To consider the revised Draft Children’s Services Improvement Plan.

The report was taken as read.

 

The Director for Children and Young People provided a brief overview of the report and invited questions from the Committee:

 

The Committee broke questions into key areas identified by Ofsted.

 

Corporate Responsibility

Q1: What proposals can you immediately propose to facilitate parents/carers and children both in public meetings and at every point of contact - so that their voices are heard and more importantly to avoid their having to bring their upsetting stories (at huge personal cost) into the public arena?

 

Have you considered trauma awareness training for officers and members?

 

The Director for Children and Young People explained they were considering how to introduce trauma informed practice and trauma awareness. Trauma awareness was part of the relational restorative practice approach and would be a key plank of not only changing Council practice, but signalling that the practice was changing. This would link to the different platforms approach.

 

In terms of different platforms, the Council needed to work with families and create a safe space where personal conversations could take place away from the public arena.

 

RECOMMENDATION: The Committee stressed that it would like to see trauma training extended to every single officer and member with a responsibility corporately to answer parents.

 

Q2: This Improvement Plan … has been prepared in collaboration with a range of stakeholders including children, young people, parents and carers, the workforce and multi-agency / cross sector partners. … We intend to continue engaging with our stakeholders to further develop a local conversation whereby we will listen, address feedback and take appropriate action as an integral part of our improvement journey as we move forward.”

 

However, the list of 11 consultees does not include any birth families consultees.

 

Please outline the ways in which birth families have been consulted when drafting the Plan and how you will continue to engage with them?

 

The Director for Children and Young People explained that in terms of the consultation events the only feedback they got in terms of parent care families came through organisations such as Parent Carer Voice and Healthwatch. The Director recognised that there weren’t currently enough forums for meaningful engagement and that was why they were developing the ‘Listening to Families’ approach, which was in the consultation process and due to be published in the New Year. This would be refreshed and updated every time Ofsted came back in the future.

 

Q3. There is a perception from some head teachers that once a family has accessed an intervention through early help or Venture, or something similar, then they can’t access a lesser degree of service and end up getting stuck in the system. They are experiencing long waiting times for high level intervention where capacity is limited, but can’t get lower level assistance at the same time. Is this perception correct and what are we doing to address that problem.

 

The Director for Children and Young People acknowledged Issues around capacity of universal early help and high level intervention. The Council would be looking to engage with head teachers and schools differently and better in the New Year.

 

ACTION: Chair suggested sharing responses on the new improvement plan from a primary school teacher with cabinet.

 

 

The sufficiency and stability of staff across the workforce.

Q1: There is nothing in the improvement plan that suggests anything new or innovative will be attempted to address the social work recruitment issue, the same is true of the shortage of foster carers. There is nothing about partner agencies being part of the pathway. For example, placements, development of role from early help into social work etc.

What will actually be different and why will the outcome be different this time?

 

Q2: The BRAG rating is red for fostering, and yet in-house fostering is measured as good which doesn’t follow, can you explain please?

 

Have we seen the fostering information leaflet, which it says has been completed? Where is it available?

 

The Director for Children and Young People did not have recruitment data on foster care, so would have to return to the committee on that.

 

In terms of recruitment of social workers and career progression, the Council had too high a proportion of interim staff and wanted a higher proportion of permanent experienced social workers. Trying to recruit had been and continued to be difficult and there was a shortage of social workers nationally.

 

The Council would be increasing the number of social worker apprenticeships next year and also increasing the number of newly qualified social workers and social work students that it was supporting – it was trying to ‘grow its own’ and create a flow of staff over the medium to long term.

 

The directorate was speaking to the DfE and Ofsted about using people with different skills in the team, such as family support workers. How the Council moved to that position had to be carefully considered to make sure children were safe.

 

 

Committee, are we looking at what neighbouring councils have done to improve their situation and seeing if we can learn lessons and follow examples?

 

The Director for Children and Young People confirmed the Council was talking with other authorities about best practice.

 

The Committee was concerned that in BRAG fostering was red and there was a high number of seemingly delayed amber items.

