Agenda item

Members are asked to note the contents of the independent report by Skylakes attached as Appendix1 and the improvements introduced by the service.

Following the AB CD judgement in March 2013, the previous Director of Children’s Services had commissioned an independent review of S47 Child Protections Investigations from Skylakes. This had been  conducted between May 2011 and March 2013. The improvement areas identified by the audit were listed along with the actions being taken by the service to address them.

The  Director of Children’s Service(Acting) apologised to the Committee for the delay in the report coming forward and assured Members that the improvement areas identified were being taken forward very seriously. It was further explained that the initial version of the report , supplied to the council, contained a number of grammatical errors and had presentation issues and assisted in the delay of the report coming forward.

The Chair felt that the Committee had already investigated the council’s conduct in section 47’s in a thorough manner and  were assured that improvements were being made in the following areas; getting permissions from parents before seeking information from agencies, social workers having a better understanding about when permission is not required, ,and  understanding of the ‘Working Together guidance’ by First Response.

 Members were also assured  that the improvements highlighted by Skylakes, were part of an  improvement plan on section 47s being worked to which would feed into the overall strategic plan  of the service and the partnership work with iMPOWER. These plans were assessed by the service on a monthly basis and all aspects of the actions attached to the plan were carefully scrutinised.

The importance of having a good Quality Assurance Framework was outlined and having live issues on the quality assurance cycle with a suite  of information behind  them  for the service to  consistently understand the  issues . For example, the service were now looking at  how they were handling Domestic Violence cases, the quality  and  timeliness of single assessments. The lead auditor would also be working alongside managers and the quality assurance and auditing process was built into the supervision process.

There was discussion about whether there was a case for the Committee monitoring  the use of Section 47’s to ensure that the circumstances for taking  one forward were being followed appropriately. It was explained that a section 47 can be started and as investigations progress ,and the criteria is not met, the  investigation stepped down.

The Committee commented that the fundamental requirement  was to ensure that  Social Worker’s recording was timely, accurate, and followed the required guidance for  seeking permissions to investigate. If this was all correctly pursued  then there should not be a reason to question the decisions  that were being made. Added information on how the service’s internal quality assurance exercise was analysing the  use of section 47’s  could be made available in the next performance report to  committee in April.

The Committee commented on Skylakes findings concerning the little evidence of how the families are referred to a drop down service such as  the CAF team.  The Committee were assured that this was being addressed  and there was better links between  the First Response  team and  CAF team to ensure that  families were passed quickly to universal support services .

 The report was noted.