Agenda and minutes

 Apologies for absence were received from Cllr Davies and Cllr Hare.

The Chair will consider the admission of late items of urgent business. Late items will be considered under the agenda item they appear. New items will be dealt with at Item 11 below.

There were no items of urgent business.

A member with a personal interest in a matter who attends a meeting of the authority at which the matter is being considered must disclose to that meeting the existence and nature of that interest at the commencement of the consideration, or when the interest becomes apparent.

A member with a personal interest in a matter also has a prejudicial interest in that matter if the interest is one which a member of the public with knowledge of the relevant facts would reasonably regard as so significant that it is likely to prejudice the member’ judgement of the public interest.

There were no declarations of interest put forward.

To consider the minutes of the meeting held on 03 November 2011 and agree  the  minutes of the joint meeting with the Corporate  Parenting Committee held on the 11^th October 2011.

The minutes of the meeting held on the 03 November were agreed as a correct record of the meeting. The minutes of the Joint meeting with Corporate Parenting held on the 11 October were agreed as a correct record of the meeting.

The matters arising report was tabled and noted.

This report is an update of Children and Families key safeguarding performance information at the end of December 2011. This Committee will have a role in scrutinising and challenging this information and should further explanation or analysis be required this can be requested and provided through a process of exception reporting.

The Committee considered a report with key safeguarding performance information collated at the end of December 2011.  The Committee would begin to receive this safeguarding performance data at their meetings and their role was scrutinising and challenging the information given.  Further information requests on the performance data could be responded to through the process of exception reporting.

The Committee considered the performance relating to contacts, referrals and assessments and were advised that the Safeguarding Service were consistently monitoring re- referrals. The ideal percentage range was 10% but the service was slightly above this.  Stability was a key priority for the service and tackling re-referral rates was part of this.  In response to questions about the reasons for re-referrals the Committee learnt that there could be legitimate reasons for re – referrals i.e. changed family circumstances.

 The Committee noted that the service was progressing well against a target of 70% for initial assessments for children in social care, to be carried out in 10 days.  The service continued with their existing practice of not signing off initial assessments until the family was located and the required professionals spoken with. The Council seemed to be vindicated in this approach as Ofsted were also advocating quality of work around initial assessments instead of timescale.  This was also in accordance with the Munro recommendations around quality instead of timescale.

 The Committee highlighted the percentage of children subject to child protection plans in Haringey which was considerably higher than statistical neighbouring boroughs.  The Committee noted that the rate of referrals to the Children’s service was lower than statistical neighbours as the screening of referrals was to a high standard and this also indicated that professionals understood the thresholds of need.  However of this lower number of referrals there was a higher percentage, than statistical neighbouring boroughs that were progressing to child protection plans.

The Committee asked about children on long term plans and were advised that there would need to be good evidence and reasoning behind allowing a child to remain on a plan for a long period. A good plan would have information on addressing issues and risks identified for the child and how they could be resolved   . It was not appropriate to have a child, long term, on a child protection plan as he/she would be exposed to high levels of risk. Therefore   either the issues would need to be addressed quite quickly or the child would need to be taken into care.

Members  asked how Hackney, a statistical neighbour,  were managing risks as they had a lower number of children subject to child protection plans  and  they would be working to the same legislation and pan London agreements for child protection as Haringey.  It was pointed out that Hackney had a higher level of resources for their Children’s service. This had allowed them, in the past, to work on their social work model, develop resources in the community for families to access and prevent children coming into care.  The prevention model  ...  view the full minutes text for item 51.

The Committee will consider update on CAF Action Plan previously considered by them  in January 2011.

The Committee considered an update on the CAF Action Plan which was previously considered by the Committee in January 2011. The common assessment framework (CAF) was the assessment of children with a lower level of need than social care.

Since reporting the improvements to the CAF process last year, there had been:  a review of the CAF panel arrangements, piloting of a new shorter CAF form for speech and language team referrals, no backlog of cases since May 2011, and better use of Framework I data to evaluate CAF activity.  There was also more flexibility of panel working with decisions on some cases being made outside of the panel, for example, if there was a risk of exclusion from school. There was improved training delivered twice a term and these sessions included between 12-15 participants. They were health visitors, school teachers and staff, with midwives also attending.

 The CAF team now included an additional 2 members of staff, transferred from the children’s social care team, who had previously worked on care proceedings. These additional staff   had helped build the capacity of the team and speed up processes.  The CAF team had, since the last report a year ago, moved from the Children and Families service and were working as family support workers screening assessments and working jointly on some cases with the Safeguarding team to prevent   the need for children to come into care.

Committee members asked about the one in five CAFs which resulted in the decision that the child /young person were not eligible for a service. It was reported that generally these unsuccessful applications often involved schools requesting the services of an Educational Psychologist. The CAF team had tracked and  were aiding  the  schools where there was a perceived training need for the completion of  CAFs .The service were also working closely  with schools and other agencies  to minimise the  number of CAFs. This could be achieved by the schools being supported to meet the needs of children.  Schools were being encouraged to share expertise gained from accessing services without the need for a CAF.

The Committee noted that the majority of children, for which a CAF was completed, were aged between 5 and 10 year olds.  Members noted that the service would only keep a track of the CAFs that were under the review of the CAF team. It was agreed to supply Cllr Amin, after the meeting, with: a breakdown of the ages of children that a CAF was completed for, an indication on the number of cases which returned to the CAF team for consideration and how long CAF cases remained open for.

 RESOLVED

That the report be noted.

