🧩 why intake processes don’t transfer between services

It’s not uncommon for families moving between contact services to assume that a new intake or child familiarisation session isn’t needed if these steps have already been completed elsewhere.

It’s an understandable assumption.But it’s one that’s worth gently correcting.

Adults tend to think in systems.

Children experience environments.

A new service means a new space, new workers, new routines, and new ways of responding. Even when the structure looks similar, it feels different to a child.

Social work practice recognises that children don’t generalise safety easily. They build it through repetition, predictability, and relationships in a specific setting.

That process has to happen again each time the environment changes.

In practice, intake assessments are specific to the service conducting them. When they are conducted by qualified social workers, the interview is shaped by that social worker's skills and experience, the service’s approach, and how risk, safety, and children’s needs are understood in that setting.

Different services ask different questions, notice different dynamics, and form their understanding of families in different ways.

Child familiarisation sessions serve a similar purpose, but from the child’s perspective.

These sessions allow children to meet the supervising worker, experience the environment, and begin to understand what visits look like with this service. Even when children have attended contact visits elsewhere, the adults, spaces, routines, and expectations are new. Children need time to orient themselves and feel safe in that specific context.

Completing a new child familiarisation session is not about repeating the past. It’s about ensuring children are supported to settle into a new environment before the emotional work of contact begins.

When families move between services, the most helpful question isn’t “have we already done this?”

It’s “what does this child need to feel settled here?”

That question sits at the heart of child-focused, social work-led practice. And it’s what guides how we approach intake and familiarisation with every family we support.