Agenda and minutes

Councillor Elliot made a Personal Declaration of Interest in Minute No. 42 (Rotherham Safeguarding Adult Board Annual Report 2017/19) – Council appointed Co-Chair of the Learning Disability Partnership Board and Partner Governor of RDaSH.

There were no members of the public or press present at the meeting.

Health Select Commission

Councillor Jarvis provided Members of the Select Commission with an update of the Health Select Commission RDaSH Sub-Group where feedback had been received on the CQC inspection.

Corporate Parenting Panel

The Chair reported that the Panel had not meet since the last meeting of the Commission.

A meeting had been arranged for the Sub-Group to meet with Rebecca Wall to look at the LADO process and the impact of that on foster carers and in particular on the retention of foster carers.

Improving Lives Performance Group

The meeting had not taken place due to illness, however, issues raised would be fed back to Children’s Services in due course.

Consideration was given to the minutes of the previous meeting of the Improving Lives Select Commission, held on 6^th November, 2018, and matters arising from those minutes.

Resolved:-  That the minutes of the previous meeting of the Improving Lives Select Commission, held on 6^th November, 2018, be approved as a correct record for signature by the Chair.

It was noted that an e-mail had been sent to Select Commission Member seeking expressions of interest in establishing a sub-group to look at Holiday Hunger in the New Year

Christine Cassell, Independent Chair of the Rotherham Local Safeguarding Children Board, together with Phil Morris, Business Manager, presented the Board's annual report 2017-18.

Attention was drawn to:-

-          There had been a number of inspections by external regulators.  They reflected the very significant improvement in Rotherham, particularly in Children’s Services, over a very short period of time

-          Those improvements in the Council and indeed the wider partnerships were to be celebrated, however, there were still further improvements to be made in safeguarding both in individual agencies and the partnership response

-          The very speed of the improvements brought some risks.  Health and Protection were good but further work was required both within Children’s Social Care and partners to ensure that the good practice was consolidated and embedded

-          There was a problem nationally with the demand on Safeguarding Services, particularly Social Care, whilst budgets were reducing

-          Rotherham’s situation was further exacerbated by the effective multi-agency work on complex abuse and the impact of Operation Stovewood.  The effective management of demand would continue to be monitored by the Board and Partnership whilst supporting and challenging further improvements in safeguarding

-          Future areas of focus

·      New arrangements for LSCB

·      Neglect

·      Monitoring of effective Early Help Service

·      CSE and the wider issue of exploitation

·      Voice of children and families

·      Continue to develop the existing work across the various boards with responsibilities in relation to safeguarding e.g. Adults Board

·      To increase collective understanding of communities in Rotherham, target services and support in order to ensure that the support was going to the right place and continue to develop the resilience of particular communities within the Borough

-          The Children and Social Work Act 2014, removed the requirement for LSCBs in their current form but there was a requirement still to have a partnership of local agencies working together to ensure safeguarding.  The key difference in the new arrangements as defined in the revised guidance – Working Together 2018 – was that it now became a shared accountability between the local authority, Chief Operating Officer of the RCCG and Chief Officer of the Police

-          A working group had been established to consider the arrangements with development of proposals in due course.  They must be published in June 2019 and in place by September 2019.  There was a strong commitment across partners to build on the existing good work of the partnership and to strengthen that further

Discussion ensued on the presentation with the following issues raised/clarified:-

·           The working group of Chief Officers working on the new Board arrangements had indicated that they would wish to continue with an Independent Chair

·           Whilst not able to answer directly with regard to placements for children with disabilities due to being an operational question, the Board would continue to question whether there were sufficient placements for children with SEND

·           No specific audits/activities had been undertaken by the Board with regard to ensuring the safety of the particular placements.  The Board received SEND updates to ensure  ...  view the full minutes text for item 41.

Sandi Keene, Independent Chair, and Jacqui Scantlebury, Safeguarding Adult Board Manager, presented the Rotherham Safeguarding Adult Board's annual report 2017/18.

Attention was drawn to:-

-          The Board operated under the legal framework of the Care Act 2014 and was now a statutory Board.  When the Care Act was published there were a number of different emphasises in relation to Adult Safeguarding e.g. making safeguarding personal which focussed on working with individuals to achieve the outcomes they wanted from the process rather than necessarily following a very rigid set procedure with defined outcomes

-          The Board was still in development.  Throughout other local authorities and Boards there were different interpretations of thresholds.  The threshold in Adult Services was what would constitute a concern and what would constitute an inquiry

-          When the Care Act was published, Rotherham was starting its Safeguarding Adults work from a very low base in relation to the organisation of the Board and prioritisation of the work.

