This report shares information with the Committee regarding the nature of both targeted and universal early help services in Herefordshire, along with additional information regarding the service offer made by the Council.

 

The committee took the report as read and the debate was opened up for questions.

 

The committee asked how the council and partners engaged with children and families to determine need and demand for services. It was asked how well the partnership knew the families, their strengths and the pattern of service use, and how this knowledge determined which services were being provided.

 

The Director of Children’s Services explained that allocation of services was based on historical data primarily taken from the JSNA (Joint Strategic Needs Assessment) and that the JSNA was being updated by colleagues in public health in the next six months.

It was explained that the JSNA was a data set that was refreshed periodically, and informed by service user feedback and by demographics and information obtained from schools and voluntary and community sectors. Additional information was also obtained from the census data.

 

It was noted that a lot of early help and prevention services were delivered through school hubs and Talk Community hubs.

 

The Head of Services for Early Help stated that families were identified by those professionals or people who knew or worked with the family and that advice and signposting could be given depending on the level of need. The CHAT (Children’s Health and Advice Team) and the helpline it operates could signpost for early help services before the need for targeted services.

 

There was a windscreen of needs from levels one to four. Level one was safeguarding, level four was where universal services were required. Levels two and three were where the CHAT helpline, school, health and police services came in.

 

The Head of Services for Early Help explained that where needs were more complex families could be offered an early help assessment, which was an assessment of the needs of the whole family including all children and adults. This was done with consent and the professional would draw up a plan of support to address any needs. The early help assessment was a working document that was regularly updated and reviewed. If additional needs had been identified, targeted support would go into the family home. Professionals would also work with other adults who have a role in the life of the child, such as grandparents.

 

Work was carried out with children to understand their lived experience, which could highlight further needs.

 

 

The committee noted that needs were changing rapidly due to the fallout from Covid and the cost of living crisis. The committee hoped a revised JSNA might draw attention to other needs, but questioned whether services would be able to respond to and adapt to changes in the community.

 

The Head of Service for Early Help explained that that early help and the wider partnership was constantly evolving and developing depending on needs. The CHAT helpline had identified an increase in calls about mental health and anxiety, and staff were being trained in the fearless parenting programme, which was aimed at parents with children who suffer with anxiety. The CHAT was constantly updating its knowledge about what services were available, including online, telephone and specialist services (accessed through GP or CAMHS).

 

The committee enquired whether information obtained by school systems such as ‘my concerns’ was being used as a data source for targeting activity

 

The Director for Education, Learning and Skills explained that schools are required to keep records of concerns and picture via electronic systems such as ‘my concerns’ or traditional paper records and this does often lead to referrals being made. Accessing the data directly would be difficult due to confidentiality issues, but schools do report in on patterns and trends that feed into the safeguarding audit.

 

The committee stated that the relationship with schools was an important one and noted the need to discuss a recommendation on making sure trends and patterns from school data was being used as effectively as possible.

 

 

The committee suggested that some families were scared to seek help from the council for fear of their children being removed.

 

A broad set of referral numbers from each area of the partnership was requested, along with figures for care leavers and what measures were in place to support them and their children.

 

The committee suggested it would useful to share good practice with all schools especially in relation to pastoral care.

 

The Director of Children Services agreed that more family support officers would be good, but disagreed about families being scared of seeking help from the council. The Director did accept that some families didn’t trust the council and that it needed to work on its image.

 

The Director stated that a report on referrals would form part of the work being done with safeguarding partners and that care leaver support was something they were hoping to discuss at a later stage.

 

The Head of Service for Early Help pointed out that there had been a lot of good news stories about the council and early help coming through from families. Early help was relationship based and building trust was key, they were aiming to promote positive messages about early help every month and would like to get families on camera at some stage. Early help had been deemed as good according to Ofsted reports.

 

The Head of Service for Early Help, provided a rough breakdown of referral sources, explain that 50% came from schools with the next biggest source being families stepping out from social care and no longer a safeguarding need. Heath colleagues, health visitors, school nurses and midwives accounted for most of the remaining referral figures.

 

The Head of Service for Early Help discussed a programme called ‘first steps’, this was a preventative universal programme open to all parents 21 and younger. The programme had had a positive take up and offered parents support with underlying needs such as finance, housing, mental health and preparation for parenthood.

 

The committee enquired about how many professionals were assigned when dealing with families and whether each sibling was provided with an opportunity to speak privately away from other siblings and family members.

 

The Head of Service explained that the lived experience of every child was captured by speaking to children separately. There were lots of different ways to capture the voice of the child, but individual voices were crucial to understanding lived experience. The number of practitioners allocated would vary from family to family and individual circumstances.

 

 

The committee sought clarity on the definition of early help as detailed in the report.

 

The Service Director Early Help, QA and Prevention explained that the definitions fell out of working together to safeguard children and reflected the continuum. Early help was about providing support at the point of presentation, but also enabling families to be stepped down or across into targeted universal services and allowing them to access wraparound services within their communities.

