The committee will consider results of a qualitative audit, completed by the Independent Member of the Committee in March 2012, examining a sample of cases where children were subject to protection plans for more than a year.
Minutes:
A programme of audits had been established by the committee in order to monitor practice and performance in Children’s Social Care, and identify areas of good practice and areas for improvement. These audits had focused primarily on new referrals and children within the First Response service. Members previously wished to look more closely at those children who become subject to a child protection plan as the result of a Child Protection Conference. These children were involved with Children and Young People’s Services for longer periods of time, generally, than those who have a brief, targeted intervention from First Response, and were dealt with by Social Workers within the Safeguarding Service.
Cases were chosen at random from Framework I to examine and the Independent Member remarked on the complexity of navigating cases on the framework I system; although this could have been a reflection of the density of the cases looked at. The Head of Safeguarding and Support explained that they were examining a windows based model of the Framework I system but there would be a cost to changing the view of cases on the system. Social Workers were experienced in the use of the system.
The case findings highlighted that there was a significant fall in the number of child protection cases open but they were still a high number. The cases examined were rightly found to require being subject to a protection plan after 18 months as there were longer term issues involved.
The committee considered the case study findings and asked whether a menu of intervention services or specialist services could have been provided at the start of some of the cases and if this could have had an impact. Also whether options such as adoption could have been considered earlier especially when children were young or babies and could be offered an alternative to staying in a family where their needs were not being met. In response, it was noted that the service were taking forward early intervention programmes with families but some families required the structure of being on the child protection plan as issues being faced could be long term and complex . The service would monitor and complete regular audits on long term child protection cases to check their progression.
The committee spoke about the need to find alternative solutions to helping families on long term plans and providing structure to their lives in a different way i.e. thorough helping them into work. The committee acknowledged that the Troubled Families project helped a small number of families and therefore this route could not always be used. One suggestion was to consider parents of children that were subject to long term planning, for participation in employment initiatives.
The committee were further interested in understanding how the issues raised by the Independent Member in the audit would be taken forward.
RESOLVED
That the issues identified by the Independent Member identified such as the length of time that a child was known to the service before issues were brought to a multi agency forum, the length of time a child was subject to plan, the timeliness of proceedings, and the impact of intervention on family be responded to by the Head of Safeguarding and Support in a report to the next committee meeting