Agenda item

Sue Wilson, Head of Service Performance and Planning, presented the following powerpoint presentation on the status of the 34 actions identified for completed against each of the 8 Ofsted recommendations for improvement identified during the November 2017 re-inspection:-

 

Current Position

-          8 recommendations made up of 34 actions (11 actions complete)

-          2 recommendations fully complete (subject to approval at the evidence panel) made up of 6 actions

-          6 other recommendations were partially complete (18 actions outstanding) and work on these continued

 

Recommendation 1

Ensure that managers provide challenging, reflective and directive supervision and, with support from Independent Reviewing Officers (IROs) and Conference Chairs, address the quality of practice and planning for all children effectively

-          A revised supervision template was now live in Liquid Logic

-          The IRO Service had been developed and were providing a ‘high support, high challenge’ approach around planning for children

-          The Rotherham Family Approach (Signs of Safety, Restorative Practice and Social Pedagogy) continued to be rolled out as part of mandatory training for workers across the whole of the Children’s workforce

-          Work was continuing to:-

Implement phase 2 of the Right Child Right Care programme of work (March 2020)

Further implement and embed the Rotherham Family Approach including across the broader partnership (April 2020)

 

Recommendation 2

Ensure that all assessments are: meaningful to children and their families; reflect the changing needs of children and effectively evaluate cumulative risks and their impact

-          Case mapping exercises take place with staff to improving the quality of assessments

-          The Social Care and Early Help Quality Assurance Framework looks at practice through a thematic lens to better recognise the understanding of cumulative risk of harm and to test out the quality of Assessments and Plans (particularly in relation to looked after children)

-          Work is continuing to:-

Fully implement Liquid Logic to enable case recording to reflect the Rotherham Family Approach particularly in relation to the format of the recording of assessments

 

Recommendation 3

Ensure that all plans: are clear about how children’s and young people’s holistic needs are to be met; have clear timescales; can be understood by families and are always well informed by risk assessment

-          Case mapping exercises take place with staff in relation to improving the quality safety plans

-          The Social Care and Early Help Quality Assurance Framework looks at practice through a thematic lens to better recognise the understanding of cumulative risk of harm and to test out the quality of Assessments and Plans (particularly in relation to looked after children)

-          Work is continuing to:-

Fully implement Liquid Logic to enable case recording to reflect the Rotherham Family Approach particularly in relation to the format of the recording of plans and risk

 

Recommendation 4

Ensure that early permanence planning is timely and considers the full range of placement options for all children when they are unable to return to their birth families

-          The increased focus of the IROs is making a difference in relation to permanence planning

-          Right Child Right Care (RCRC) is having a significant impact on permanence planning with more children being discharged from care since February 2018, as a result of the wider improvement in practice

-          Work is continuing to:

Focus on foster care recruitment (based on the feedback from the recent Peer View and our own self-assessment)

Revise the Marketing and Placement Sufficiency Strategies in order to boost in-house foster carer recruitment by a net gain of 15 foster placements each year for the next 3 years

 

Recommendation 5

Improve the timeliness of the early help response to children particularly those who have a disability

-          The standard response time for children with disabilities is now managed as part of the fortnightly performance meetings; regular meetings take place between the Early Help Disability Manager and an experienced Early Help and Family Engagement Service Manager

-          Signs of Safety training has been rolled out in the team and is being embedded

-          Performance data shows that timeliness has improved with an upward trend predicted to continue

-          This is now complete

 

Recommendation 6

Work with schools to reduce the number of fixed-term exclusions and persistent absentees from education among children looked after

-          The attendance and exclusions of looked after children are discussed at Personal Education Plan (PEP) meetings

-          Creative mentoring and attachment friendly schools are starting to show impact

-          The Virtual School has seen a reduction in exclusions and attendance has improved from September 2017 to September 2018

-          Work is continuing to:

Implement the creative mentoring scheme (January 2019)

Complete Phase 2 of the attachment friendly schools (September 2020)

 

Recommendation 7

Ensure that children benefit from a timely good quality Lifestory work and clearly written later life letters to enable children to understand their experiences, life history and reason for separation from their birth families

-          Life Story Work (LSW) continues to be a priority and a new model has been implemented with additional support and training being provided by the Therapeutic

-          Information about therapeutic stories and telling about difficult experiences or traumas has been shared with staff.  The Advanced Practitioners and the Practice Consultants are leading on LSW within each team

-          Court & Permanency Team have recently recruited a worker whose focus was specifically on LSW and with her lead and the support from the TT the quality of LSW has improved

-          Work was continuing to:

Improve the quality of later life letters (January 2019)

