Agendas, Meetings and Minutes - Agenda item

Agenda item

Children's Social Care Service - Ofsted Monitoring Visit Feedback

Minutes:

The Assistant Director Social Work Safeguarding Services had been invited to the meeting to provide an update on the outcome of Ofsted's sixth monitoring visit of the Council's children's safeguarding services, which took place on 2 and 3 October.  The visit had focused on children in care up to the age of 16.

 

The Panel received a presentation.  By way of introduction, the Assistant Director made the following main points:

 

·       At the time of the Ofsted inspection in 2016, there was a need to improve performance for all children in all parts of the Service.  It was now 18 months into the implementation of the Service Improvement Plan (SIP) and the Service was making progress that had not been seen before from such a position of breadth and depth of inadequacy.

·       The SIP was reviewed in the light of KPIs and Ofsted feedback.  It was confirmed that the SIP would be retained once the service moved to Worcestershire Children (WCF) and reviewed as necessary.

·       There were now 5 key workstreams:

A.    Supporting and developing our workforce

B.    Voice of the child

C.    Enhancing our multi-agency partnerships

D.    Edge of care

E.    Placements for children in care – sufficiency duty

·       Workstream C would involve engaging with colleagues in health, schools and the police via the Worcestershire Safeguarding Children Board (WSCB) and other forums.

·       Workstream D included looking at all different levels of need to provide support to avoid children coming into care.

·       With reference to Workstream E, it was important to ensure that children were matched as well as possible.  This Workstream provided the biggest financial challenge.

 

Members were given the opportunity to ask questions and the following main points were raised:

 

·       Members were reminded that the approach to service improvement had been to focus on all areas at the same time.  Once an area had seen improvement, this should become business as usual.  It was important to ensure the sustainability of what had been achieved.

·       The Chairman of the Panel expressed concern that schools were increasingly finding that referrals made to social care were being referred back as they were not meeting the criteria for intervention.  Schools were concerned that they did not have the capacity to deal with this.  The Assistant Director agreed that there may need to be honest and challenging conversations between partners and she understood that some schools had capacity issues.  She went on to inform Members that there was a much improved picture in terms of the relationship between referrals to the Family Front Door and which cases went forward for assessment.

·       The next Ofsted Monitoring visit would take place on 8 and 9 January 2019 and would focus on Early Help.  An Inspection of Local Authority Children's Services (ILACS) was expected to take place in May or June 2019.

·       In response to a question about the permanency of social work staff, Members were informed that the Authority was performing better than other authorities locally.  With reference to the Family Front Door, nearly 100% of managers were permanent appointments.  This level of stability at management level brought increased stability at social worker level.

·       A question was asked about whether staff had concerns about moving to WCF.  In response, Members were reminded that the Company would be wholly owned by the County Council and the statutory responsibility would remain with the Local Authority.

·       Concern was expressed about the implications for care leavers of the roll out of Universal Credit.  It was agreed that the Corporate Parenting Board would be asked to consider a report on this.

·       Members wished to congratulate all staff in children's social care for the fantastic progress they had made and asked the Assistant Director to pass this on to staff.

 

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