 

The committee enquired that if there was a spectrum of early help, whether simply labelling it early help was a good way of describing it so that the public understood what it was. The committee asked how best to get across the differences regarding the sort of help that could be accessed before social care got involved as professionals.

 

The Director of Children’s Services suggested that there was a danger of over engineering the terminology, it could be called early help, early intervention or early prevention, but families generally knew what they need.

 

 

The committee enquired about availability of pre-natal services.

 

A representative of the Wye Valley NHS Trust explained that colleagues in midwifery provided pre-natal classes and offered mums to be anti-natal contact, one-to-one holistic assessments in the home and support for parents and family with any issues.

 

The representative for West Mercia Police explained that they had a number of officers dedicated to early help, including a prevention assessment officer and two intervention and prevention officers, one being located in the MASH with social care staff.

 

Initially these roles had focused on children already showing signs of trauma and on the fringes of criminality, but they were now moving focus from tertiary to secondary prevention, focusing on children who were exposed to negative situations and removing the likelihood of them becoming involved in criminality.

 

Using the police data set, a prevention assessment officer looked at every child recorded as an involved party of crime and reviewed every child under fifteen subjected to a stop and search. This would not always result in a referral, but when it did, support would include home visits with the family, ongoing engagement with parents, school engagement with education professionals and potential referrals to mental health programmes such as steer clear (knife crime) and strong young minds (anger management). Working with the family and the child, the interventional prevention officers assess what would be the most suitable means of supporting and delivering early help. The work is documented on a problem solving plan, which sets out how to improve and track the situation with families. Generally there had been a positive picture from this.

 

 

The committee asked how the partnership arranged things strategically, and how would different partners make changes in relation to the revised JSNA.

 

The Director of Children’s Services explained that public health were working across the partnership to develop the JSNA data set and how to use that going forward. Leadership teams were involved with this and there were parallel pieces of work being done, Public health was very keen to engage with different partners and information was being used to inform conversations about what the service should look like in two to three years’ time.

 

The committee acknowledged the work being done with teenagers on the fringes of crime, but enquired about those teenagers who simply needed support and help in everyday areas. What lessons had been learned from the funding issues that led to closure of ‘no wrong door’ and what was being done to provide somewhere to go or some way of connecting with advice providers that maintained privacy and gave teenagers a safe space.

 

The representative for NHS 0-19 Public Health Nursing Service explained that teenage public health nursing had a school nursing service embedded in it. Every high school had the opportunity to access a school nurse, who delivered drop-ins surgeries for young people every week. These were confidential and covered sexual health, anxiety, smoking, drink and drugs. The school nurse would provide teenagers with info, advice, signposting and signposting to the sexual health clinic, in a confidential space to have discussions.

 

The service was looking to enhance and develop its offer to teenagers, with workshops within schools offering support around transitional times and to children missing from school.

 

 

The committee asked if there were any lessons learned from the ‘no wrong door’ situation.

 

The Director of Children’s Services stated that the service had learned a lot about keeping an eye on contracts and commissioning. Youth services were no longer a statutory service, although there were fantastic services being provided by community and community volunteer groups. Regrettably, given the economic climate, it was unlikely there would be a return to commissioning or providing youth services.

 

The committee asked whether it might be possible to sup

 

 

The Director stated that funding was a political decision, but there was a role for town and parish councils to support local initiatives to support youth workers.

 

The committee enquired as to whether information from the children and young people survey was being shared and fed into how the services were being developed and how partners were responding.

 

The Director of Public Health stated that they would be combining the historic responses with the most recent set to create longitudinal data. The Children and Young People Partnership had been up and running again for 12 months and was the forum that would have oversight of that data. The data would be used to inform strategic plans.

 

The health and wellbeing strategy was prioritising ‘best start in life’ and mental wellbeing and would go through a process of starting with evidence, implementing the intervention and evaluating the outcome. The cycle of change would then be repeated as required.

 

 

The committee enquired about the threshold documents being used consistently across the partnership.TF are threshold documents being used consistently across the partners.

 

The Director of Children’s Services gave an assurance that the threshold documents were solid (as viewed by Ofsted), but everything hinged on people understanding and applying the threshold in a consistent manner. The safeguarding partnership owns the document and more work needed to be done on making sure that people in voluntary groups, schools and nurseries knew and understood how to access services and how to have a conversation with people concerned about children.

 

 

The committee asked about availability of children’s theatre as it was a useful platform for allowing children to express themselves by pretending to be somebody else.

 

The Director of Public Health pointed out that Creative Health Champions would consider how to embed arts and culture into health and wellbeing and there could be some opportunities to link things in with the community paradigm.

 

 

The committee asked about the process and who who the point of contact was for seeking help in relation to cyber bullying inside and outside of school.

 

The Director for Education, Learning and Skills explained that all schools have anti-bullying/behaviour policies and that within those policies there were processes about how to report bullying concerns. The policies contained advice on cyber bullying issues and Herefordshire schools were proactive in dealing with cases. Schools took their personal development curriculum offers very seriously.

 

 

The committee asked about how early help and family hubs in Herefordshire would look.

