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

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

·         It was noted that the report covered 2022/23 and was ten months out of date.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.    The Family Approach was progressing well across the partnership and was tied in with the roll out of restorative practice training. The Independent Scrutineer stated that they had seen clear evidence of agencies working together for the benefit of families.

5.    The Committee heard that since the 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 audits and the timescales for audits and annual plans.

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

7.    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.

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

9.    The Committee raised concerns about individual partner members being too busy to engage with assessing how they’re working together as a 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’.

10.  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.

11.  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.

12.  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.

13.  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.

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

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

16.  In relation to 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 to the Quality and Effectiveness Subgroup, which added another level of reviewing.

17.  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.

18.  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.

19.  The Independent Scrutineer explained that to get to a point where sophisticated questions about measuring impact could be asked, there was 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.

20.  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 be 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?