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North East London Keyworking Service

The North East London (NEL) Keyworking Service works with children and young people with learning disabilities and or autism who are aged 0-25 years, have complex needs and are on their local Dynamic Support Registers.

A Dynamic Support register is a local list of people with learning disabilities and or autism who are at risk of going into hospital, for example mental health wards. More information about the Dynamic Support Register (DSR) can be found online.

Keyworking service offer:

  • Provide a dedicated Keyworker as a consistent point of contact for children, young people and their families.
  • Help families navigate services and access the right support at the right time.
  • Coordinate support across health, education, social care and voluntary sector services to ensure joined-up working.
  • Build trusted relationships through compassionate, person-centred support.
  • Ensure the child or young person's voice is at the centre of planning and decision-making.
  • Offer practical guidance, information and emotional support to help families feel informed and empowered.
  • Advocate for children, young people and families to ensure their needs are understood and acted upon.
  • Develop and review personalised support plans that reflect individual needs, strengths and goals.
  • Support key transitions, including changes in education, services, hospital admission and discharge.
  • Monitor progress, address emerging concerns and help prevent crises where possible.
  • Communicate in ways that work best for families, including face-to-face meetings, telephone calls, emails and text messaging.
  • Work collaboratively with families and professionals to achieve the best possible outcomes and improve quality of life.

Testimonials

My keyworker helped me a lot, she listens and understands and does not judge. She’s has been supportive throughout my journey.

Our Keyworker is simply amazing, very supportive and was helpful to us from day one. Through her, I now have a better understanding as to why keyworkers are all so important because of the work they do. I only wished we had met our keyworker much earlier in this journey. In just a short space of time since we started working together our keyworker set the wheels in motion on a lot of long-overdue and on-going issues we had encountered with regards to getting the right help for our SEN child whose behaviour and autistic symptoms seemed to have regressed since the past 2 years. She cut out the wait time, and made finding the right services and support for our son within the borough extremely easy, very straightforward and hassle free (as should be), by simply contacting and connecting us directly with the right people and services, compared to others we had contacted in the past, who we were supposedly dealing with, but had failed to be as helpful in our crucial moments of need, with some overly complicating our matter and simply passing us around to delay the process without actually doing anything to help and support us through the challenges we had with our son. We're in a much better place now in receiving the right support because of her. We're ever grateful.

My daughter was struggling with her mental health and refused to engage with any mental health services. However, her keyworker was very patient and found ways to engage with her. She is currently only engaging with the keyworking service.