The draft Children and Young People’s Plan is presented to the Health and Wellbeing Board for the consideration of any recommendations to the Cabinet Member concerning the content of the Plan.

The director for children and families introduced the draft plan and highlighted the improvements made and achievements over the life of the previous plan. Many children and young people had been involved in developing the new plan. Consultation was now taking place and it was hoped that the final version of the plan would be approved by Herefordshire Council at the full council meeting in February 2019.

The children’s commissioning and contracts lead explained the engagement work that had taken place with children, young people, providers and parents in drafting the new plan. Efforts had been made to make the plan as concise and easy to read as possible. The plan had moved towards an outcomes based approach and four key pledges:

·         be safe from harm;

·         be healthy;

·         be amazing; and

·         feel part of the community.

In discussion of the draft plan the board noted:

·         it was important to join up work with children and work with adults to focus on whole family issues;

·         that the importance of making every contact count (mecc) should be highlighted;

·         that ‘family first’ was a local name for an approach to working with troubled families, with an expanded outcomes framework;

·         that the plan could be aligned with the local maternity services plan and that contact between the authors of the two plans should be encouraged;

·         that mental health was an important element, work was taking place with partnerships and would feed in to the plan and be translated to concrete actions;

·         that individuals from a travelling background had the poorest outcomes in Herefordshire and that particular efforts should be made to target and engage with this group;

·         that care should be taken when presenting figures in the plan as fact if they were not, for example the number of children and young people requiring support with their mental health or emotional resilience was an estimate based on national statistics, it was agreed that this would be reworded;

·         that schools would have a significant role to play in implementing the plan, it was noted that action plans would be developed under the main plan and that schools would be one of the partners involved;

·         that members of the board should take the outcomes in the plan back to their respective governance structures, publicise the plan as much as possible, ensure the outcomes were embedded in their own areas of work and regularly referred to;

·         that the plan should be more explicit about partnership work, but it was noted that the plan should not become too large a document;

·         that board members should identify barriers to the success of the plan and use their strategic weight to remove these.

Actions identified by the board included:

·         board members to take the strategic priorities identified in the plan and work to deliver them through the governance structures of their respective organisations;

·         board members to reference and encourage discussion of the strategic priorities identified in the plan in forums not specifically dealing with children and families to identify opportunities for indirect contributions to achieving outcomes; and

·         board members to publicise the plan and the outcomes achieved through it.

It was resolved that:

(a)  The Health and Wellbeing Board’s comments on the attached draft as set out in the minutes of the meeting be fed back in order to inform development of the final version of Herefordshire’s final Children and Young People’s Plan; and

(b)  The Health and Wellbeing Board considered its key role and identified necessary action it should take in helping to achieve the proposed priorities.