Utilise Liquid Logic better to track the presence of lifestory and later life letters (February 2019)

 

Recommendation 8

Ensure that birth parents of children who are adopted fully understand what support is available and are helped to access this

-          Additional support has been put in place for birth parents whose children have been adopted

-          RMBC continues to commission this support PAC UK and the Adoption Team website has now been updated to include PAC UK and link to this service

-          This is now complete

 

Liquid Logic

-          Signs of Safety (SOS) within Liquid Logic is having an impact upon the development of key documents within the system impacting on completion of some actions

-          In order to minimise this potential barrier we have commenced work around developing key documents to be used in the existing Liquid Logic pathway

-          This should then reflect our improving practice in the case record more effectively

 

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

 

·           As part of the independent health check (6th-8^th February 2019) commissioners would come in and test out the Ofsted recommendations.  There was a series of meetings organised with case tracking taking place

 

·           Lincolnshire Council was selecting 10 cases they would audit and look for evidence in current practice that they could now see a difference.  The same as an Ofsted inspection, the Service ran “Annex A” - 11 lists of every child that the Service had been working with over the last 6 months.  That document had been submitted together with a document called “chat”, a single page document listing the key concerns and risks about some of the cases.  Lincolnshire would use it to select the 10 cases

 

·           There was confidence that the Services rated by Ofsted in January 2018 as either being Good or Outstanding, were still of the same calibre.   Rotherham was able, on an ongoing basis, to assess the effectiveness of its services.  It was an ongoing effort which required time, energy and investment to ascertain an accurate view of how it was performing.  A raft of information was submitted to the monthly multi-agency Performance Board where Assistant Directors and Heads of Services attended and presented narrative reports supported by data and performance information.  There was also a very robust monthly schedule of case file audits which were evaluated and moderated, put together in an audit report and sent to managers, the learning from which was then fed into a training and development programme

 

·           Practice learning days were also held where managers across the Service went out to observe practice with an action plan compiled following the visit.  The Strategic Director and Deputy Leader would then visit and assess whether the services had performed against their action plan

 

·           The new inspection arrangements included an Annual Conversation.  Prior to the meeting, the Service had to develop and submit 2 weeks in advance, a self-evaluation assessment that covered all the requirements of the Ofsted inspection regime.  Ofsted then interrogated representatives on the self-assessment.  Following the Annual Conversation last year, a positive letter had been received 

 

·           There were a number of products that different local authorities used for their case management recording of their children’s Social Care work and for some Early Help work; Rotherham used Liquid Logic for both.  However, when Rotherham implemented Liquid Logic Signs of Safety was not being used and nor was the Rotherham Family Approach developed.  As with any product, Liquid Logic had an “off the peg” product with the ability for each local authority to develop its own local nuances and add to the processes that existed.  All Social Workers and managers had been trained around Restorative Practice and Signs of Safety.  Liquid Logic had now developed a licensed Signs of Safety product which would sit alongside the existing products.  Work was now required to ascertain if it was the right product for the Service or develop/alter the existing version that took into account Restorative Practice and Social Pedagogy.  The Social Workers who were most confident in the use of the new methodologies were finding ways to record within current forms but some of the current development structure did not include making it intuitive.  Some of the forms were not the most helpful to the Social Workers but if it could be improved it would help embed Signs of Safety

 

·           Representatives of Liquid Logic would be visiting Rotherham soon to present demonstration work to establish whether it was best to improve the system or if there was an alternative way

 

·           Of the 8 recommendations/actions that not yet been completed it was felt that the biggest challenges were:-

 

No. 6 (work with schools to reduce the number of fixed-term exclusions and persistent absentees from education among children looked after) was challenging because it relied upon a complicated partnership response.  Fixed term exclusions was a national issue; the providers all wanted to help the Authority but it did rely on very effective partnership arrangements and something that was a real challenge in the country at the moment

 

Both No. 2 (ensure that all assessments are: meaningful to children and their families; reflect the changing needs of children and effectively evaluate cumulative risks and their impact) and No. 3 (ensure that all plans: are clear about how children’s and young people’s holistic needs are to be met; have clear timescales; can be understood by families; and are always well informed by risk assessment) which started with “ensure that all ….” were incredibly challenging for any Assistant Director or Strategic Director to say that every single assessment/plan was developed and achieved what was set out.  However, The Service needed to be in a position where it could provide assurance that it was achieving the aim in more cases than it was not

 

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

 

(2)  That the Ofsted outcome letter from the Annual Conversation be forwarded to the Select Commission for information.

 

(3)  That the outcome of the Peer Review for Looked After Children be submitted to this Select Commission as well as Corporate Parenting Panel.