To receive a verbal update on the Children Service’s Improvement Plan from Dawn Godfrey, Director of Children’s Services.

A verbal update on the Children’s Services Improvement Plan was received from Dawn Godfrey, Director of Children’s Services.

During discussion the following points were noted:

·         Two independent social care consultants had been commissioned to sense check the department’s own assessments of the risk areas highlighted by Ofsted.

·         As a positive it was obvious to reviewers that the voice of the child was being heard and that social workers knew their children well. However on the negative side the recording of the children’s views was through the filter of the professional. A key area of focus therefore would be on the co-production of plans rather than writing them for the child. The development of the MyApp would help with this.

·         Reviewers found that Child Protection Plans were very detailed, too much so in some cases which over complicated things. It was recommended that Plans should be more dynamic and not remain static.

·         Recent work had shown an improvement in the quality of assessments. This had been accompanied by a drop in timeliness however as managers would not sign off on the assessments unless they met the required standard. Ms Godfrey felt this was an acceptable trade–off and would prefer quality assessments over hitting timescales which had, in the event, only dropped slightly, from 90% to 86%

·         The perennial issue that the department faced was the quality of its management oversight which had been exacerbated by workforce stability. A new structure was being put in place which would give CLA the high level of support they needed. Going forward there would be one team for children in need and Child protection cases and another team solely for CLA and care leavers which would enable staff to give children more attention.

·         Much more emphasis was being placed on in-house fostering recruitment with a separate fostering team manager being focused on this.

·         Morale had increased amongst social workers who had felt safer and more supported since the new team leaders had been in place.

·         Although there had been a significant amount of workforce ‘churn’, the service should be fully permanently staffed by March of next year. This would mean that agency social workers could be let go, although one would be retained to continue covering maternity leave.

·         Councillor Webb had previously asked a question about how many complaints the service had received. Last year during quarters 1 and 2 (April to September) the whole of children’s services had received 13 complaints; this year during the same period there had only been 3 which was remarkable and a reflection of the hard work done by the team. In addition, of last years’ complaints 6 had been stage 2 complaints compared with 3 this year. None had been fully upheld.

·         There had been a downturn in the number of compliments received during the same period; down from 20 to 14, however in October there had already been 7 received.

·         The annual conversation with Ofsted in January was not a formal session but would be used by officers to talk through their self-assessment.

·         A formal focused visit by Ofsted was expected in March but focused visits do not result in a graded judgement. Another inspection was usual in 3 years’ time and the department was absolutely clear that it expected to receive an improved graded judgement at this time. Although there was still a lot of work to do to move the service from the bottom half of the ‘requires improvement’ spectrum into the ‘good’ band, Ms Godfrey felt that progress had been made.

·         There were several initiatives across the services to support staff wellbeing but another facet of support was having workloads that felt manageable so that stress levels could be reduced. A recent scoping report on caseloads across the East Midlands found that Rutland had the lowest level.