For the Children and Young People Scrutiny Committee to consider the 2022/23 annual report of the Herefordshire Safeguarding Children’s Partnership (HSCP).

 

 

The Children’s Commissioner introduced the report and gave an overview of the main themes contained within. The key considerations included:

 

·       An acknowledgment from the Commissioner that there had been clear improvements in some aspects of the service, but there were still areas were a significant amount of work needed to be done. The need to implement improvements at pace was emphasised.

·       The Commissioner drew the Committee’s attention to section 14 of the cover report which detailed six areas where evidence of progress would be expected to be seen at the next review.

·       The Committee was advised to consider the work being carried out by the Improvement Board and align its work programme accordingly to avoid duplication of work. It was suggested it might be useful to obtain officer feedback regarding parent and children’s satisfaction and involvement in service developments. It was also suggested that the Committee might wish to focus its attention on areas not being directly looked at by the Improvement Board, such as the development of locality arrangements and multi-agency working.

·       It was noted that the Families Commission report published in June 2023, had raised issues about the approach taken in supporting families and helping them to understand better ways of caring for their children. The report had provided clear evidence and views from families that their experience with the service was not as positive as it should have been.

·       It was explained that the partnership with Leeds Council had been developed shortly after the review. It was an 18 month programme funded by the Department for Education, with a primary aim of improving the quality of practice and addressing the culture of working with families.

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Following the presentation the report was opened up to the Committee, the principle points of the discussion are summarised below.

1.     In response to a question from the Committee it was explained that Leeds Council had longstanding locality arrangements, which were commonly referred to as ‘The right help, at the right time, in the right place’. It was suggested by the Children’s Commissioner that it might be useful if the Leeds partners delivered a presentation about how they deliver locally based multi-agency support to families.

2.     The Corporate Director Children and Young People acknowledged potential issues around language and how services were described, especially in relation to early help. The Director clarified to the Committee that early help was not typically carried out by social workers, and that early help and prevention should be being conducted by a wide range of statutory, community, voluntary and faith agencies, with a view to preventing a higher level of need being reached where a social worker would be required.

3.     It was explained that children’s services did run targeted early help services when there was a particular level of need and that this would ideally remove the requirement for social care intervention.

4.     The Committee heard that there was an opportunity to strengthen and coordinate relationships between the Council and multi-agency partners by using primary schools as early help hubs. This was a model that had already been employed and had worked well for autism hubs.

5.     The Corporate Director explained that it was in the interests of children and families in Herefordshire that the service and its partners strengthened early help arrangements so that families got the right help at the right time. Ideally, families would be able to either go online or go into the their local school, health centre, library or other setting and obtain information about parenting support or any other issues that might be impacting their families. This would eliminate or reduce the need for matters to be escalated to a point where the involvement of statutory services was required.

6.     The Corporate Director explained to the Committee that starting in April 2024, the service was looking to allocate new referrals by postcode, so that social workers in assessment teams would be working with a cluster of families in a particular area. There would be a transitional element to this and where social workers had already built strong relations with families they would strive to avoid disrupting those exiting relationships by waiting until intervention had concluded.

7.     It was stressed that social workers would largely continue to be based at Plough Lane, with workloads and cases that were postcode allocated, then for several days a week workers could potentially hot desk at a school or health centre within their allocated area.

8.     The Children’s Commissioner was keen to see arrangements put in place that would be easily accessed and well understood by both families and agencies. Ideally there would be a mechanism for determining the most suitable professional/agency to support families.

9.     There was a need to ensure that that children’s social care was well aligned with the arrangements of other agencies, such as the police and health partners, who had shown a willingness and readiness to be involved in new locality arrangements and multi-agency working. Millstones and timetables to monitor how partners were being engaged needed to be maintained. 

10.  The committee heard that the service was keen to build trust with families and consult in relation to parent and children satisfaction with the service. Once a clear set of proposals for the service was in place then these would be shared widely and people would be asked for their input and feedback via surveys and other activities.

