Minutes:
Ms Ann Graham, Director of Children’s Services, provided a verbal update to the Committee.
The meeting heard:
· Looked After children were carefully tracked. A robust system was in place whereby when a child became looked after, they would be placed on a new system called. Liquid Logic (replacing Mosaic). There was not a child in care that was not on that system.
· There were numerous processes and systems in place, including seeing the children regularly. There was direct communication with the children and although some of the tracking had not been recorded vigorously, this did not mean that relevant action had not taken place.
· Audit was taken seriously and attempts had always been made to take actions on any recommendations.
· In relation to permanency planning for children, these were not just driven by permanency planning processes, there were other processes where permanency was driven, such as Children Looked After review processes. Efforts were being made to bring permanency planning to a better level.
· There had been staffing issues within the permanency planning area and this had blocked some of the frequency and the timeliness around to children being returned back to a panel within three months.
· Children under the age of five got reviewed every four weeks. Checks were made to make sure there were no delays around adoption. Children over the age of five - to six upwards – had a process in place that was in need of a review. Therefore, a tracker was in place regarding children that were due for reviewing. Any non-compliance around children not being brought back at the right times would be escalated to managers within the service. A permanency planning tracking model was being sought to ensure that social workers were given sufficient notice to ensure when to bring children back to review. Several sit-in sessions had been prepared to ensure that the message was clear to staff regarding their responsibilities.
· A range of auditing was done in the service. However, social workers could not spend all their time making sure that the system constantly had the right information recorded on it. It was also important that they spent their time asking the children about their safety, the quality of their education, their goals and aspirations and how are they were getting on with the people around them. A lot of the training was driven to the qualitative aspects of a child’s life. Those doing the audits examined these various criteria as did OFSTED. However, OFSTED were unlikely to go into the detail of policies. Everyone in the service would be asked to focus on the best outcomes for the children and the young people.
· Audit was a valuable tool to give assurance where things were not looking at their optimum level. It would be possible to send auditors to the areas which operated at optimum level and this was not the point of audit. An action plan could then be implemented and show Improvement so that the next time an audit was made improvements could be observed.
· When the audit report was received, it was responded to and actions were completed. This was not the end of the process. A new assistant director had been appointed and although a time scale was not yet set, the service would be audited again. The service would be happy to report back to the Committee in four to six months’ time.
· Having a nil-assurance report was less than optimum, but inspection and audit was useful as an improvement tool.
· The service would continue to make improvements with Liquid Logic. Aside with Liquid Logic was PowerBI. This was a system through which data was gathered. Work was being done to make it more efficient so that reports could be obtained on regular basis so a focus could be kept on what had been done and any points of improvement.
The Chair felt that too much time had been taken for the service to action any recommendations. A close relationship and communication with the Head of Internal Audit and Risk, was necessary and a report on progress should be submitted within six months.
RESOLVED:
That the update be noted.