Agenda and minutes

Councillor Sam Webster (Co Chair)

Sean Kelly (Vice Chair)

Scott Mason

Stephen McLaren

Alison Michalska

Jacquie Newton

Sally Pearce

Sally Seely

John Yarnham

ZartashaZahied

None.

Minutes of the meeting held on 5 July 2017, to be agreed

The minutes of the meeting held on 5 July 2017 were agreed by the Board as a true record and signed by the Chair.

Verbal update from Emily Humphreys, Support Assistant Children and Adults Directorate

Emily Humphreys, Support Assistant, Children and Adults introduced a report updating the Board on membership. She informed the Board that Jacquie Newton and Sally Pearce from Seely Primary School had tendered their resignation from the Board. She informed the Board that an alternative representative for primary schools had been identified. Emily also advised the Board that Zoe Butler was attending her first meeting as the new further education representative.

RESOLVED to note the resignation from the Board of Jacquie Newton and Sally Pearce and the addition of Zoe Butler as further education representative.

Helen Blackman, Director of Integrated Children’s Services introduced the report on the Update on Priority 2 – Safeguarding and Supporting Children and Families. Clive Chambers, Head of Safeguarding and Aileen Wilson, Head of Early Help Services gave presentations to the board on work around Child Sexual Exploitation and Parenting programme work. The following information was highlighted:

(a)  Since the last update Police staff have joined the Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH). Adult Safeguarding have committed to joining the MASH and the National Probation Service will have a presence within the team from the beginning of October;

(b)  Over the last 2 years training has been rolled out across the Schools as part of the Designated Safeguarding Lead role and has delivered training to nearly 700 staff with at least 100 schools represented;

(c)  In recent years there has been some intense media interest in Chid Sexual Exploitation (CSE) and how local authorities are tackling the issue. Nottingham has been considered to be in the vanguard for many years;

(d)  During return interviews of young people who went missing it became clear that they tended to gravitate towards city centre establishments and bars and the need to engage this sector in CSE training was clear;

(e)  This engagement with the security industry has been very well received, training events have taken place over the last 2 years or so and in August 2017 a leaflet was jointly launched with the Security Industry Association targeting the sector and aiming to help support them in identifying and reporting CSE;

(f)  The Multi Agency Sexual Exploitation (MASE) panel is a well-established panel that looks at three aspects of CSE, the child or young person, the perpetrators and the places CSE is most likely to occur. It does not replace other activities that work to keep children safe but sense checks the work being done, and has helped to establish some very effective work practices;

(g)  Work around perpetrators is the most difficult aspect of the work undertaken by the panel. Police powers are limited around prosecution and a recent piece of work looked at other ways to disrupt CSE. These additional approaches work alongside Community Protection work that ensure that perpetrators are not involved in licensable activities;

(h)  The Panel has developed a set of 24 standards that aim to ensure a consistent response and approach across the county and partnership agencies RAG rated their performance against the standards, there were no red results and only 2 amber results;

(i)  Parenting support has always been available within the city but the offer has not been consistent across different areas. The Early Help Team has worked to bring together the provision and pool resources from across the city;

(j)  The purpose of the pilot was to increase the range of interventions, test the efficacy of the group work model and to reduce the level of casework within the early help and targeted family support teams;

(k)  Within the last year the completion rate for the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 20.

Presentation by Superintendent Ted Antill

Superintendent Ted Antill gave a presentation to the Board providing a Partnership Update from Nottinghamshire Police. He highlighted the following points:

(a)  Nottinghamshire police are reintroducing officers into schools across the area in a pilot that has been running since September 2017. There are currently 4 schools in the City with an officer in place;

(b)  The School Early Intervention Officer’s (SEIO) time is split between delivering lessons  on issues such as substance misuse, online safety and knife crime, and delivering restorative justice interventions, investigating crimes, Anti-social behaviour incidents, liaising with partners and problem solving interventions;

(c)  Lesson content and other work can be targeted and specifically tailored to the school’s need;

(d)  Officers do not just spend time in a school setting, they are integrating into the communities in order to interact with the young people outside of school and aim to break down the barriers between the community and the Police;

(e)  At Nottingham Academy there has been a PCSO engaged in activities very similar to these for a number of months. An officer will be joining the PCSO and any learning from their role and experience will be built into the pilot scheme;

(f)  51% of people that went missing during 2016/17 were under the age of 18, young people between 12 and 17 are more likely to go missing. Repeat missing children account for a large proportion of missing incidents recorded in Nottinghamshire;

(g)  Those young people who are also at risk of CSE are considered a high risk missing person;

(h)  Any young person has been reported as missing 3 or more times in a 90 period is the  subject of a multi-agency intervention;

