Agenda item

The report will provide an analysis of the performance data and trends for an agreed set of measures relating to looked after children on behalf of the Corporate Parenting Advisory Committee. Report to Follow

The Performance report was a helpful tool to help the Committee identify issues that required focus in the care for looked after children and care leavers.

The Director for the Children’s Service highlighted the number of areas where performance improvements had been made. This was through a focused approach of the monthly call over meetings and the embedding of a quality assurance function.

The borough still had a high number of children in care and was still considered an outlier. Members were assured that there were specific monthly placement planning meetings to ensure that all options for placements are being explored and that there is consistent rigor being applied by officers.

The Permanency strategy had made significant improvements to providing more permanent stable placements for children and young people in care. There had been an increase in the special guardianship orders and kinship carers, and adoption timescales.  However, there was still room for improvement with adoption timescales, so the service would be re-launching the permanency strategy and considering at all aspects of permanency planning. The council would also be speaking with a specialist organisation about working together on adoption.  The re -launched strategy will  set out the key values  on long term placement options  such as living with a family member,  kinship carers and also looking at  supporting and  provisioning the judiciary  with the  confidence that  LAC  ,on section 20’s notices, are  able to  stay at home.

There was still concern about the cohort of children aged between 5 to 13 coming into care and there would be further monitoring and scrutiny of the process of their care.

In response to a question about the number of older children in care, it was noted that there are 118 aged between 14 -17 coming into care via section 20 notices. The Committee further asked how this number compared to statistical neighbours and noted that the borough did have higher numbers of older children in care. Officers felt that older children in the borough were more likely to become looked after due to the risk adverse culture in the service.  Also there were undeveloped diversionary activities in the borough to engage the young person in and better enable the behaviour of the young person to be tackled. This requires a multi disciplinary approach as there would need to be joint work with schools, Youth Services, YOS, Police and judiciary.  Members noted that all partners working together can make a   difference and this involves getting involved with the young person at the right time and using the expertise and skills at an early stage.   The Committee were pleased to note that was additional external funding was being sought to support early diversionary activity and the committee were interested in getting a report back, at their March meeting, about this work and any initial improvements.

 Following member question the following information was provided to the Committee:

·         The number of children in care can suddenly go up in a month due to a large family of children coming into care or   young person is put on remand.

·         Additional focus on section 20’   so all options for the placement of the young person are considered. This requires constant quality  analysis by managers  of Social Workers work  so that  they are constantly looking a the bigger picture for the young person and  considering   different options

·         20 LAC in residential provision, of this number, 16 have special needs.

·         Each week the Cabinet Member for Children and Families and the Director for Children’s Service will review the number of children missing from care and the process to locate them. They will also focus on the quality of the discussion with the young person when they returned to care to ensure that the issues causing the absence are being tackled. There is continual challenge and focus on missing children.

·         In terms of educational achievement of looked after the children, the United Kingdom was one of the strongest countries in Europe. The looked after children achieving awards were a good way of meeting young people in care that were exceeding in education.

Agreed that numerical figures for LAC not in employment, education and training should be   referred to in performance reports instead of percentages as there was a small number involved in the analysis.    The Director of CS spoke about the need to align YOS, education and training providers to   improve support for care leavers and members were assured that this would be discussed at the next call over meeting.