Agenda item

The Children in Care Performance Scorecard of May 2019 is attached.

The Head of Corporate Parenting spoke of the performance scorecard and shared with the Panel that since the last meeting there had been improvements in key areas.

Children Services was aiming to set higher aspirations for the Looked After Children, in particularly around the foster carers annual reviews and child visits. The area of difficulty fell within the personal education plans (PEPs) and the initial health assessments.

The Panel heard that staff had made progress in addressing concerns within the service for significant improvement. For example, the initial health assessment was to be channelled through the Health and Wellbeing StrategyBboard, and although there was more work to be completed, to have improvement within the social work practice was the target.

Officers shared that one area of improvement had been reviewing of health assessments, which was the initial stage when a child comes into contact with Children’s Services. This was a key priority for the service to achieve a better outcome. It was also important that the service assessed issues very early to avoid drift and delay. The improvement in this area was due to the growing number of staff in the service. Officers noted that improvements being achieved had not reflected in the report presented, as there had not been an update since May.

The Panel welcomed the changes, which had been ongoing. There waspleasure taken in the improvements within the service specifically with the PEPs and health assessments. Credit was awarded to the Virtual School Service which had worked hard  to achieve a better service performance. Conversely, the Panel raised concerns about indicators that needed improvement.

Further discussion from the Panel highlighted the statutory obligation for pathway plans that was not being met and that more work was to be done to reach targets as 18% of care leavers were eligible for a pathway plan. Pathway plans for children were required at the age of 16 years and 3 months, which had been amended from previous months. Pathway plans were not the same as care plans.

Officers informed the Panel that the service had been working hard on improving figures and had seen an improvement with figures over 85%, which had been their target.

In response to questions from Members of the Panel in relation to the standard and quality of PEPs, officers informed that they had undertaken a social worker survey, and the feedback received highlighted that their relationship with the Education team had strengthened and improved immensely. This was demonstrated by the the service working better together in completing PEPs. This had proven very helpful for the service, and had helped support the services’ processed and their journey of improvement.

In response to questions from Members of the Panel concerning the quality assurance of pathway plans, officers highlighted that the process had several layers. These included the social worker co-producing the plan with their young person before a team manager would review it. Pathway plans were formally reviewed at the young person’s six-monthly review and each update or change in a child’s life was also reviewed. Officers shared that the service was introducing an audit programme, which would also be another layer of quality assurance. The auditing programme would see two types of auditing, one from an external independent reviewer and another from an internal audit within the service. This was to get a greater understanding of how things could improve.

Comments from the Co-optee Members of the Panel shared that from their experience, young people did not understand the importance of a pathway plan as it was not very clear, and was seen as more of a “tick box exercise”. Consequently, more exposure was encouraged around pathway plans for young people to understand why and what the information was for them and how it would  relate to their future. Life stories would also help the young person to see what their life would look like. Officers informed that the service was developing a care leaver’s forum, which was proposed to commence in September. This would be used to developed a  a new design for the Croydon pathway plan making it a user friendly and meaningful document.

The Panel RESOLVED to note the Children’s Performance Dashboard.