 

The Director of Children’s Services noted that Herefordshire Council was not part of the government pilot on family hubs, but that it would be possible to discuss the general principles around them.

 

The Director for Education, Learning and Skills explained engaging with early help and face-to-face meetings with primary, secondary school heads, and leaders and governors’ webinars, were good opportunities for the local authority to feed in on a variety of agenda items including the early help and prevention offer.

 

There was a growing offer of early help and prevention in a cluster-based community paradigm model. Visits to larger market town schools had revealed a pleasingly rich early help and prevention offer that was well established from community and voluntary organisations working within schools. Schools also had available community space around the hub and spoke model, which could potentially be developed further.

The committee asked how involved partners were with the hubs.

 

The Director for Education, Learning and Skills pointed out that a number of organisations already contributed and that this could be developed further with partner organisations.

 

The committee asked what a parent could expect to experience from the hubs.

 

The Director for Education, Learning and Skills explained that hubs could coordinate voluntary work that happened in schools and bring together a variety of services. The school essentially acts as a host, meeting point and enabler for those services to coordinate around families and this included midwifery and health services running groups for families and for children. The hubs were trying to provide an environment and collate groups where services could coalesce and come together, including pre and after school clubs.

 

The committee asked if cyber bullying be fed into the hub.

 

The director of Children’s Services confirmed that would be an aspiration and pointed out that an advantage of running such groups through schools was the strong parent input it drew in.

 

The committee discussed four key ways of remedying cyber bullying: that the source be identified and stopped, the victim supported so that they didn’t suffer long-term harm, the person bullying would be counselled and the message would be spread that bullying was unacceptable. The committee asked if these steps were being implemented currently.

 

The Director for Education, Learning and Skills schools explained schools have anti-bullying policies bespoke to the individual schools. These typically contained key processes and guidance on how the schools approached the issue, including investigation, support and applying the process as a whole. Schools were expected to take bullying very seriously and staff were highly skilled at supporting children and dealing with bullying in all its forms. Many schools also participate in the national anti-bullying initiative about the golden rules.

 

The Independent Scrutineer explained that appropriate processes were in place to deal with the level of concern. This would start with the school and escalate to a safeguarding lead at school who would have contacts into the wider system, such as MASH, where there was a police contact. If the bullying was very serious attempts would be made to locate the source depending on the information available.

 

The safeguarding board in November would be seeking assurance that children would supported and bullying dealt with in a way as described.

 

The Director of Public Health explained there was an aspiration to develop a healthy school standard or a kind of tool kit for schools that would enable them to identify and tackle issues they were thought were important, which could include bullying.

 

 

The committee enquired about whether the authority had got the balance right for commissioning of other services and whether there was enough funding for commissioned partners.

 

The Head of Service for Early Help explained that organisations were commissioned to provide early help, but the all ages commissioning service led on that over a number of services across the partnership. Information on that could be provide at a later date.

 

The Cabinet Member for Children and Young People did provide a note of caution into well intended, but potentially restrictive and damaging council monitoring of voluntary organisations in the early help sector. A degree of capturing and counting was okay, but there needed to be a degree of trust in the leadership of other organisations that they would just get on with what they were doing.

 

The committee agreed with the cabinet member, but asked if you don’t count anything at all how gaps would be identified. What was the role of the local authority and was it the role of the authority to make sure that there was some early help around.

 

The Cabinet Member for Children and Young People explained that gaps would be identified through Children and Young People Partnership Board in the area of work that sits below statutory prevention. There was a need for data counting and capture, but when you reached a level where that becomes difficult it would be advisable to step back and put trust in the voluntary community sectors and schools.

 

 

The committee discussed setting up two task and finish groups, one around family support officers and the other around pastoral care.

 

The Statutory Scrutiny Officer warned against setting up two such groups without proper preparation and discussion about what the committee would want from them.

 

The Director of Children’s Services stated that a task and finish group on family support officers would not have significant impact on how many there would be next year, however there might be potential for a task and finish around the broader subject of recruitment and retention, which would not just be limited to family support work.

 

The Director for Education, Learning and Skills pointed out that pastoral care responsibility sat with the governing body of the school and the trustees in the case of a trust.

 

The Statutory Scrutiny Officer noted that it had become apparent that the committee might benefit from an initial briefing on what the local authority’s powers were in relation to schools. It was a rapidly moving area where council powers were being drained and would continue to be drained. There was a very different environment from just five or six years ago.

 

The Scrutiny Officer suggested an initial briefing about those powers might equip and inform the committee in terms of recommendations it makes going forward.

 

The committee agreed to hold back on any task and finish group activity until proposed topics had been discussed in more depth and relevant briefings had been held.

 

The committee unanimously agreed the following recommendations:

 

RESOLVED:

 

That:

a)    The committee notes the report, and

b)    the council will make full use of school information collection to plan and deliver early help support, and

c)    the JSNA will be brought to scrutiny to understand its role in supporting service delivery, and

d)    a briefing around the schools education powers will be arranged and delivered for committee members.