Agenda item

The Chair advised that Sir Paul Ennals had to leave the meeting at around 14:50 and so proposed that Item 11 was brought forward, after which the Board would return to the agenda. The Board agreed to the variation.

The Board received a copy of the annual report, previously circulated within the agenda pack, from Sir Paul Ennals, Chair of Haringey’s LSCB.

Sir Paul Ennals summarised some of the key aspects of the report. It was commented that the LSCB had two roles; one to promote partnership and the other was to bring together all of the relevant agencies within Haringey, in order to facilitate each agency being able to hold one another to account. There was a legal requirement that an annual report was published. It was noted that in summary, for last year, there were no serious concerns highlighted in the report. Sir Paul Ennals commented that hopefully this year’s report would show an improvement.

Cathy Herman from the Haringey Clinical Commissioning Group commented that when the board last looked at attendance there were a couple of organisations that stood out as having low attendance. Ms Herman asked what happened when organisations do not attend these meetings regularly. Sir Paul Ennals responded that if this became a serious issue then contact would be made with the head of the relevant agency and regular attendance would be requested. Sir Paul Ennals advised that attendance at the meeting was not the most accurate way of measuring engagement with the LCSB process.  It was also commented that one of the issues raised by Ofsted and referred to in the tabled report was difficulties with getting schools engaged in this process (now that schools are fully independent). Significant progress had been made in the last period and engagement was much improved.

Ms Herman asked Sir Paul Ennals what happened if, despite contacting the head of the partner agency and reiterating expectations around levels of engagement, this did not improve. In response, Sir Paul highlighted that there was a process of biennial formal reviews of safeguarding practices in all partner agencies which every LSCB undertakes. This involved each agency doing a self evaluation of safeguarding practice and then this would be challenged and scrutinised by each of the constituent agencies.

Ms Herman further commented that a key challenge going forward for the Board was how to make consultations more joined up with partners, particularly around young people. Sir Paul Ennals responded that this was indeed one of the priorities identified in the report.  

The Chair commented that she was pleased to see the link between gangs and Child Sexual Exploitation highlighted as a priority for this year in the annual report and asked Sir Paul to comment on how he thought this work was progressing. In response, he commented that one of the actions arising from previous LSCB discussion was the need to update and expand our CSE strategy. Ms Etheridge was leading a task and finish group bringing together all of the agencies on behalf of the LSCB which was due to be reported back to the LSCB Board on the 27^th January. Ms Etheridge noted that the third Task & Finish group was taking place on the 14^th January and that engagement from partners to this group so far has been very good.  Ms Etheridge also commented that she believed that we are getting to a much better place on CSE than we had been previously and that the task would be to ensure that this work was fully embedded in practice.

The Chair then summarised and it was:

RESOLVED:

1. That the Annual Report of the Haringey LCSB (2013-2014) be noted; and
2. That the Priorities for 2014-16 also be noted.