Issue - meetings

Report of the Director, Children and Young People’s Service to provide an update on progress with delivery of the Safeguarding Plan, as requested by the Committee, and an update on the findings of the Ofsted follow-up inspection.

The Chair welcomed the Cabinet Member for Children and Young People’s Service - Councillor Reith, and the Director of Children and Young People’s Service – Mr Lewis to the meeting.  In respect of the JAR action plan – in asking for a brief update from Councillor Reith the Chair advised the Committee that it should be noted that the most recent Ofsted report had reported good progress.

Councillor Meehan commented for the record that in having both Councillor Reith and Mr Lewis present as requested at the previous meeting, the Councillor at that meeting (Councillor Butcher) who had been most vociferous regarding the JAR action plan and the need for both the Cabinet member and Director to be in attendance this evening, had not bothered to attend this Committee.

Councillor Reith in thanking the Committee for its invite to the meeting advised that the report before the Committee had also been the subject of considerable discussion and scrutiny at a number of Council bodies. Both the Safeguarding Monitoring Group, and the Children’s Trust had received regular updates of the safeguarding plan and had closely monitored progress, and it had also been the subject of additional meetings of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee where Members had been able to ask a considerable number of questions and probe both Mr Lewis and herself.  Discussions had also taken place externally at GoL, the DCSF and Ofsted as well as a number of public meetings.  In respect of the role of the Audit Committee in terms of the safeguarding plan, it would be for this Committee to question the accuracy and validity of the data presented to it and question the sources of the information. It was also the case that every month as part of the on-going core assessment the data was independently assessed in a random fashion and the core information followed through on individual cases.  It was good to say that there had been a marked improvement in the service from where the service had been at 1 year previous and both members and officers were able to say this with confidence. However it was also recognised that there was still considerable room for improvement and both members and officer were of the view that improvement would be an evolving one based on the now effective systems in place to manage and assess the quality of assessment and the data supplied and a number of rigorous checks to test the authenticity of the data.

The Director of Children and Young People’s service – Mr Lewis advised the Committee that there were three specific elements to the report before them – at appendix 1 – the Safeguarding Plan Milestones report, appendix 2 – the Safeguarding Plan Performance Indicators Report, and the Ofsted Inspection of progress made in the provision of safeguarding services in the LB Haringey.  Mr Lewis reported that there had been only 2 elements of the inspection that had not been as on track as had been anticipated (NI)  ...  view the full minutes text for item 167