To provide a progress update on the Families Commission report considerations. 

 

The Corporate Director Children and Young People introduced the report and provided an overview of the background, purpose and output of the Families Commission.

The Director detailed that in September 2023 the Children and Young People Scrutiny Committee had discussed the Families Commission report and received an update on progress being made by the service.

 

The Director explained that Herefordshire Children’s Services had continued to undertake work around the outputs of the Families Commission. Phase 2 of its Improvement Plan included a range of opportunities for children, families and the public to continue to feedback on their experiences of Herefordshire Children’s Services and to engage in the development of the service.

 

It was explained that the Improvement Board was due to share the Phase 2 Improvement Plan with the Children and Young People Scrutiny Committee on 17 September 2024 and Cabinet on 26 September 2024.

 

The Corporate Director drew the committee’s attention to a specific number of areas covered in the update report detailing ongoing work that would be incorporated into Phase 2 of the improvement plan, including:

 

-          Early help activity and projects relating to the Community Safety Fund and, My Family, My School, My Community

-          The strategic review of Peopletoo and the locality model.

-          Continuation of the delivery of restorative practice, particularly in relation to new staff and throughout the partnership.

-          Engagement and participation of children, young people, parents and carers

-          The SafeLives review of domestic abuse responses in Herefordshire and domestic abuse training

-          Complaints (which had been covered previous in item 7)

 

The Chair invited comments and discussion from the committee in relation to the report. The key points discussed are detailed below:

 

1.    The committee enquired as to what the Safeguarding Partnership was doing to ensure that complaints procedures in every agency across the partnership were: accessible to families, working well and recording findings.

 

2.    The committee asked if there was a need for a portal on the partnership web page that could provide people with access to the different partner complaints procedures.

 

·         The Safeguarding Partnerships Business Manager explained there was a complaint tile on the Safeguarding Partnership website, which guided people through to the relevant partner website - where they could access the appropriate complaints procedure.

·         The Safeguarding Partnerships Business Manager referred to the Section 11 Audit Process as contained within the Children Act 2024, which required individual agencies to have robust child safeguarding practices in place. It was explained that partners would respond to an audit, which would then be checked and challenged by the Independent Scrutineer to establish what had been done to address issues in areas that had been identified as being inadequate or needing improvement. This information would then go onto an audit portal where partners were required to detail how they had addressed issues, what lessons had been learned and how processed or culture had changed as a result of a complaint being made.

 

3.    The committee enquired about the roll-out of restorative and relational practice to partners and if/how this would be done at pace.

 

·         The Corporate Director Children and Young People explained partners were keen to receive the training, but capacity issues had slowed the pace of roll-out. Social workers and social carers were filtering the themes of the practice through to partners informally, but it was a priority of the Leeds partners to ensure that formal training sessions were rolled-out across the partnership as soon as possible.

·         The Safeguarding Partnerships Business Manager pointed out of the importance of distinguishing between how the term ‘restorative practice’ could take on a different meaning depending on context. As an example it was pointed out that restorative practice could relate to working with families to restore damaged relationships, but could also be used to describe a means of early resolution of an issue when used in the context of the complaints process.

 

4.    The committee referred to paragraph 8.E in the main report:

“How will Herefordshire Children’s Services support social workers to establish and maintain the trust and confidence of parents and families and enable their participation in planning to keep their children safe and promote their wellbeing?”

 

The committee enquired how the service would support social workers especially in relation to ensuring caseloads were manageable.

 

·         The Corporate Director Children and Young People, explained that the work being done around the workload focused on ‘good conditions for practice’, which aimed to ensure that the conditions were right to enable staff to deliver good practice. Factors including; manageable caseloads, access to managers, regular supervision, good (and clear) practice standards, along with a robust and easy to use IT system, were all being focused on to ensure that social workers and all staff were supported in delivering good practice.

·         The Corporate Director Children and Young People stated that caseloads, particularly within children in care teams had been stable recently. However, there had been some challenge in the assessment teams and the service had been keeping a close eye on this to ensure they could react to caseload spikes in a swift and effective manner. In some instances, agency workers could be used to help manage situations, but ensuring the conditions of practice were right was key to maintaining long-term and continued stability, which in turn would ensure Herefordshire Council was an employer of choice.

 

5.    The committee referred to the cultural friction described in the report and enquired why certain partners had not always been supportive of the restorative approach.

6.     The committee asked how it would be possible to determine if restorative approaches were being taken forward and if improvements were being made as result.