The report will  inform elected members of the outcome of the unannounced OFSTED inspection in October 2011 and of the progress made against the areas for development.

 The Committee received a report back on the Ofsted unannounced visit of the contact, referral, and assessment arrangements on the 11^th and 12^th of October 2011. The inspection report was appended to the report for member’s consideration. The Inspection report had identified the areas of strength as being   the work of the Multi Agency Hub, the work of the Roma community Partnership worker and the UK border agency specialist worker. The recruitment to these two posts conveyed the Council’s ability to respond to the needs of vulnerable children and young people from these communities. The inspectors found no areas for priority action.

Inspectors found that the service responded promptly to referrals, there were good quality of assessments and analysis. Other positive findings were the ability of the service to meet the diverse needs in the community, their work with disabled children, performance monitoring and robust audits undertaken by the service.

 The areas for improvement were: in the timing of supervision of Assistant Social Workers by qualified Social Workers when completing assessments, increasing the number of cases referred to CAFCASS, up to date record keeping and protocols and assessment tools for use when a young person is reporting domestic violence from a partner. The service had taken a note of the files which had been looked at and knew the Social Workers that needed additional support in the area of record keeping. There were also plans to complete a data cleansing exercise on framework I to ensure that any surplus files were not included on the system and   ensure that   there was an awareness of the timescale for files remaining on the system and when they needed to be updated and reviewed. The service were already  ensuring that a qualified social worker will sign off an assessment before completion , even when the work is considered to be to a high standard,  and    considering further referrals to CAFCASS. The service had been working on developing protocols about raising awareness of domestic violence between young people and this work would be completed in February and could be reported to the committee at a future meeting.

 Overall the Council were pleased with the inspection findings. The service was already aware of the needed areas of improvement therefore there were no new areas of concern identified by the inspection. Under new inspection arrangements the findings of this inspection would contribute to the annual review.  Currently the Safeguarding Service was judged as adequate with “good prospects” for improvement.

The Committee commended officers for their continued efforts to drive forward improvements in the Safeguarding Services.

 RESOLVED

That the report be noted.

That the press and public be excluded from the meeting for consideration of the following items as they contain exempt information as defined in Section 100a of the Local Government Act 1972( as amended by Section 12A of the Local Government Act 1985): paras 1&2:namely information relating to any individual , and information likely to reveal the identity of an individual.

The press and public were excluded from the meeting for consideration of the following item as it contained exempt information as defined in Section 100a of the local government Act 1972 (as amended by Section 12A of the local government act 1985) paras 1&2 namely information relating to any individual, and information likely to reveal the identity of an individual.

The Independent Member of the Committee  was commissioned to undertake an  audit into a sample of case referrals considered by the First Response team  in July. The committee will now further consider  how these cases have been  progressed.

The Committee considered an update report on a sample of referrals to the Safeguarding Team in July, audited by the Independent Member of the Committee in September .The Independent Member had revisited the cases and checked on their progress in November. From the 37 families considered, thirteen cases had been closed by the end of August and a further nine cases were   closed in November.  The Committee considered a short update on each of the original 37 cases looked at.

The Independent Member gave assurance to the Committee that, where Social Workers had seen evidence of risk to a child, they had been seen on the same day or 24 hours later.

The Independent Member pointed to a case where there had been exemplary follow up work, engagement, and appropriate escalation by the assigned Social Worker. She had continued to monitor the young person’s engagement with the Adolescent Team after referral.  Due to the nature of the referral it would have been crucial to be to able to raise concerns if she did not attend appointments and the Social worker recognised this responsibility.

There were nine cases where the children were assessed as being in need and where the Independent Member felt that isolation factors need to be considered.  These were referred to the Head of Safeguarding and her responses to these cases set out in the attached report.   There were a further 4  cases, concerning children,  where the Independent Member felt there  was evidence of “drift” .This was where either the cases could have been closed more promptly or taken forward more expeditiously and an update was provided on these 4 cases to the Committee. Generally, the Independent member reported that there was good evidence of analysis of cases and effective liaison work.

 The Committee was concerned about the number of cases being shown as open on the framework I system.  As part of the national Children in Need census the data on open cases was extracted from the Framework I system and passed to central government on an annual basis to enable compilation of comparator data.  The Committee were advised that this was not a true reflection on the actual number of cases as separate audits showed that most cases were closed promptly and not held open inappropriately.  Also as a comparison, neighbouring boroughs Hackney and Waltham Forrest had chosen not to supply this data.   Officers explained that there was a lot of old data on the framework I system which needed to be removed or filed elsewhere. Once this was achieved processes and protocols on how long a case file were kept open and how frequently they were updated on the Framework I system would be put in place.  Negotiations on timescales with Social Workers would be completed between April – June of this year.  The committee felt that completion of  actions were crucial as  it was  important  for framework I to  be depended upon as a reliable source of information

 RESOLVED

That the report be noted  ...  view the full minutes text for item 55.

None

Date of next meeting  13^th March 2012 7.30pm

The date of the next joint meeting between Children’s Safeguarding Policy and Practice Committee with the  Corporate Parenting is on

 05 March 2012  7.00pm Council Chamber

The next joint meeting with the Corporate Parenting Committee was planned to take place on the 05 March 2012.

The Committee were interested in taking forward the previous discussions  on how the safeguarding services manages risks  and officers pointed to an LSCB review  named on the edge of care which could be considered to  take forward this discussion. Although this was not planned for completion until the end of March. It was suggested that a later date of the Committee could be looked at   to enable this report to be considered?

A report on the Family Intervention project was also suggested.