To approve the purchase of Mind of My Own (MOMO) apps to enable children and young people in care and those with disabilities to share their views, wishes and feelings with their corporate parents and the council.

THAT:

(a)        the council subscribes to MOMO for three years at a cost of £12,600;

(b)        the council subscribes to MOMO Express for three years at a cost of £10,500;

(c)        the council purchases training for 50 users at a cost of £1,000;

(d)        an exemption to paragraph 4.6.13.2 of the contract procedure rules shall be granted to allow the contract to be awarded to Mind of My Own (MOMO) for the reasons set out in the report below.

MOMOs apps are a modernised way of gaining young people’s views and enabling them to speak up about the things that are important or of concern to them. They are a safe, easy and digitally appropriate way for them to communicate with their care team, that are accredited to the ISO27001 information security standard. Both apps have been designed and extensively tested with young people using social care services, to make it easy for users to create clear, structured and detailed MOMO documents of their views, wishes and feelings. MOMO One is a free app that anyone can download and use to send their views, wishes and feelings, through their own personal account on any mobile device or computer, anytime they choose. Service MOMO is the localised service subscription package that unlocks special features for MOMO One users in that area or service, including a local menu of who they can send their views to. Service MOMO also provides services with access to audit trails of young people’s views and aggregated data on what they are saying collectively through MOMO One. MOMO Express is an app for workers and young people with a learning disability to use together. It connects to Service MOMO and generates reports in the same way as MOMO One. All apps and Service MOMO are updated every 6 to 12 weeks to introduce new features and refine or enhance existing ones.

MOMO would increase engagement with all children and young people in contact with social care services, including those with a learning disability. It would enable the service to evidence children’s views comprehensively within the care planning process and improve the quality of review, safeguarding and other meeting types by increasing social workers’ focus on young people’s lived experience.

MOMO would increase the flow of information from children and young people to their social worker, thereby improving the quality of decision making. This should lead to an increase in placement stability and life chances for Herefordshire’s children and young people.

Herefordshire’s last Ofsted report in 2014 recommended “that learning from complaints and representations from children and young people, parents and carers and service users is systematically collated and analysed and is used to improve service delivery and development” and further commented in relation to the Herefordshire Safeguarding Children Board (HSCB) that “members recognise the need to engage with children, young people, families and the community to secure their views to influence the development of its work and safeguarding practice. However, little progress has been made in obtaining the views of children and their families who have contact with safeguarding services”. Although work has been undertaken to address these issues since 2014, the task of systematically collating and analysing complaints, comments and compliments is time consuming. MOMO would address these issues in an efficient way, saving time spent currently attempting to analyse information manually.

An alternative provider was approached and presented to the voice of the child steering group at the same time as MOMO. They did not have a developed product but indicated that they would be able to build a similar product to the specification required. They were asked to provide costings and a timescale to build an equivalent product, but have not responded to either requests since the initial presentation on 12 January 2017.

Research has indicated that there is no other equivalent product on the market that would meet the specific needs of looked after children, therefore an exemption to paragraph 4.6.13.2 of the contract procedure rules shall be granted to allow the contract to be awarded to Mind of My Own (MOMO) for the reasons set out within this report.

Continue as we are meaning that advocates, social workers and independent reviewing officers will continue to seek young people’s views in relation to meetings or specific issues as and when time and resources allow. They will continue to use face to face meetings, telephone calls and paper based consultation forms to achieve this. However, children and young people consistently tell us that they dislike completing consultation forms and so many choose not to. They are often asked to answer very similar questions in slightly different formats to contribute to looked after children (LAC) reviews, personal education plan (PEP) review meetings and foster carer reviews. The use of paper based consultation forms makes analysis of the information very difficult, if not impossible.

Review and develop new paper consultation tools. Although it should be possible to improve the forms being currently used, this does not address the difficulties of young people disliking the forms, duplication and difficulties in analysing the information.

Development of our own digital involvement tool. To make a product like this, that is engaging for young people and fits into existing social work processes, would require significant upfront resource investment in scoping, design and development and a likely 12 to 18 month lead time and ongoing annual maintenance costs. To make the product accessible to young people as an app which works on multiple platforms, would incur further costs. Implementing and monitoring the product would require further internal investment. Annual investment in product maintenance would be required to fix any problems, manage changes and maintain performance.

Use an online survey tool such as SurveyMonkey. This would provide an effective means of surveying groups of people, however it does not offer any direct benefit to young people. It is not accessible in the same way as an app and does not allow young people to send their views to a specific worker, it is at best a service-led means of gaining feedback. There are no UK based survey tools that hold ISO27001 certification and they are not suitable for storing young people’s personal and sensitive data.

Join Viewpoint, which is a piece of assessment and consultation software, that provides children’s services with libraries of questionnaires and interviews to use with children and young people. It is not designed for children to use to communicate with their workers. Young people can choose when to access these tools, but they do not own their account and cannot choose who to send their views to. App versions are available, but only to services that have paid to use the software. Children and young people do not get access to these apps on their own devices nor their own account. Viewpoint does not proactively facilitate connections between local councils and does not hold ISO27001 accreditation.