To receive a presentation from Miles Williamson-Noble, Chairman, Rutland First.

A presentation on the Resilient Rutland project (appended to the minutes) was received from Miles Williamson-Noble, Chairman of Rutland First, the Community Interest Company leading the project.

During discussion the following points were made:

·         The Resilient Rutland work would lie somewhere between that of the pastoral care team and that of the professional services.

·         The Resilient Rutland project officially started on 29 January 2019 and would finish after three years.

·         It was important that young people drove the project and each of the secondary schools in Rutland had been asked to nominate a representative for the youth forum that had been set up. This forum would try and link in with the work of Young Healthwatch.

·         The Anna Freud charity had been contracted by Resilient Rutland to evaluate the prevalence of mental health issues in Rutland Schools. This baseline would then enable Resilient Rutland to show the achievements and improvements achieved over the three year time period.

·         The Academic Resilience Approach would involve creating an individual plan for each of the Rutland secondary schools. This approach would be similar to the Route to Resilience programme run by Future in Minds for primary schools.

·         The wellbeing practitioners, which would take up about a third of the funding,  would provide direct in-school support and would support and boost the work of existing pastoral care teams.

·         The Resilient Rutland team did not have the right experience to supervise the wellbeing practitioners and so were in talks with CAMHS and Relate about providing them with professional supervision.

·         Resilient Rutland were hoping that by showing that early intervention produced savings, future funding would be available once the project had finished.

·         Although the team was aware of the beneficial links between physical and mental health and other activities such as art and drama, there was no specific funding in the programme for this. Practitioners would be able to flag up what was already available and direct young people to those activities rather than providing anything new.

·         There was money in the Better Care Fund to take the Rutland Information Service (RIS) to a higher, improved level. The Strategic Director for People wanted to find a way of agreeing this as the one central place that directed residents to services, both children’s and adult’s, in order to avoid adding any more complication or confusion to the process. Mr Williamson-Noble agreed to liaise with Sandra Taylor, the Health and Social Care Integration Manager responsible for RIS on this issue.

·         The Leicestershire Partnership Trust (LPT) had a comprehensive directory of available services but it was aimed more at professionals rather than the average person on the street. LPT were looking to develop a more accessible directory for all the services available across the geographical area that they served.

·         The Strategic Director for People welcomed projects that built capacity into the system but was wary of how it would be managed as a partnership in light of future funding predictions. The exit strategy needed to be carefully considered so that there was not a reliance on something that would then be taken away. The Resilient Rutland team would need to be open and honest about the fact that the project was for three years and that funding was not guaranteed going forward.

·         Resilient Rutland recognised that sustainability was key. The whole school approach that they would be taking would enable schools to carry on with their individual projects after initial support from the team and would hopefully become self-fulfilling.

·         Preventative schemes needed continuous re-iteration to embed them and therefore turnover of newly upskilled staff may impact on this.

·         OFSTED criteria for ratings may in future require schools to have a certain level of mental health support.

·         A note of caution was sounded by the Director of Nursing who stressed that triage within schools could not refer directly to CAMHS and that this had to be done via a GP. There was a helpline that practitioners in school could call to understand which service would be best to refer to.

·         Resilient Rutland would like to include in their project, children who were home schooled and those excluded from schools, possibly because of an underlying mental health issue, but this would not be done in the first phase.

·         From a safeguarding perspective rather than an educational one, Council guidance on regulating children educated at home needed to be updated.

AGREED:

The Board NOTED the aims of the Resilient Rutland Project and the measures being put in place to achieve them.