Issue - meetings

Chris Cook, Independent Chair of Nottingham City Safeguarding Children’s Board and John Matravers, Service Manager for Safeguarding Partnerships introduced the Nottingham City Safeguarding Children Board Annual Report 2016/17 and gave a presentation to the Committee highlighting the headlines from the report. They gave the following information:

(a)  In 2016/17 Nottingham City Safeguarding Children Board (NCSCB) was assessed as being compliant with its statutory and legal requirements;

(b)  The Board showed good progress and a rigorous inspection of Children’s Services in February 2017 graded the service as “Good” overall. The ‘voice of the child’ work was seen as a particular strength in assessment and planning;

(c)  The inspection of the Youth Offending Team (YOT) gave an encouraging picture of an ‘overall high performing YOT with practitioners who are enthusiastic, knowledgeable and inclusive in their work’;

(d)  Partnership work has further been developed with Police investing more resources in the multi-agency hub and other partners also joining the hub;

(e)  Deprivation continues to be a challenge for Nottingham City with the City being ranked 8^th out of 326 local authorities in the 2015 indices of multiple deprivation;

(f)  There has been good work on the engagement strategy with  collaboration between Nottingham City Council and Nottingham City Clinical Commissioning Group along with the Board to develop an animation on rethinking ‘Did not attend’ to ‘Was not brought’;

(g)  Continued learning and development has reached over 670 colleagues with the Every Colleague Matters programme. Following a high profile serious case review over 2200 colleagues across the partnership were reached with case review events developed to further learning;

(h)  Neglect has remained the most frequent reason for a child being place on a Child Protection Plan in 2016/17 and 97% of Child Protection reviews took place within the timescales;

(i)  Following on from the Children and Social Work Act getting Royal Ascent in April 2017 there will be changes in organisation and framework of multi-agency protection and safeguarding arrangements which will be monitored and progressed by the Business Management Group during 2017/18;

Members of the Committee asked a number of questions and further information was given:

(j)  The rethinking of did not attend to was not brought has changed the mind-set of healthcare professionals and prompts them to ask the question why the child was not brought. There are many reasons a child is not brought to an appointment and many of them are reasonable and in no way suspicious, but the change in mind-set of professionals helps them to assess each case;

(k)  The NCC, CCG and NCSCB are working to develop an animation aimed at parents/carers to offer support if they are having trouble attending appointments and to explain the importance of attending appointments;

(l)  In an effort to be proactive following the review of cases from Rotherham and Rochdale taxi drivers are being required to complete safeguarding training as part of their license renewal. The work force is not the issue, but they are likely to notice things that could feed  ...  view the full minutes text for item 27