11.  It was explained that websites containing service information were available across the partnership. The Council was looking to make its own website more accessible, but would not consider one over-arching site, as this would be too difficult to resource, update and maintain.

12.  Social media platforms were increasingly being used to disseminate information and the Council was continuously learning from families about how they accessed and would like to access information.

13.  The Committee heard that the majority of complaints relating to children’s services fell within the statutory children’s complaints process as laid down by legislation. This was a 3 stage process with recourse to the ombudsman. The number of complaint shad been decreasing and number of compliments going up, with more cases being resolved at stage 1 and 2 of the process than before.

14.  The Corporate Director offered to bring a report by the complaints team to the Committee if it wished to see it.

15.  The Committee head that he six areas identified in the report at section 14 where evidence of progress would be expected replaced and ran alongside existing measures on the dashboard.

16.  The Committee questioned how it might be possible to acknowledge work being carried out by the Improvement Board publicly. The Corporate Director suggested that it might be useful for the Chair, Vice Chair, Chair of Improvement Board, Corporate Director CYP and Scrutiny Officer to meet up and discuss the best approach to take in regards to the matter.

 

Resolved: The Committee voted unanimously to approve the following actions:

 

Action: For the Committee to consider, as part of its work programme, which areas it will focus on over the next six months and be mindful of, but avoid duplication of work being carried out by the Improvement Board. The Committee should also pick up on areas that aren’t being covered off by the Improvement Board, such as locality arrangements and multi-agency support for families.

Action: Chair, Vice Chair, Chair of Improvement Board, Corporate Director CYP and Scrutiny Officer to meet to discuss how the work of the Improvement Board could be made more visible and accessible to the public and other members of the Council.

Action: The Committee to hold a work programme meeting to discuss how to approach subjects such as the complaints procedure including: how complaints/compliments are registered and scrutiny of the annual complaints report.

 

 

 

 

Rec around having a dashboard for the sic areas of improvement hat have neebn identified by the commission so that we can have a monthly feedback.

DF these are a continutauon and replaced na some are alongdside.

 

LH not wanting to duplicate work being doen by improvement panel. LH how do we acknioeldege th progrees being mad by the imorovement board in apublic way, We jdetand improvement board meetings are not oublicj, scrutiny is the place where we require assurance on gbehalf o dt he, how de we acknoledege the the progress that is being made an overseen by the improvement board ina public way ad arecognise that hrough the scruitniny process while making useful contribution /addition from the point of view of scrutiny.

 

Locally responsice social care

 

 

A firum for parentsna dchildren todeedvack eperince of the with tehsrrvice.

Dashboard improvements

 

Heather Manning Specialist Nurse Safeguarding Children NHS ICB

Superintendent Helen Wain West Mercia Potem 7lice

Steve Eccleston Partnership Manager

Stuart Mitchell Co-Optee parent givernor secondary

 

 

Item 7

 

The Independent Scrutineer took the report as read and gave a brief overview including the following considerations.

 

·       It was note that the report covered 2022/23 and was ten months out of date.

·       Significant progress had been made in many areas since the publication of the report. The Quality and Effectiveness Subgroup was used as an example, as its use of performance data, and analysis of partnership participation had greatly improved over the last ten months.

·       It was noted that there was still a lot to do, but the Independent Scrutineer believed there were refreshing signs of commitment from partners to improve things. 

 

Following the presentation the report was opened up to the Committee, the principle points of the discussion are summarised below.

 

1.     In response to a question from the Committee the Independent Scrutineer explained that evidencing the positive impact of what the partnership does for children was still a challenge, but that this was true of similar partnerships in other areas.

2.     The partnership now reports to the Improvement Board and has an agreement with the board that the partnership will deliver on the neglect strategy, continued improvements in the mash, adopting a get safe model and the implementation of the partnership wide trauma informed approach.

