Agenda item

The Commissioning Director for Care and Support, the Operational Director for Children’s Care and Cabinet Member for Children’s Social Care & Disabilities presented a report on OFSTED Inspection of Children's Services Improvement Plan.

The Council was subjected to a Standard Inspection in July 2023 under the OFSTED Inspection of Local Authority Children’s Service (ILACS) framework. The result of the inspection suggested there needed to be improvements made on the Council’s Children’s Services. The Council was required to develop and publish an improvement plan which covered eight recommendations made by OFSTED.

There had been a vast improvement within the Children’s Services since the improvement plan was published on 11 December 2023; however, due to the current financial restraints faced by the Council, the improvement of the Children’s Services had slowed down. The Operational Director for Children’s care detailed improvements that had been made on the following OFSTED recommendations, which included:

1.  Timeliness of strategy meetings.

2.  The capacity, quality, consistency and impact of supervision and management oversight.

3.  Assessment and decision-making for children experiencing neglect.

4.  Timeliness of pre-proceedings pathways

5.  Consistency of response to 16 and 17-year-olds who presented as homeless.

6.  Oversight of children’s placements in unregistered children’s homes.

7.  Application of threshold in early help.

8.  Life-story work and permanence planning.

Once a year, children’s services had an annual engagement meeting with OFSTED where progress was discussed via a self-evaluation document. 

The Committee enquired on whether there would be any further improvements regarding placements and whether there were any plans going forward to ease the placement issues and cost. The Commissioning Director for Care and Support informed the Committee that there was a national crisis regarding children’s placements; however, there were several pathways that children’s services were taking to combat the issue. The Council and OFSTED had produced an efficiency plan which would detail family placements, outside family placements, and prevention.

Concerns were raised on how successful family hubs were in attracting families that need the assistance the hubs had to offer. The Commissioning Director for Care and Support explained that it was still early days for family hubs; however, there was early evidence that indicated family hubs were working with a reduction in the number of people needing further support. Advertisements detailing the family hubs had been placed around the borough as well as an online presence.

In response from a question asked by the committee regarding long-term child protection plans, the Operational Director for Children’s Care advised the committee that children in long-term child protection plans tended to have more complex needs who were in pre-proceeding and tended to be neglected. There was a difficulty with neglected children as often the family environment starts to improve under the supervision of children’s services before it starts declining again. The children’s services conduct monthly meetings reviewing children who had been on a child protection plan longer than nine months. 

There was an intensive supervision training for all managers within children’s services, along with meetings with principle social workers. There was inconsistence with between the answers given, with some managers giving in depth answers while other give a check-list response. There had been an improvement made on management oversight and reflective supervision.

A question was raised by the committee regarding strategy meetings with other partners. The Operational Director for Children’s Care informed the committee that most of the strategy meetings were held on Microsoft Teams. There was a capacity issue in which the Metropolitan Police had brought in additional staffing. The introduction of the new scheduling system had meant that there was a more efficient use of people’s dairies meaning meetings were already booked in.

The Committee asked for clarification on how children’s services would measure the outcomes and improvements. The Commissioning Director for Care and Support explained to the Committee that there was a national set of detailed indicators used daily to track the progress of children’s services. Most of the indicators had been routinely collected nationally which had helped established the Councils benchmark. There was also an internal programme of audits within the children’s services performed by audit teams, children services management, and independent experts.

(Standing Order 7.1 (Chapter 3, Part 2 of the Council Constitution) was extended at this juncture to enable the meeting to continue beyond the two-hour threshold).