 

The Director for Children and Young People pointed out that it would be worrying if everything in BRAG was green, because that would suggest everything was fine, which it wasn’t. People are working hard to improve things and each month when progress is made it will be updated.

 

The Committee requested a diagram/chart to show loops as to how all the areas interlink, would be great and this would link in with the dashboard.

 

The Director for Children and Young People explained that storyboards were likely to feature within the improvement plan.

 

 

 

 

 

The timely and robust identification and multi-agency response to children and young people

 

Q1: Many concerns could be raised in this section but the pressing need seems to be for a clear understanding and response to the issue of neglect – which as we know is one of the most harmful forms of abuse.

What work has been done to date on a strategy for this and with whom does the responsibility reside?

 

The Director for Children and Young People stated that an interim neglect strategy was published last month by the safeguarding partnership and was due to be evaluated in terms of its impact next spring. The next step of the neglect strategy would hopefully be published in the summer or early autumn of next year. There is a one year interim strategy in place at the moment.

 

 

 

The quality of practice including assessments, plans, planning and purposeful visits that are responsive to risk and need

Q1: Head teachers are telling us that the voice of the child needs to be heard and not only that of the parent. When social care is supporting parents sometimes children’s voices are not prioritised. This remains a concern amongst heads.

What measures are in place to address this?

 

The Director for Children and Young People acknowledged that a lot more needed to be done in terms of voice of the child. When a local authority had been in decline for years, there was a real necessity to get structures and benchmarks in place for delivering the quality. In the New Year, the directorate would be monitoring impact through quality assurance audits. As a service, it was crucial to find ways to capture the voice of families and children. It was not just about reports and strategies, but about genuinely listening and triangulating this against what children and people tell us. The Council was trying to improve from a very low base. There had been some positive progress, but there was a long way to go.

 

The Committee asked the Director if the service engaged with teachers in relation to the voice of the child.

 

The Director confirmed that they did involve teachers and had been asking how they could include teachers to a greater degree to build a better picture.

 

 

 

Timely and Effective multi agency arrangements to ensure children are protected and enter care when required

Q1: Do you consider that deciding on the Family Group Conference model by April 2023 is acting at pace?

 

The Director for Children and Young People stated he would like to have more provision now and certainly early January. The plan for the 1^st April was to have the resource in place rather than make a decision about the resource. Realistically that was about as early as we would be able to get emergency resources in place.

 

Committee: could we change the wording from ‘determine’ FGC model and approach by April 2023 to ‘implement’?

 

Director: yes we could that.

 

 

Q2: Do you consider that rolling out the Edge of Care Strategy from March 2023 is acting at pace and should it be a Measure that Matter (target).

 

The Director for Children and Young People explained that was as fast as they could do it, given the scope and scale of the activity. The edge of care strategy would be a long term strategy and was a multi-agency piece of work. There would be a wide range of performance indicators. The ‘measures that matter’ were there to give the audience a sense that things were moving in the right direction. The fact it is not a Measure of Matter doesn’t mean it is a lower priority.

 

The Committee pointed out that the earlier you can invest in early years, the more it’s possible to reduce costs of children in care further down the line. A paradigm shift has to be made.

 

 

Q3: What will the multi-agency ‘edge of care’ offer look like? It is intended to build on family strengths and resources so children and young people can stay with their families where appropriate. Given the pressures families are under, how soon will this service be up and running?

 

It was explained that the aim was to have a strategy drafted by the end of January and extended service in place by March 2023. There were good services in the ECHO team and they wanted to supplement those with the extended family group conference offer, as well forging stronger links to voluntary community and faith sector organisations.

 

Q4 Is the Director of Children’s services minded to better resource Early Help or is the real prevention work likely to be left to the community to do for free?

 

The Director for Children and Young People explained it was a combination of both, we would like to see resources coming into children’s services being diverted to early help, but the offer should also be provided by universal services such schools, health centres and nurseries. Currently the balance is not right. There has been fantastic input from local communities based on the Talk Community feedback. We want to implement feedback we have recovered from families and schools to implement quick win actions that will demonstrate to communities that we are listening and doing something to address the issues.

