What's a contact centre?

30 Jun

You may be wondering whether a contact centre is right for you and your family.

We’ll take you through everything you need to know about a contact centre, so you can find the right contact centre for you.

What you need to know about contact centres

They can provide a safe place that offers meaningful contact. Children from separated families can meet up with their non-resident parents or other members of the family and spend quality time together in a safe, comfortable environment.

Usually, these meetups are described as contacts and are often described as summarised supported or supervised contact depending on the type of contact you have.

Supervised contact comes with a report from a support worker, who will also be there during the contact, whilst the non-resident can talk and play with their child.

Summarised supported contact is similar, however, it means that a support worker will be present but won’t need to write a detailed supervised report on the session.

What's the process?

Before the contact day, the non-resident parent will be invited to a pre-visit at the centre. They’ll be able to look around, meet our staff and ask any questions.

After that, our centre will then invite the child and their resident parent to do the same.

The pre-visit is a really good opportunity to find out about how the centre will work with your family’s situation. Our staff can then make sure that the service is going to be right for you and your family.

Why us?

Contact centres have a range of different contacts tailored to each family’s situation.

For example, we have letterbox contact for children who may not have personal contact with their non-resident parent. While the child won’t be with the non-resident parent physically, they’ll be able to come in and open letters or gifts with a support worker.

The child can then also write back to the non-resident parent, making sure their contact remains via our letterbox service. This means no personal details like addresses, emails and phone numbers are exchanged.

Our centre also offers electronic contact. Here, the child will be invited into the centre where they can video call their non-resident parent under the supervision of a support worker.