(i)  Work is carried out with care placements to ensure a robust plan is in place should a child go missing. A small pilot scheme was run involving 3 prolific missing and at risk of CSE young people. The missing from home officer attended the care placement and worked with the placement as well as the young person and there was a significant reduction of missing episodes;

Following questions and comments from the Board the following information was highlighted:

(j)  The SEIO pilot was launched very quickly. Following the initial period of the pilot there will be full consultation with the Youth Offending Team, Priority Families Team and other partners. This will help to avoid duplication of work and will ensure that there are no gaps in provision;

(k)  A consistent message across the City is essential, sometimes the work delivered can feel a little generic, something Nottingham focused would be helpful in engaging young people;

(l)  The SEIO’s are having 5 full days training. There is limited training available to them around working with young people with learning disabilities or difficulties. As the number of officers in schools increase this is an aspect that will come to the front. A further evolution of the training will be to take the scheme into primary schools;

RESOLVED to note the content of  ...  view the full minutes text for item 21.

Report of the IndependentChair,Local SafeguardingChildrenBoard

Clive Chambers, Head of Safeguarding and Quality Assurance introduced the Independent Chair’s Annual Safeguarding report and Business plan. He advised the board that this document has not yet been published as it was only agreed at the Nottingham City Safeguarding Children’s Board on 22^nd September. He highlighted the following information:

(a)  Shared learning has been very successful this year, briefings were delivered to key people who then took the training back to their organisations. The tools for them to deliver the training within their own organisations were provided. This encouraged a “bottom up” approach to learning which has worked well and was often shared in a more conversational style that was more easily accessible to colleagues;

(b)  The partnership with the Nottingham City Clinical Commissioning Group and Nottingham City Council continues to be extremely successful. The partnership has worked towards changing the mind-set of the workforce when looking at young people who are missed appointments;

(c)  The report includes an audit on last year’s priorities and a business plan for the forthcoming year. 2016/17 was a success at implementing different approaches. 2017/18 will look to embed these new approaches;

(d)  The main priorities for 2017/18 are:

·  Reducing neglect – understanding the extent of neglect, raising awareness across the partnership with an aim to improve early recognition, providing effective services to improve support, reduce the impact of neglect and to ensure that the voice of the child is heard when planning services.

·  Learning and improvement – development of a new safeguarding training model and a Learning and improvement Strategy, disseminating learning from reviews and information sharing

·  Empowering Young People – ensuring that every child has a valued voice, supporting and empowering young people in reporting abuse and Co-Production, where services challenge themselves in genuine participation and co-production of services and plans with children and families;

RESOLVED to note the contents of the Independent Chair’s Annual Safeguarding Report and Business Plan.

Report of the Director of Children’s Integrated Services

Lisa Hazel, Integrated Workforce Consultant presented the report on the Refresh of the Children’s Partnership Core Development Standard to the board. She highlighted the following points:

(a)  The Core Development Standard (CDS) standardises the training that all staff who work with children and families and young people receive. This ensures that all staff are trained to the same national standard;

(b)  The refreshed CDS aims to give basic knowledge to all staff who have limited contact with young people and families, but to provide intensive and targeted training for worker who have more contact and specialist contact with them;

(c)  Courses have been added to the Standard covering issues such as domestic violence, mental health, CSE and child development and existing courses have been refreshed and reviewed;

(d)  Some courses are fully funded and there are others that can be bought and incur a charge to attend;

(e)  The website has been refreshed and redeveloped to reflect the changes in the offer. It now more closely matches the structure of the CDS itself and included hyperlinks to e-learning where available;

Following questions and comments from the board, the following information was highlighted:

(f)  The voluntary sector offer training focused on an introduction to the voluntary sector safeguarding that can be added to the CDS;

(g)  Mental health training funded through the Future in mind is starting to roll out within the City Council. Further funding has been secured which will allow the same training to be offered to the wider work force from January next year;

(h)  There is a large proportion of training within schools that focuses on health issues, including mental health and first aid. This reduced the time that teachers and teaching staff have on education based training;

RESOLVED to

(1)  approve the changes to the Core Delivery Standard as set out in the presentation and report appended to the agenda.

(2)  ask each agency to look at best fit within their own training plans to show consistency of developing practitioners in line with the CDS

(3)  note where Partners need training development support the offer of buying elements of the Core Offer from Nottingham City Council if or when required.

Helen Blackman, Director of Children’s integrated services introduced a report on an Update to the Children’s Partnership terms of reference to make the joint Chairs permanent. She advised the Board that these changes could be reviewed in the future if the board felt it was necessary.

RESOLVED to approve the proposal to make the Portfolio Holder for Early Intervention and Early years and the Portfolio Holder for Business, Education and Skills the permanent Joint Chairs of the Children’s Partnership Board.

To be noted

Emily Humphreys, Support Assistant for Children and Adults introduced the forward plan outlining agenda items for the upcoming meetings.

RESOLVED to note the forward plan.