To receive an update on the Children’s Improvement Plan.

Members noted that due to staff sickness it had not been possible to circulate a report for this item, however, the Director of Children’s Services, Nancy Meehan, provided a verbal update.  The Improvement Programme aimed to bring Children’s Services to a ‘good’ standard by April 2021.  The Plan was based on previous Ofsted recommendations and covered the following four themes:

1.            Leadership, management and governance

This involved making sure the right leadership and culture is in place to improve outcomes, management grip around delivery of services, ensuring completed data, performance and intelligence – are we doing better and are statutory responses improving e.g. when people are referred to services, speed of proceedings etc – these were all seeing improvements.  Professional responses to where there may be concerns of allegations of safeguarding issues of people who are in positions of trust were improving and meeting all timescales and there had been a significantly improved response to children at risk of exploitation e.g. through MACE, CMOG meetings in response to child exploitation screening tools and improvement partnership working.

2.            A robust model of social work practice

This was covered earlier in the meeting plus community based early help services being rolled out across Torbay to ensure a community and voluntary sector response.  This would help deliver services to families in their communities to help reduce the need for formal statutory responses.

3.            A sufficient and skilled workforce

This was also covered earlier in the meeting.  Staff turnover is currently 9.9% which is below the national and regional statistical neighbours.

4.            Quality assurance and audit

Children’s Services are quality assuring their work and holding up a mirror to see if their actions make a difference to our families.  Ofsted had acknowledged that the Council was in a very different place as demonstrated by the move away from a DFE appointed Commissioner to an Improvement Partner.  There has been improvements in recording and showing outcomes for children but there is still a long way to go.  The vision is that children deserve outstanding services at all times.

Members asked questions in relation to the following:

·                     the Plan was to be rated as ‘good’ by April 2021, the Improvement Board acknowledged that we were probably not yet there, what more do we need to do to get to ‘good’ and what are the areas of weakness – Ofsted are not seeing any signs of children being unsafe which is positive, but there is still variability and lack of consistency for all our children across all our teams.  They are focussing on supporting fist line managers to bring in consistency across all teams, children should get the same and right and good service across all teams.  They need to be more reflective in supervision, what does it mean for the children when making decisions in the context of the child’s journey and life?  The challenge has been trying to deliver improvements in Covid-19 not having the same access to 1 to 1 reflections or debriefs after a difficult situation, learning and development working within a team has not been there as they are working differently;

·                     progress of Liquid Logic – this is on track to be implemented on 7 June 2021 and will enable improvement of reporting through streamlining of systems.  During that week there will be a lockdown of the two systems, the challenge is to ensure that data is input into the two systems to migrate the data across, the challenge is to ensure that data is input into the two systems and there are plans and people in place to carry this out and ensure that there is no data blackout during that time; and

·                     does anyone from the voluntary and community sector sit on the Improvement Board – not at present but the membership is being reviewed to see who the partners are to take us on the next stage of our journey and how the voluntary sector can be involved.  It was important to ensure representation and the voice of young people was taking into account – Nancy Meehan agreed to take this suggestion back to the Chair of the Improvement Board.