3.     There had been a challenge finalising the neglect strategy, but good progress had been made with the interim programme, and the final strategy would be available for scrutiny as soon as it was complete.

4.      ‘Get Safe’, MASH (Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub), struggling to finalise the neglect strategy in terms of the final strategy, but good progress with the interim programme.

5.     The Family Approach was progressing well across the partnership and was tied in with the roll lout of restorative practice training. The Independent Scrutineer stated that they had seen clear evidence of agencies working together for the benefit of families.

6.     The Committee heard that since report had been published the Audit Subgroup had been combined with the Quality and Effectiveness Subgroup. There had been an improvement in the focus on multi-agency audit and the timescales for audits and annual plans.

7.     The Quality and Effectiveness Subgroup had reported back on six cases of where child abuse was suspected, the group had looked at those cases, conducted a multi-agency audit and received learning recommendations back from that, which were now part of an action plan that would be followed through.

8.     The Independent Scrutineer stated that there were aspects of partnership work that could be taken as a specific focus and tracked through for the year. Regular updates on multi-agency audits could be provide for the Committee if it wished.

9.     In accordance with ‘Working Together 2023’, the next report has to be available by September 2024.

10.  The Committee raised concerns about individual partner members being too busy to engage with assessing how they’re working together as partnership. It was felt that communication and coordination should be at the heart of the partnership and not sliding away because people were ‘too busy being busy’.

11.  The Independent Scrutineer acknowledged an issue in relation to capacity challenge for the partners, because the same pool of people were tasked with working with multiple partnerships, which could create conflict. However, the situation was proving and this was likely to be reflected in the following year’s report.

12.  The Independent Scrutineer explained that, individually, most of the partners were quite strong in terms of safeguarding, but the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts. The challenge of partnership working and the journey the partnership was on was making the sum greater than the whole.

13.  The Committee heard that multi-agency data was still a challenge and work was ongoing between the partners to remedy this. An embryonic safeguarding partners’ dashboard was being supported by the local authority. There was sufficient partnership information for the Quality and Effectiveness group to tackle the next challenge, which was to look at the data, what it was showing and what to do about it.

14.  The Committee heard that the partnership did not have a dedicated Children’s data analyst, although there was one within the Council’s Performance and Intelligence Team.

15.  Greater resource in relation to partnership data analysis was necessary and there was a need to get together all the individual data people from each partner to map out where things were.

16.  There had been strong replies from individual agencies to challenges on Section 11 of the Children Act 2004, but again as a partnership this was not in evidence.

17.  In relation to the a question regarding increasing the pace of change it was explained that there was a multi-agency review of the MASH with Leeds, adopting a peer review methodology where colleagues would go into the MASH to observe some of the practices. There had also been governance changes, which now required the MASH to report the Quality and Effectiveness Subgroup, which added another level of reviewing.

18.  The Committee heard that measuring the impact of improvements was a challenge and that ‘pulling levers’ in certain areas and attributing impact to that was difficult to do in the short term.

19.  The Committee noted the difficulty in measuring and allocating impact to improvements, but asked how and if the partnership could detail what impact it expected its improvements to have.

20.  The Independent Scrutineer explained that to get to a point where sophisticated questions about measuring impact can be asked, there is a necessity to have certain architecture, such as data and training, in place. In the last 12 months the partnership had got this architecture in place, but there was still more to be done.

21.  The Committee heard there were good links between the partnership, education department and schools. The challenge wasn’t just about schools but the whole education sector. Schools under local authority control were straightforward to deal with, but independent schools, early years providers and specialist education needed to be engaged and included in a way that didn’t look like or was tokenism. A piece of work to achieve this was currently underway.

 

Resolved: The Committee voted unanimously to approve the following actions:

 

Action:  That a workshop is held including all data analysts from across the partnership.

 

Action: In relation to impact. That the partnership focuses and responds to the question of what it is expecting to see if the suggested improvements are implemented?