Agenda item

Presentation attached.

(Councillor Leadbetter attended in accordance with Standing Order 25(1) and spoke to this item at the invitation of the Committee.)

The Committee received the Children’s Social Care Performance Report, which set out the Quarter 1 performance for 2023/24, covering key areas as follows:

·         Data changes in Referrals, Assessments, Child Protection, Children in Care, Care Experienced Young People and Workforce.

·         Peer reviews and learning

·         Department for Education visit on 27/28 June 2023

·         Improvement Plan 2023/24

·         Front Door Design

·         Strategic Quality Performance Review Meeting (QPRM)

·         Recruitment and Retention

·         Practice Quality Assurance (Audit Framework)

·         The next six months

It was noted there would be a further Ofsted monitoring visit next week in relation to the Care Leaver services.

Officers reported on feedback received from the Peer Reviews that included:

·       There were a large number of Early Help teams leaving potential for duplication and for children to slip through; there were multiple referral points into teams and a lack of co-ordination when working out how to meet needs.

·       The Council needed to strengthen performance information and Quality Assurance

·       The service was looking at a new Family Hub model and expansion of family intervention teams to provide more intense Early Help and universal support, to include social care, health, public health and midwifery.

·       Decision-making at the front door was largely safe.

·       There was good partnership working, but needed to ensure good information sharing.

·       Social workers had warm, tenacious conversations with families, but needed to be clearer about next steps or what services could best meet their needs.

·       Systems and processes were complicated.

·       The service was in the process of reviewing the operating model for the front door.

·       The need to develop a clear Early Help offer, understood by families and partners so that families can self-serve or partners can direct them to the right service.

Questions and discussion points with Members and Officers included:

·         Reassurance that the Family Hub model would provide partnership services to meet early intervention needs, to include working with difficult to reach communities, as yet to be fully scoped and consulted upon. The Cabinet Member stressed the importance of placing the Family Hubs in the right locations.

·         Further narrative was requested on the data (p.3), which Officers agreed to include in future reports; and also the direction of recruitment figures.

·         It was planned to reduce the number of agency social workers over the next two years in line with the national average (18%).

·         Social care teams had been reorganised into smaller teams to enable better practice and supervision.

·         Extensive discussions had taken place with District partners on working together to provide better permanent housing options for care experienced young people.

·         Work was ongoing to improve and strengthen permanency plans for children; and some quality assurance work around those plans would be undertaken shortly.

·         There were not any homeless Care Experienced young people, only those designated in unsuitable accommodation, i.e. temporary, not their own. Work was ongoing to improve the quality of supported accommodation.

·         The audit framework had been developed to look at the quality of the practice and the outcomes for children and families. A knowledge base had been collated since April of this year.

·         Assurance that children awaiting a Child Protection Conference were known to the social worker team and safeguarded where necessary.

It was MOVED by Councillor Sanders, SECONDED by Councillor Trail and

RESOLVED that the Committee:

(a)  welcomes the commitments of the Cabinet Member on Family Hubs and invites the Cabinet Member to report back at a later stage on this and welcomes improvements to the percentage of Children in Care with a permanency plan;

(b)  raises its concerns about details on partnership working on securing permanency homes for children in care;

(c)   asks for future performance reports to provide further narrative on the work behind the data and figures and evidence of better outcomes to appraise Members; and

(d)  agrees to set up a future task group to seek user feedback from children and families on our social care services.