Agenda item

-           Strategic Director of Children and Young People’s Services to report.

The Leader introduced a report by the Strategic Director of Children and Young People’s Services, which detailed how in late April the Government announced the availability of £105m Transformation Challenge Award grant and a further £200m capital receipts flexibility.

The purpose of this report was to provide a briefing to Cabinet on the Transformation Challenge Award and to provide detail around the bid proposal for Rotherham.

Each Local Authority was limited to one project submission, which had to be made by 1st July, 2014.

It was proposed that a bid from Rotherham be submitted to fund the development of a Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) underpinned by the development of a Single View of a Child Information Dashboard.

The MASH would help to bring about positive outcomes for children and young people, their families and carers through a multi-agency approach to referral, decision making, assessment and the provision of services at the right time, in the right place and by the right person.

It would focus on safeguarding children and dealing with domestic abuse. The co-location would enable agencies working with children, young people, their families and carers to work collaboratively to offer a co-ordinated response to families. This would be carried out by agencies collectively assessing need and identifying services from the point of contact, through referral and decision making to the provision of services to safeguard children and support their families. The objective was to provide an improved ‘journey’ for the child or parent/carer with a greater emphasis on early intervention.

To underpin this work a “single view of a child” integrated data dashboard was proposed.  The dashboard would provide an holistic view of performance across partners, underpinned by a single view of the child/family and provide the following benefits:-

·                Improve the accuracy of information shared.

·                Enable partners to share information more effectively and timely.

·                Provide one holistic view of the child created by the information held by partner agencies.

·                Provide the most up to date information about the child and family. 

·                Enable visible identification of the child’s and families journey and where they are in the process.

·                Provide a tool for the collation of partner data and the ability to monitor and manage performance against this data.

As part of the contract for the social care system with Northgate an infrastructure was purchased in 2013 which would be the basis for further developments around a single view of a child.

It was envisaged, however, that this would be rolled out wider to include the Foundation Years’ Service and to support the Families for Change work (Troubled Families), it would be hoped that the IT development could then be shared (sold on) to other Local Authorities for use in their multi-agency teams.

The critical criteria to be met for the scheme related to:-

·                Savings must exceed the amount of grant/capital receipt flexibility sought.

·                The bid must have a positive impact on service users.

·                As a minimum, bids must be in partnership with at least one other partner.  This could be another local authority, public authority, the Voluntary and Community Sector or a private sector partner.

·                For capital flexibility only. That the value of the asset sale was genuinely additional to those disposals that would have happened anyway.

Cabinet Members noted this initiative would deliver cash releasing efficiencies in the work with young people.  The funding bid submitted by the Council would require a responsible partner to also sign up and this multi-agency approach, led by the Council, would deliver, in cost avoidance terms, significant benefits going forward.

Resolved:-  That the principle of Rotherham submitting a Transformation Challenge Award bid be signed up to and for this to be developed further for submission on the 1st July, 2014.