To provide an update on progress against the children’s services improvement plan.

Darryl Freeman (Corporate Director for Children and Young People) gave a brief introduction to the Children’s Services Improvement Plan. The principal points included:

1. The Improvement Plan follows the inspection by Ofsted last summer where Children’s Services in Herefordshire were rated as inadequate.
2. Thereafter, a statutory direction followed in addition to the appointment of a children’s commissioner.
3. The improvement plan was agreed by Children’s Scrutiny and Cabinet in December 2022 and was submitted to Ofsted.
4. Progress against the improvement plan is primarily monitored by the improvement board as there is no governance role for the Health and Wellbeing Board, however, some of the elements of the improvement plan have connections to the wider Health and Wellbeing Board agenda.
5. The improvement board meets six-weekly and an update will be provided in addition to a thematic review which covers looked-after children.
6. Progress is also monitored by Ofsted and they have commenced a programme of monitoring visits, the first of which was in March 2023 and the feedback report was published in June 2023.
7. In the first monitoring visit, the focus was on the front door multi-agency response to risk in which good feedback was received by Ofsted with regard to progress that had been regarding the multi-agency response and the multi-agency safeguarding hub.
8. Within the same report, there’s also a reminder that there is much more to do to improve the consistency of the quality of the practice, particularly of the quality of assessments in that particular visit.
9. Ofsted were returning later this week to focus on child protection.
10. The visits from Ofsted will form a regular pattern for the next couple of years.
11. Children’s Services have been in decline for many years and improvement to a standard of ‘good or more’ will not happen overnight. Rather this will be a 2-3 year improvement plan activity.
12. The general direction of travel continues to be positive and the vast majority of activities are on track and the impact of the activity are now being measured. A lot of work is being done to change systems and processes, including IT systems, and it takes time to see the impact of that and the difference it makes with children and young people.
13. Gail Hancock (Service Director Improvement) and her team have started to provide some impact measures for the future.
14. Recruitment remains the single greatest challenge and to recruit experienced social workers is a particular challenge in Herefordshire.

The Corporate Director for Children and Young People then invited questions and comments from members of the board.

Jane Ives asked the Corporate Director how much the current rating of the service as ‘inadequate’ is impacting on the ability to recruit

The Corporate Director answered that the two are inextricably linked and that the competitiveness of Herefordshire’s offer including quality of supervision, stability of leadership and management will help make a difference.

The Director of Public Health noted that the link to the Health and Wellbeing Strategy and in particular, the ‘Best Start in Life’ provides an opportunity  ...  view the full minutes text for item 21