Agenda item

Report of Director of Children’s Social Care

Viv McCrossen, Head of Family Community Teams Central, presented the report which details the Partnership CAF Performance for the first quarter of 2014/15, comparing performance against 2013/14 and 2012/13.

A Common Assessment Framework is a framework to help practitioners working with children, young people and families to assess children and young people’s additional needs earlier, provide more effective services, and develop a common understanding of  needs and how partners can work together to meet them.

Since an information cleansing programme during 2013, a new set of measures were introduced to better measure need, analyse outcomes and prevent duplication. This included specifically recording initiation by agency, reason by outcome, age, outcome by agency, ethnicity and age.

The following points were highlighted at the meeting:

(a)  during 2013/14 1180 CAFs were initiated across the partnership, this was an increase of 36.1% on 2012/13 which is the highest number ever in the City;

(b)  during the first quarter of 2014/15 299 CAFs were initiated, the highest number during the first quarter ever;

(c)  from 2012/13 to 2013/14 initiations by Family Community Teams have increased by 71% with Primary Schools increasing initiations by 19.7%, Health Visitors by 31.9% and secondary schools decreasing initiations by 13.2%;

(d)  62.3% of CAFs were closed when needs were met but there was an increase of cases closed due to increased risk where cases were escalated to specialist services;

(e)  30% of cases escalated to social care already had a CAF, so investigation needs to take place to find out why 70% of cases had not had a CAF and what support if any had been received prior to Social Care involvement as this may identify a gap in identifying children with need at an early stage;

(f)  the cleansing exercise had highlighted that better discipline is required in closing of CAFs on the shared system but also that the system needed ask more questions, including identifying the a lead person for each initiation.

It is noted that referrals to Social Care were perceived to be much easier than initiating a CAF so this needed to be investigated along with who and how appropriate it had been for each referral to be made directly to Social Care before a CAF had been considered.

Impact tracking will take place to find out which organisations prove most successful in meeting the child’s needs.

On behalf of the Partnership and in light of her leaving the Local Authority, the Chair thanked Viv McCrossen for her regular contributions to the work of the Children’s Partnership Board.

RESOLVED

(1)  to note performance measures presented and agree to their continued usage in future reporting;

(2)   to agree for the additional performance reporting on “tracking” of closed CAFs to measure sustained impact;

(1)  to agree that each agency is responsible for consistently updating the accuracy of information for CAF records initiated and open on CAF Central Records system for each quarter of the financial year;

(2)  to agree to the Communications Plan, timeline and launch of the refresh to CAF Central Records system and processes.