Issue - meetings

Councillor Cheryl Barnard, Portfolio Holder for Children, Young People and Schools, Catherine Underwood, Corporate Director for People, Ailsa Barr, Director of Children’s Integrated Services, and Sam Morris, Head of Strategy and Improvement, attended the meeting to discuss the recent Ofsted inspection of children’s services.  They gave a presentation highlighting the following information:

a)  Children’s services are some of the most important statutory responsibilities of the Council and therefore are subject to a robust and rigorous regulatory regime, which focuses on the effectiveness of services.  The effectiveness of children’s services is of importance to the whole Council.

b)  The inspection took place over three weeks in July and included the sharing of the Council’s self-assessment.  Initial feedback was provided to the Council and the report was published on 5 September.

c)  The Council was judged to be ‘Requires improvement to be good’ in the domains of the impact of leaders on social work practice with children and families and the experiences and progress of children in care and care leavers and ‘Inadequate’ in the domain of experiences and progress of children who need help and protection.

d)  While the outcome of the inspection judgement as ‘Inadequate’ is disappointing, the Council considers that overall the report is balanced detailing where improvements need to be made but also recognising where progress has been made and areas of strong practice that can be built on.  It is recognised that due to the grading for the domain of children in need of help and protection, the rating for overall effectiveness could not be any higher, despite the higher rating for other domains.

e)  Ofsted identified eight specific areas for improvement:

  i.  Effectiveness and timeliness of responses to children’s needs when first presented to the Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) – there are significant weaknesses in this area, with decision making needing to take place much more swiftly.

  ii.  Management oversight and direction of front-line workers and the local authority designated officer

  iii.  Social work capacity so that social workers and first-line managers can respond effectively to children in need of help and protection, and that children in care have greater consistency of social worker – this was recognised as a challenge in Ofsted’s previous focussed visits.  A changing workforce has an impact on the consistency of relationships for children in the Council’s care.

  iv.  Placement sufficiency for children in care and those with complex needs – the main challenge for the Council is finding the right arrangements and other local authorities are also having difficulty with this.

  v.  The service response to care leavers aged 21 or over – the Council needs to ensure that information provided to care leavers is clearer and works to support them.

  vi.  The service response to young people who are aged 16/17 years who present as homeless – the Council needs to make sure that accommodation needs are progressed promptly.

  vii.  The quality and timeliness of return home interviews

  viii.  Oversight of children missing from education and those who  ...  view the full minutes text for item 20