themes emerging directly from Return Conversations, mapping work, and direct practice with young people.

FAST also supports 16/17‑year‑olds who present as homeless under the Joint Housing Protocol, and young people experiencing significant mental health challenges that require children’s social care involvement. In all these areas, the Missing Children team plays a key role in understanding patterns of absence, vulnerability, and risk when a young person disengages, absconds, or disconnects from education or services.

Children are referred into FAST through the integrated front door (Family Connect from March 2025). The team completes a Family Help Assessment within 10 days, taking a whole‑family approach to understanding needs and formulating support plans. Where missing episodes affect siblings or wider family dynamics, practitioners—including the Missing Children team—extend support appropriately.

Alongside Warwickshire’s Relational Practice Framework, FAST practitioners are trained in solution‑focused brief therapy, ARC (a trauma‑informed model), motivational interviewing, and mediation. These approaches underpin the work of Missing Children Practitioners, supporting them to build trust, reduce shame, and increase young people’s sense of safety and connection.

Most FAST work takes place under the Child in Need statutory framework, where parents and carers are partners in safeguarding. The Missing Children team works collaboratively with families, schools, carers, and partner agencies to improve safety, using a combination of disruption activity, safety planning, and direct intervention.

Overall, the Missing Children Practitioners are a vital part of FAST’s strategy to understand and reduce extra‑familial harm. Through consistent engagement, trauma‑informed practice, and a strong multi‑agency approach, they help young people stay safer and more connected to protective networks.

Now is an exciting time to be part of our team as Warwickshire begins to embed our Families First teams who support the young people in our County. Our approach is about locality working, multidisciplinary and multi‑agency teams that support the whole family. Building strong partnerships with local services, Health, Police and Education.

We are recruiting for the role of Missing Children Practitioner (base to be…