-          There had been considerable investment in time and commitment from the Council and partner agencies.  The Board sub-structure was heavily dependent, and benefitted from, the individual commitments from members of the Board from other agencies.  There had been very little performance information, but as a result of commitment from the Council that was being vastly improved

-          There was not a great deal of benchmarking information nationally to ascertain where the Board was although work was being undertaken in Yorkshire and the Humber to look at some of the comparative information around thresholds.

-          Work had taken place on the constitution of the Board, developing within South Yorkshire revision and revitalising any procedures that had been using in the past and some individual procedures that the Rotherham Board had created in terms of what it had felt was important 

-          Next year there was to be a joint Adult and Children’s single audit of agencies around Safeguarding

-          Rapid progress within the confines of restricted resources

Headlines of Report

-          The data needed to be understood from the point of view that in Adult Safeguarding there would be a number of people who were referred as a concern/inquiry and deemed to have met a threshold for people who were in residential nursing care as well as people who were in their own homes

-          Also operating within the context of people having a variety of capacity in order to respond to and to be safeguarded and operated within the Mental Capacity Act

-          The latest quarter’s information showed that the Board was dealing with 46% within residential and nursing care, 36% people in their own homes and others from other settings e.g. hospital, community hospital community services and acute hospital

-          The level of concern reporting had decreased in the last year where as the level of inquiry investigation had increased.  This needed to be understood and investigated further, however, it was felt that the decrease of concern was because of effective signposting at the front door when enquiries  ...  view the full minutes text for item 42.

Further to Minute No. 23 of the meeting held on 23^rd September, 2018, Susan Claydon, Head of Service Early Help, and Dean Fenton, Head of Service School Planning, Admissions & Appeals Service, presented the following further information as requested:-

-          Each Local Authority had the responsibility to employ a CME Officer.  Rotherham had an Operational Manager who over saw the work and a Head of Service Strategic Lead.

-          All Early Help Locality Teams adopted attendance and CME related issues as ‘everybody’s business’ so that home visits and enquiries pertaining to a child missing from education could be directed by the CME Officer and associated manager

-          As part of Phase 2 and 3 of the Early Help Strategy, Cabinet had agreed that the CME function move from Early Help into Education and Skills. This was important in further aligning CME processes to wider education processes such as school admissions and elective home education.  The transition expected in January 2019

-          177 children (from 97 families) classified as new CME referrals, a reduction compared to the previous quarter (188 children/97 families)

-          Of the 177, 92 children had been known to have had previous episodes of CME that were closed

-          Evidence suggested that the recurrence was largely due to families being transient and then returning to Rotherham intermittently rather that concerns related to vulnerability and/or safeguarding issues

-          At the end of the reporting period there were 146 active cases that remained open to CME – a 30% reduction from Quarter 1

-          256 resolved cases (significant increase on Quarter 1 – 134 cases)

-          13.7% of children within the CME cohort were eligible for Free School Meals

-          89 new referrals from primary schools and 88 from secondary schools

-          Outcomes data now captured – of the 256 children that were closed to CME in the Quarter, 46 were found and transferred to admissions and tracking.  75 children were closed as they were found and another local authority subsequently accepted responsibility for them.  21 children were found in a school within another local authority and 29 were found have taken up a new place at a school in Rotherham.  22.5% of children were closed as a result of all possible enquiries being exhausted and 12% were verified to have left the UK.  2 children were classified as being educated at home

-          The majority of the children found in another authority were proportionately distributed around South Yorkshire

-          Of the newly identified cases, 82.5% were from the central area of Rotherham at the time of referral

-          The majority of children CME were classified by ethnicity as Roma by their parents (40%) and a further 36% unclassified

-          The Early Help Head of Service had negotiated a new form, introduced in October, in conjunction with the School Admission Service, to encourage parents to complete ethnicity information.  This element remain a voluntary aspect when applying for a school place in Rotherham

-          Work was taking place within  ...  view the full minutes text for item 43.

Tuesday, 15^th January, 2019, commencing at 5.30 p.m.

Resolved:-  That a further meeting be held on Tuesday, 15^th January, 2019, commencing at 5.30 p.m.