Issue - meetings

Di Smith, Interim Independent Chair of Croydon Safeguarding Children Board, was in attendance for this item.  She explained that she was an experienced Director of Children’s Services, and that she had extensive experience of working on children’s services improvement plans with various councils.

Di Smith explained that the Annual Report of the Croydon Safeguarding Children Board predated the recent Ofsted inspection of children’s services, in which the annual report had been found not to be fit for purpose. It had been criticised for its lack of evidence and evaluative rigour.

The covering report produced by Di Smith sought to emphasise current activity and progress in improving children’s services. A key objective of the Croydon Safeguarding Children’s Board will be to develop effective partnership work between the council, the police and health service providers and a steering group bringing together representatives of each of these authorities has been created to take this work forward. In addition, a development day bringing together key stakeholders was recently held, in which all present acknowledged the safeguarding partnership had failed and that measures had to be taken to ensure that children’s safeguarding became more effective. Partners worked on prioritisation, ways of evidencing respectful challenge and of achieving “effective impact” as urged by Ofsted.

Members were advised that improvements would need to follow the latest government guidance on “Working Together to Safeguard Children”. 

Members asked how partners would balance action and statutory reporting responsibilities. They were informed that the priorities set out in the 2016-17 annual report would be maintained and that partners would have to implement the objectives set out in the Ofsted improvement plan. As regards statutory reporting on performance, the Interim Chair acknowledged that this could take up significant amounts of officer time and that this needed to be better balanced with implementation of improvements.

Members asked how they could access agendas and reports of the safeguarding board as they wished to compare new agendas and minutes to documents published before the Ofsted inspection. They had noticed that older agendas had been significantly overloaded and wondered whether this had improved. The Executive Director (People) stated that agendas should usually be published on the web, although this was not always the case.  Members were also reminded that the CSCB was not a council body and had different publishing procedures. The Interim Chair explained that she would have to work with partners to agree to publish their meeting papers on a regular basis. Members expressed the hope that this could be achieved so that they could monitor the work of the Safeguarding Board and satisfy themselves that its challenging role was becoming more robust.

Members asked for health and police partners to attend future scrutiny meetings focusing on the work of the children’s safeguarding board, as their role in this work was critical. They stressed the importance of scrutinising the effectiveness and impact of their partnership work to safeguard children. The Interim Chair stated that she was willing to coordinate the attendance of health and  ...  view the full minutes text for item 44