Agenda item

The Director of Children’s Services, the Director (Designate) Children’s Social Care and Safeguarding, and the Chief Financial Officer attended to update the Panel on performance and financial information for services relating to Children and Families.

In the course of the discussion on social care PIs, the following main points were raised:

·       This was the first full year of useful baseline data being available and gave a much more secure picture.

·       In relation to the Family Front Door, the figures reflected a national trend of rising referrals.  However, it would be important to analyse the specific reasons why the County Council had seen a rise in referrals. One issue appeared to be a rise in referrals from the police that were not meeting thresholds and work had been done on why the police were not applying thresholds correctly.  Similarly, there was a peak in referrals from schools in July.  It would be important to understand whether this was due to professional anxiety or schools clearing out a backlog before the holidays.  This had been a repeated pattern and it would now be important to identify which schools the referrals were coming from.

·       A Member asked if it would be possible to include year on year averages to identify trends in seasonality.

·       Social work assessments were only counted when complete.  A system was now in place to monitor the assessments still open and identified those which were about to breach the 45-day target.

·       A question was asked about the 23% of contacts to the Family Front Door classed as ‘other’.  It was confirmed that there were about 20 different ‘other’ sources, such as other local authorities or other social workers.

·       In response to a question about why these datasets were collected, Members were reminded that there had been many conversations about which figures to include and this combination had been arrived at.

·       KPIs relating to Through Care for Looked after Children and Care Leavers showed a sustained positive improvement or a positive trajectory of improvement.

·       The figures for looked after children who came into care having been previously looked after within the previous 12 months related to only 12 children in the whole year and it was suggested that these were very small figures.

·       It was confirmed that the Edge of Care Service would go live in September, with some staff already in place.

·       Within the West Midlands region, the Council had the lowest rate of new children being taken into care.  The Chairman welcomed this news and reminded the Panel that it was important to look at the actual impact on children.

·       The Chairman was pleased to see the reduction in the number of children experiencing 3 or more placements in a year.  The Director (Designate) informed the Panel that work on sufficiency was a focus for 2019/20.

·       In response to a question about why the level of external residential placements was higher than the national average, Members were informed that this related to a shortage of specialist residential placements.  The children involved had very complicated needs and an average family home was not the best place for them.  As part of sufficiency work, there were plans to develop the number of specialist foster carers.

·       It was confirmed that looked after children should not be excluded from school.  For maintained schools, the County Council could direct the school to act.  For academies, it was necessary to write to the regional schools commissioner who, on average, took 9 months to reply.

·       The development of partnership working was on a journey and staff in children’s social care had good relationships with the majority of schools.

·       Although fewer children were being taken into care, the service would also wish to see child protection rates drop and children in need rates rise to about 50% of cases, leading to the provision of support to parents and allowing children to stay with their family.

·       If a family refused to cooperate, the action taken would be decided on a case-by-case basis.  In some cases, a statutory social work assessment was the push that a family needed.  It was also possible to use district based, community/ voluntary sector support to take things forward.  Members agreed that informal support was important particularly in relation to community and youth work.  Targeted family support workers needed to be aware of issues and signpost families as necessary.

·       The number of children who came back onto a child protection plan within 2 years had reduced.  However, this was only against a baseline from last year and there was a need to continue to build sustainable improvement.

·       Average caseloads were being sustained and there was positive feedback from staff on this.  The Chairman pointed out that the increase in numbers of permanent staff was very important and the Authority was becoming one that people chose to work for.  The Director (Designate) reminded Members that, as well as recruiting staff, the Authority was producing good social workers and providing a structure which gave career progression.

·       It was suggested that links to the University of Worcester were good but could be improved.  Members were informed about the POP project which would increase the number of placements available for student social workers.

·       The CMR suggested that sickness levels were a good indicator of staff morale.  The Director of Children’s Services informed the Panel that sickness levels amongst social workers had halved.  The Local Authority’s aim was no more than 7 sickness days per member of staff per year.  Currently, for social workers, the average figure was 6.47 days.  The Chairman suggested that this should be commended, as social work was probably the most stressful job in local government with the most serious decisions having to be made.

The Panel went on to discuss 2018/19 year-end budget information.  The Chief Financial Officer informed Members that his aspiration for future years was that Q1 information would be considered by Scrutiny Panels at this time of year.  In the course of the discussion the following main points were made:

·       The Year End Position was that two service areas were showing as red.  This should be seen as good news.  24 months ago, the base budget had been re-balanced and it was a significant achievement to get to this level.

·       Overall the budget showed a £1.158m overspend which was a significant improvement.

·       A question was asked about the £0.204m overspend in Education and Skills due to an increase in staffing costs in Adult Learning.  Members were reminded that Adult and Community Learning was grant funded.  The service had no previous history of overspend and this situation had not been predicted.  Work was now being undertaken to understand the reasons for this.  It was a complicated situation as many tutors were not employed by the County Council.  Internal Audit was looking into this.

·       In response to a question about the future of the Public Health Ring-Fenced Grant, Members were reminded that this was not built into the base budget in order to limit risks.  The Chief Financial Officer reported it was his personal view, that there was likely to be an announcement in September which would roll over all grants to the following financial year.

·       A question was asked about the overspend and how this would work next year in the context of the budget set for Worcestershire Children First.  The Chief Financial Officer informed Members that the details of this were still being worked through and there would be constant dialogue between the County Council and WCF.  He would meet at least monthly with WCF’s Director of Resources.

·       The Chief Financial Officer informed the Panel that indications to date suggested that 2019/20 Q1 was broadly within budget.

·       The overspend in Home to School Transport was as a result of inflation rather than increased demand.

·       It was suggested that the £8 million overspend in the DSG for High Needs Pupils was not high when looked at in the national context.  It was confirmed that there had been no movement from the DfE on this and the issue remained with the Council.  Members were informed that this would be a cumulative issue and other Councils were already further along the road.  The Council was lobbying on this along with other County Councils.  The Council could take action, but it would never be possible to address the issue without action from central Government.

·       There was some evidence that the issue of the High Needs Grant was worse in rural areas.  The Chairman of the Panel suggested that the Treasury and central Government needed to acknowledge what was happening in the real world.  The Chief Financial Officer confirmed that, ultimately, the debt sat with the Council.

·       It was confirmed that most of the expenditure was statutory and there was, therefore, very little flexibility to reduce expenditure.  For the future, the risk of the financial position would remain with the Council, while much of the work would be done by WCF.

·       In the Chairman’s opinion, this was a national crisis that needed a massive injection of public funding.