Issue - meetings

Report of the Director of Social Care and Health

Further to Minute No. 18 of 26 September 2017, the Committee considered the report of the Director of Social Care and Health indicating that in April 2016 an inspection took place of services for children in need of help and protection, children looked after and care leavers. The report was published on 27 June 2016.

An action plan was developed that addressed the 11 recommendations made in that report and this was submitted to Ofsted in October 2016.

The plan has now been reviewed and updated to focus on current priorities to ensure that the service continued to improve and that all services provided to children were good or better and improved their outcomes.

The new plan was presented to this Committee on 26 September 2017.

The report considered the performance Score Card that underpinned the current plan and the Score Card was attached as an Appendix to the report.

The report set out the background to the matter, together with progress against priorities, and concluded that there was still much to be done to drive improvement in performance across all areas to ensure that outcomes for children continued to improve.There were areas where audit indicated that the quality of practice was improving and there was a need to build on this to ensure consistency across the service.

Members of the Committee asked questions/raised matters on the following issues:-

·         With regard to the quality of supervision, the performance score had not yet achieved “good”, although the percentage had improved overall;

·         Overall improvement was anticipated to be reflected from January to April 2018 onwards; and

·         With regard to caseloads for social workers, numbers reflected children and not the number of families.

RESOLVED:

That progress reports on Children's Social Care Performance continue to be provided to the Committee on a six monthly basis.