Agenda item

The Chair introduced Christine Cassell, Independent Chair of the Local Safeguarding Children Board (LSCB) and Jason Harwin, South Yorkshire Police (Vice-Chair).

Councillor Jepson expressed his concern regarding the format of the report.  This was endorsed by other Members of the Commission.

Christine apologised for the formatting of the report which had been due to an IT issue.  She undertook to provide Members with a correct version of the document and took on board the comments with regard to the general layout of the report.

The report had been produced by the previous Independent Chair, Steve Ashley, and was the annual report for 2014/15.  It was very late in being submitted to the Select Commission but future reports would be submitted in a more timely fashion.

Christine highlighted the following:- 

Purpose and function of the Board

-         To co-ordinate what was done by each person or body represented on the Board for the purposes of Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children in the area

-         To ensure the effectiveness of what was done by each such person or body for those purposes

-         It was neither a delivering or commissioning Board; other Boards carried out those functions

2015/16 Report will comment on areas of improvement that were identified as priorities for the coming year i.e.

-         Effectiveness and Early Help

-         The effectiveness of the response to neglect and domestic abuse

-         Experience of Looked After Children

-         Effectiveness of multi-agency response to CSE

-         How the LSCB influences improvement across agencies and effectively challenges performance

-         Co-ordination and strategic commissioning activity

-         Hearing and acting upon the experience of others, particularly children and young people

-         Ensuring all the issues informed learning and development across the agencies

Priorities the Board would be working on included:- 

-         Strengthening the understanding of performance

-         Quality of safeguarding services

-         Engaging with young people

-         Ensuring that  was alignment with the priorities being identified and commissioning decisions

-         Communicating more effectively the work that the Board undertakes

Discussion ensued on the report with the following issues highlighted/clarified:-

·         The LSCB and the Children’s Improvement Board had been working to improve the quality of data and performance information available. This would enable better challenge and scrutiny of services provided by agencies across the board..  Forthcoming annual reports would contain much improved information

·         Within the document the section outlining the LSCB Statutory Framework required more explanation as to the role and function of the Board in an easy to read format

·         There has been a lot of work done around Looked after Children (LAC) but there was still improvements to be made.  The Improvement Board examined individual plans with particular focus on LAC to ensure that outcomes were no worse..  In line with the rest of the country,  LAC outcomes were still poor although work was taking place to make improvements.

·         Over the last 18 months, the LSCB has had a greater emphasis on scrutinising how services take account of the voice of the child. had.  The data has been captured and fed back to services. Future reports will detail how this information is being used to change services.

·         Both individual and joint services have to have plans that contained the voice of the child.  This was part of the inspection framework of OFSTED; HMIC and also joint inspections.  It was part of the Safeguarding Board’s responsibility to make sure that services were taking account of the voice of the child and scrutinise what was done with the feedback received

·         Need for clear and succinct information on the work of the Board and its six sub-groups

·         Early Help was still very much work in progress so the position with Rotherham’s Early Help offer was still under developed but significant strides had been made in the last six months.  From the aspect of Social Care, it was now much easier for Social Workers to step down cases into Early Help.  This prevented escalation into Social Care, with families  who still required help being provided with  ongoing support and help in the community at the lower end of the threshold.  It was better developed in some of the localities than in others but there was an enormous amount of work taking place to ensure a consistent response

·         The LSCB would be asking questions about the effectiveness of Early Help around how Early Help Services knew they were making a difference to children and families; what evidence they had of the quality of support that was given; were children and families better off as a result of that as well as the impact it was having on the number of cases that went through to Children’s Social Care; and was it preventing a need for more intensive support to families.

·         There had been 40 registered Family Common Assessment Frameworks from primary schools

·         The funding for the Board had been increased last year.  Chief Officers had agreed to additional funding and there was currently a national review ongoing which would report at the end of March, 2016, which may make some comments about the resourcing of Boards many of which were time in kind.   The LSCB would reflect on its developments in context of that plan

·         All the initial actions in terms of the development of the Board had been met but many were now out of date.  The Board was in the process of revising its business plan both in the context of the improvement actions that it had for the Improvement Board and for its own Board planning processes.  The speed of progress for the Board needed to accelerate and the Board had a plan to ensure it could be more rigorous in the work it was undertaking;

·         One of the issues for the Board was that individual services had their own training/learning/development plans.  From the Board’s perspective, it wanted to develop multi-agency training which added value particular in areas where it added value to safeguarding children and young people

·         The Board had just launched an audit process with all schools across the Borough to which it had had a good response.  Through that process the Board would able to ascertain that improvements happened in Safeguarding practice

·         A standardised approach to training was a challenge as services were working to different authorised practices.  The Board was trying, where it could, to achieve commonality around the Common Assessment Framework and the Strengthening Families approach, and that was what was being signed up to

·         With resources, including money, decreasing there was opportunity for added value from multi-agency training.  There were real opportunities for joint learning and development across Adults and Children’s Safeguarding maximising the time with staff and externally with partners to get the best benefit for the public of Rotherham

The Chair thanked Christine and Jason for their attendance.

Resolved:-  (1)  That the report be noted.

(2)  That David McWilliams be invited to a future meeting to discuss the Early Help provision.