Councillors and committees

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URGENT CARE IN SURREY HEARTLANDS

Meeting: 28/07/2020 - Children, Families, Lifelong Learning and Culture Select Committee (Item 14)

14 CHILDREN'S IMPROVEMENT UPDATE pdf icon PDF 254 KB

Purpose of the Report:

 

To provide an update on the improvement of Surrey’s children’s services and the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the improvement programme. This report provides further information on the services and activity outlined in the last report to the Select Committee on 21 January 2020.

Additional documents:

Minutes:

Witnesses:

Mary Lewis, Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Families

 

Jacquie Burke, Director – Family Resilience and Safeguarding

 

Key points raised during the discussion:

 

1.    The Director informed Members that the Service’s annual conversation with Ofsted had taken place since the previous meeting of the Select Committee. Ofsted had been assured by the council’s progress during the COVID-19 pandemic and the approach taken in children’s social care to meet the needs of the county’s vulnerable children. Members heard that assurance visits and targeted visits would resume in September 2020, albeit they were likely to be conducted virtually. Full ILACS (inspection of local authority children’s services) visits would not be resumed until March 2021.

 

2.    A Member asked whether there had been an increase in missing children cases during the COVID-19 pandemic and what the council did to locate missing children. The Director informed the Committee that there had been a reduction in the number of these cases during the pandemic. There were tight procedures in place for locating a missing child and for return to home interviews. The timeliness of the latter had greatly improved over the previous 12 months. The Service works with the Police – who were responsible for searching missing children – the missing child’s family and all agencies known to the child to locate them. Where necessary, with Police agreement, the council publicised missing children.

 

3.    The Chairman agreed to circulate the figures relating to missing children from the Surrey Children's Services Improvement Board Performance Compendium to the Committee. The Cabinet Member notified Members that missing looked-after children was a standing item at every Corporate Parenting Board meeting; adding that a missing incident for a looked-after child could be an event as minor as returning late from a social activity, and this should be considered when examining data relating to missing children.

 

4.    A Member referred to compliance rates for audit requests, questioning how instances of non-compliance were monitored and followed up on. The Director responded that, whilst compliance had improved over time and the Service was committed to achieving full compliance, there would always be occasions where people were unable to complete audits and, occasionally, furlough will be granted in this respect. Earlier in the year, the challenge to recruit permanent social workers meant existing staff carrying out audits had to undertake additional operational tasks. There had been a significant, positive response at team-practitioner level to providing management oversight for 6,000 open files at the outbreak of COVID-19 in England. A dip sample of 10% of those case notes by the quality assurance team returned an agreement rate of 91% on risk management.

 

5.    A Member asked how the Service had been providing training on the analysis of motivational interviewing and the identification of what good supervision looks like. The Director replied that a number of catch-up training sessions had been arranged for practitioners who had already undertaken two-days of training on the technique and that a commitment had been made to ensuring that  ...  view the full minutes text for item 14