 

·         The Corporate Director Children and Young People stated that they had not personally encountered any resistance to the restorative training from partners, but described situations where there had been confusion between restorative practice and management of risk. It was hoped that this would come to light, in a helpful way, once the training was delivered to partners.

·         The Corporate Director noted that from experience it appeared that partners were very keen to adopt ways of working that included: ‘Think Family, engagement of the wider family and strength-based approaches.

 

7.    The committee enquired how the service would know that practice was changing within partnerships.

 

·         The Corporate Director Children and Young People identified two areas that could be used to determine if the practice was working.  Firstly asking children, young people and parents about how they felt the partnership was working together, whether they felt the right professionals had been involved and, if not, which professionals they thought should have been involved.  Secondly key performance indicator data could provide some headline around quality; repeat assessments and repeat child protection plans were good indicators of whether the service and what had been achieved was allowing families to step down and sustain.

 

8.    The committee asked for further detail about the ‘Think Family’ approach.

 

·         The Corporate Director Children and Young People explained that Think Family was a term applied to an existing practice, which involved widening focus from, for example, just a parent and their child, to bringing in the wider extended relatives and considering the impact they had on an individual’s life. It involved using knowledge of an individual’s wider family/network to be able to link them up with appropriate services that could help them. Think Family tied in with and would be bolstered by effective locality working and locality models. The Director confirmed that the Think Family approach would be embedded as a way of working across the partnership.

 

9.    A committee member suggested that the layout of the report and its content made it difficult to gain a sense of how much progress had been made in addressing the questions that had emerged from the Families Commission.

 

10.  A committee member requested assurance that recommendations from the Fostering Panel would be given weight and sufficient attention.

 

·         The Corporate Director Children and Young People gave the committee an assurance that they would check where recommendations from the panel - relating to general service development - went and ensure that responses and feedback were looped back to the panel. An assurance was also given that recommendations relating to specific children would be incorporated into the child’s case.

 

11.  The committee enquired as to what a ‘child friendly Herefordshire’ would look like.

 

·         The Corporate Director Children and Young People suggested that a child friendly Herefordshire would involve people being able to see the importance of children in all of the council’s policies and procedures. The Director felt that local politicians/councillors - as elected representatives of the public - should also play a key role in providing feedback from the public and support in shaping Hereford into becoming a child friendly place to live.

 

12.  The committee suggested that the idea of child friendly Hereford should be included as part of the discussion in the ‘Including children’s voices in council policy’ item scheduled for the committee’s November meeting.

 

·         The Cabinet Member Children and Young People gave examples of child friendly activity carried out at Leeds, and suggested that achieving child friendly status wasn’t a destination, but a concept and a way to exist, which needed to be embraced by the council, its partners and communities.

 

13.  The committee enquired about the long-term sustainability of early help and families and community support projects that were being funded through the Police and Crime Commissioner and My Family, My School, My Community.

 

·         The Corporate Director Children and Young People explained that they had one eye on what would happen when the funding for those services ended, as it would not be a simple case of the council taking over future funding for those projects.

·         The Corporate Director explained they had taken on the role of Senior Responsible Officer and together with the Head of Service for Early Help were working closely with content providers to make sure that the added value the projects were bringing to families was understood. When what had and hadn’t worked was understood, it would be possible to establish where future funding income for growth and alternative services might come from - to ensure that there was no ‘cliff edge’ for the families that had been worked with through the projects.

 

14.  The committee highlighted instances where information about available funding for groups such as youth clubs had come through late and noted that in some instances when funding was approved it was processed too late to be used properly. The committee suggested that when funding for projects was available and approved, it needed to be processed swiftly.

 

15.  The committee noted that every family that had participated in the Families Commission had expressed a desire to ensure that their painful experiences should be used to improve the service, so that others didn’t have go through what they had. The committee asked if the service was ‘getting there’ in terms of improvement or whether there was still work to be done.

 

·         The Corporate Director Children and Young People explained there was still much work to do, but was pleased with Phase 2 of the Improvement Plan. There would be a refocusing of the Improvement Board with the quality assurance framework, which would triangulate around the key performance indicators, the audit and the service user feedback about whether or not the service was improving.

At the conclusion of the debate, the committee discussed potential recommendations and the following resolutions were agreed.

 

Resolved that:

1.       That Herefordshire Council provide analysis of funding provided through the Police and Crime Commissioner and My Family, My School, My Community to demonstrate that funding and resources are focused on delivering sustained early help and support for families and communities.

2. The funding available to support development of a child-friendly Herefordshire is distributed as rapidly as possible.