Help please, we don't know what to do

[Swiftey]

Hi,
Both my children were taken into social care in May 2022,after my oldest son made some false allegations against me and his mum. We have been to court 6th December 2022, with the ruling that my oldest son stay in care and my younger daughter to be rehabilitated back to us after a positive assessment. Before the trust would re assess us we had some work to complete, talking teens, family links. These courses was stated in the care plan. I also did tha talking dads program, and we both have done the dice programme. Neither of the latter programs were in the care plan but we wanted to better our parenting skills. All work was completed by us on the 4th September 2023.
We had a review with the IRO on the 28th September in this review the trust told us that they are going to re assess me and my partner, but they told us we have to wait a minimum of 12 months from the court date which is the 6th December 2023. Now speaking to our solicitor they told us that the trust should provide us with a detailed plan of contact upto and through the assessment, our solicitor even told us that we should now be having unsupervised contact with our daughter which all forms part of our assessment. We now have unsupervised contact twice a week with our oldest son.
We have approached the trust with this and they are saying that no unsupervised contact can take place until a positive assessment has been completed.
So how come I'm been told one thing from the trust and another from our solicitor.

Another question I have is can we go back to court to get a court order to make the trust do the assessment sooner, as we strongly feel that they are just going to delay things.

[Suzie, FRG Adviser]

Dear Swiftey

Thank you for your post and welcome to the Board.

In response to your two questions here on our website is information about discharging care orders and here is information about local authorities ‘duties to children in their care’. I am not able to contradict or comment on the advice that your solicitor gave to you: when you have read our webpages you may want to meet with them again.

Your second question might be answered through the discharge of the care order information above. From what you have written the local authority has considered reuniting your child, in most cases they will do an assessment before children go home, see page 56 & 57 of Working Together to Safeguard Children 2018 for information (and a chart) about this.

I hope this information is helpful

Best wishes
Suzie