Agendas, Meetings and Minutes - Agenda item

Agenda item

Independent Reviewing Officer Annual Report

Minutes:

Linda Joyce explained that she was attending the meeting on behalf of Sally Branchflower to give an update on IROs (Independent Reviewing Officers).

 

The team were now fully staffed and were diverse in terms of age, gender and ethnic background.  They had regular supervision to check caseloads and were encouraged to attend training.

 

The role of the IRO was to monitor the role of the authority in care planning, Chair review meetings – if that was what the child wished, and ensure the child’s wishes were central to the process. Records were kept which showed detailed actions and recorded the young person’s story in a sensitive and positive way.

 

A data set was produced for each worker with key targets to ensure timeliness of reviews and feedback and to enable any problems to be picked up. If any disputes occurred, IROs could help to resolve the situation, informally at first but they could then escalate the issue if necessary.

 

The Child’s Voice was very important and the IRO ensured that children had a say in how their review meetings were set up and organised. IROs were making an effort to move reviews away from offices and schools, if that was what the child wanted. Children were able to give feedback on the minutes of their meetings. How the children engaged with the process was varied for the individual – some preferred to speak on the phone rather than attend meetings, while some emailed or sent feedback via the MOMO app, depending on how they wished to engage. The Mind Of My Own app was accessible to young people and their social workers; it had been available for over a year and people had said it was very easy to use.

 

Quality assurance was maintained in a number of ways. Mid-point audits were held when input was received from the child; practice acknowledgements were given to social workers to recognise good work and some joint visits were done with a manager to assess workers.

 

In future the service would work on continued timeliness of reviews, involving children even more in the process and ensuring there were good links between teams.

 

Various comments were made:

 

·       A young person attending the meeting pointed out that most young people would engage with the one person they trust. It was pointed out that some young people, when they became settled didn’t want to take time out for meetings and in those cases review meetings could be held yearly

 

·       Reviews had to happen at set points – within 1 month, 3 months and then 6 monthly. If needed, reviews could happen more frequently

 

·       Sometimes children did not want their parents involved with reviews, which could be difficult, especially with older children, but parents still needed to be given high level information

 

·       Benchmarking was not really carried out with other local authorities but the review timetable was a nationally set requirement

 

·       The endpoint of when IROs stopped working with children would happen if the child returned home, they reached 18 or were adopted. Everyone involved had to agree that the reviews could stop and sometimes visits would continue at home until the situation had settled

 

·       Nationally the figures on the numbers adopted had been falling. Worcestershire figures were good within the West Midlands region but the numbers were still not increasing

 

·       Permanency planning was improving and overall children were spending less time in care before finding a permanent place

 

The Chairman thanked Linda for her update and providing assurance to the Board.

 

RESOLVED that the Corporate Parenting Board noted the contents of the report and considered if there were any issues that the IRO service should take into account in the forthcoming year.

 

ACTION: Board Members should share the contents of the IRO Annual Report with the persons/ services they represent on the board.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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