 

The Committee pointed out that it had heard from some family support workers that family support and early help were no longer really considered prevention, because there was so much backfilling going on in the system at the moment that they were being taken as a much higher level of service.

 

 

 

 

Monitoring and Tracking to prevent drift and delay (plo, permanence planning, PLO and unregistered children’s homes

Q1: Families who encounter difficulties that lead to PLO pre-proceedings are facing an adversarial legal system which offers them little support. What provision is being made to provide families with the right information for court proceedings in a timely manner so that they are fully aware of the process and the implications? The communication the families are getting is very poor.

 

There was uncertainty about current info on the Council website relating to this, but an assurance was given that it would be checked. It was explained that last year saw the publication of the national public law working group support for families with pre-precedings document. This needed to be linked as a source to the Council website.

 

RECOMMENDATION: That families are properly advised on the right information and advice and support on Public Law Outline (PLO) meetings and pre-court proceedings.

 

Q2. Training on HRA/EA. Does that information exist on a publicly accessible page? Can you direct me to it? Are the identified pathways through the service easily found and understood by families and do we have feedback on that?

 

The Director for Children and Young People stated that they were not accessible at the moment and that this would be part of the strand of work that the directorate was planning to do in the listening to families approach, and then map that with family health to produce that material.

 

Committee: we have to be aware of the increased sensitivity emotions that people have and for people to be trained in how to handle the impacts of their decisions in terms of the HRA/EA should be a priority. There isn’t enough awareness of it among officers and members.

 

The availability of support and services to meet children and young people’s needs

Q1 Statement - We are still hearing stories of people having to re-tell their stories. One family has waited over 2 years for this support (life story work) to be organised and implemented effectively. This means the child is constantly re traumatised having to tell her story to, so far, 9 social workers. This concern has been shared at every PEP/LAC meeting we have attended since 2020.

 

The Director for Children and Young People pointed out that life story work don’t have resources at the moment and this was dependent on the Council’s ability to improve permanent social worker levels. In the short term it would be hard to make improvements, but they were training more social workers in different parts of the service. They were committed to reducing agency workers (who were very good) and needed more permanent workers.

 

 

 

 

Services to support children and young people with Special Educational Needs and/or a Disability (SEND)

Q1.There is a lack of confidence amongst head teachers with regard to SEND. We are concerned about capacity, lack of availability of places in specialist settings and lack of flexibility within the graduated approach where a child does not fit that system. There are huge pressures on staffing at all levels within the team which means that excellent staff are overloaded and we will lose them

 

There is only one social inclusion officer for the whole of Herefordshire - as you reconsider the SEND strategy for Herefordshire - can you tell us how can this deficit be addressed? 

 

The Director for Children and Young People explained that he would bring the committee a detailed progress report on this at the next scrutiny committee. On the back of the peer review we have challenged and worked with our partners in health agencies to put more capacity in. Too many children have been waiting too long and starting school without an assessment. Extra capacity has been put into the SEND team over the last couple of months and we are listening to head teachers.

 

 

At the end of the consideration of this matter, the committee resolved that the following recommendations be made to Cabinet for inclusion in the Children's Services Improvement Plan Action Plan:

 

1: That trauma awareness training for all relevant persons including council staff and members be included in the Children Services Improvement Action Plan and that this be signposted to the relevant staff at the appropriate times.

 

2: That the targeted action to develop and launch a Family Group Conference model be targeted for implementation by April 2023, rather than "asap thereafter" as currently stated.

 

3: That families are properly advised on the right information (links will be provided to the Family Rights Group website and other resources) and advice and support on Public Law Outline (PLO) meetings and pre-court proceedings.

 

The committee also resolved:

                            

That HRA/EA training be provided to all relevant council staff (including the Legal Team as promised to be financed in the first tranche of the transformation budget) and members as a priority and at pace, and

 

That the committee share with cabinet some responses from a Primary School teacher on the new Improvement Plan, as submitted by one of the committee’s co-opted members.