Issue - meetings

The Board received a presentation from the Head of Children’s Social Care in relation to the Ofsted Improvement Plan.

The Head of Children’s Social Care reported that the Ofsted inspection had concluded that Children’s Social Care in Sefton required improvement to be good across all areas and had made 11 recommendations which had been incorporated under the following three objectives:-

·         Objective One – To ensure that frontline practice is consistently good, effective and focussed on timely, measurable outcomes for children.

·         Objective Two – To improve management oversight at all levels to ensure effective services for children and young receive good quality supervision.

·         Objective Three – To ensure that frontline services are sufficiently resourced and the workforce are appropriately skilled to enable high quality work to be undertaken with children and young people.

It was reported that steady progress had been made since the inspection and further improvements were ongoing.

The Head of Children’s Social Care reported that, in relation to Objective One, the following outstanding issues had been identified:

·         Re-referral rates had increased by 21.6%.

·         Child Protection re-plan rates was now a significant area of focus.

·         Assessment should be undertaken within 10 days of referral.

·         Child in need plan should be in place within 25 days from the date of referral.

·         Children Looked After Health check compliance.

·         Care Leavers - Not in Employment Education or Training, focus on help and support for this cohort.

·         Reports for conferences and reviews to be shared with parents three days before the conference.

·         Improvements required on the quality of the recording of audits.

The Head of Children’s Social Care reported that, in relation to Objective Two, the following issues had been addressed:

·         Frontline Managers development programme in progress.

·         Performance meetings with managers were taking place.

·         Data refreshed to ensure that managers understand overall performance, team, and individual performance.

·         Supervision policy reviewed and refreshed.

·         All staff quarterly practice and performance workshops implemented.

·         Governance structure agreed and scorecard developed for Improvement board, Health and Wellbeing Board and Overview and Scrutiny Committee.

·         Supervision audits undertaken which do show improvements.

·         Annual Survey of supervision completed and the findings being collated

The Head of Children’s Social Care reported that, in relation to Objective Three, the following issues had been identified and addressed:

·         Introduced Practice Standards.

·         Reviewed and refreshed policies and procedures.

·         Consulted on and moving to implementation of service restructure which will address what Ofsted reported:

-       Children experience too many changes of social worker at important transition points.

-       Caseloads are too high in certain areas, (assessment, Corporate Parenting and IRO’s)

-       Management oversight and supervision needs to improve.

·         Delivered Workshops on all aspects of recording information on the child’s record.

·         Reviewed and refreshed core training offer to social workers.

The Head of Children’s Social Care reported that the actions within the Improvement Plan were complete but more focus on impact and outcomes was required.

RESOLVED:

That the presentation in relation to the progress of the Children’s Social Care Ofsted Improvement Plan be noted.