Witnesses:
Mary Lewis, Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and
Families
Jacquie Burke,
Director – Family Resilience and Safeguarding
Tina Benjamin, Director – Corporate Parenting
Mark Mapstone, Assistant Director – Performance,
Intelligence and System
Key
points raised during the discussion:
-
The Chairman thanked officers, social workers, the
management team and Cabinet Members for their hard work during the
COVID-19 pandemic and praised them for continuing to launch the
initiatives within the Family Resilience improvement
programme.
-
The
Director – Family Resilience and Safeguarding introduced the
report and provided the Select Committee with a summary of the
improvement work that was taking place in Surrey’s
children’s services and the impact that COVID-19 was having
on the improvement programme and the delivery of frontline
services. Overall, the service performance data showed that the
Service was coping well during the pandemic, responding effectively
to increased demand, ensuring that children and families were
provided with the support they needed during that period, and
continuing to deliver its improvement programme. The area of
greatest concern was children with disabilities and the Service was
endeavouring to continue progressing in this area to fulfil its aim
of providing a consistently high-quality service for all
children.
-
The Vice-Chairman asked whether Children’s
Services were adequately resourced to meet
the increased demand and whether there were any risks of which the
Select Committee should be aware. The Director – Family
Resilience and Safeguarding stated that sophisticated modelling of
capacity examined cases coming through the children’s
services front door and the subsequent trickle down into the rest
of the system and informed the Service how best to meet that
demand. The Director emphasised that it was not desirable to
continue to provide the current level of statutory support for
families because issues were best resolved when identified and
addressed early. The Helping Families Early Strategy aimed to bring
families out of statutory services in a supported manner to help
them capitalise on changes made. Resourcing and staffing continued
to be one of the Service’s greatest challenges and was the
motivation behind a bespoke recruitment workstream. The results of
the new recruitment and retention package would hopefully be seen
in January/February 2021. The Cabinet Member stated that her
greatest concern was the pressure that increased caseloads placed
on staff. Members were actively engaging with Surrey Members of
Parliament to lobby the Government to take action to make social
work a more attractive career option.
-
The Vice-Chairman noted the
increased caseloads to which social work staff were subject
and asked what wellbeing support was available to
staff and how this was provided and funded. The Director - Family
Resilience and Safeguarding informed the Select Committee that
there was a significant wellbeing offer which was accompanied by
mindfulness training and coaching, team trips to Surrey Outdoor
Learning, corporate coaching teams, and bereavement and domestic
abuse support. Service leaders were vocal about staff wellbeing and
internal communications emphasised the support available and the
importance of staff taking time for themselves away from
work.
-
A Member stated that there was a high number of
agency workers in Surrey and asked whether neighbouring counties
experienced the same ongoing issue with the recruitment of social
workers. The Director – Family Resilience and Safeguarding
assured the Select Committee that the recruitment of social workers
was a top priority for the Service. Benchmarking with other Local
Authorities showed that there was a discernible correlation between
turnover and agency rates and inadequate authorities and achieving
a more stable staff group was a big focus of the Service’s
transformation programme. The Service was grateful to Members for
approving an enhanced salary offer for the recruitment and
retention of social workers. There was a programme within the
transformation programme that looked at workforce and employer
experiences, staff focus groups, career pathways etc. The Service
had published its refreshed recruitment offer, which could be found
on the council’s website.
-
A Member asked whether the
appointment of 40 newly qualified social workers (NQSWs) was
sufficient to satisfy the Service’s social work requirement.
The Director – Family Resilience and Safeguarding stated that
in their first year of practice, NQSWs were permitted to work with
significantly less children than experienced social workers thus
teams needed to have a balance between the former and the latter.
Due to COVID-19, it was also taking longer to bring NQSWs up to
speed and thus the Service was measured in its employment of 40, 10
for each Quadrant. The Director stated that the real issue was the
duration for which social workers remained in frontline practice
and the ways in which the Service could create conditions that
encouraged social workers to stay in post for longer than the
average 5-7-years. The Executive Director emphasised that it was
vital that the council offered excellent working environments and
good career progression so that social workers were inspired to
enjoy longer careers.
-
A Member noted that Essex County Council (ECC) and
Surrey County Council (SCC) were improvement partners and asked
whether the two Local Authorities used the same practice models for
their children’s services. The Director – Family
Resilience and Safeguarding explained that the Department for
Education gave SCC the opportunity to work with ECC as a partner in
practice following the passing of Dave Hill, to support the service
during the recruitment period for the new Executive Director of
Children’s Services. The Director stated that this had been
an effective relationship and it was very helpful to see
ECC’s performance-management practice. A discussion needed to
take place about what the relationship between the two Local
Authorities would look like going forward.
-
A Member queried why re-referrals to children’s social care were increasing and
asked whether the upward trend indicated anything regarding the
quality of frontline practice. The Director – Family
Resilience and Safeguarding stated that often those families
supported by the service tended to be the least resilient thus some
level of re-referral was always expected. During the COVID-19
pandemic, families were unable to access their own support networks
of families and friends, thus there were some pandemic-related
referrals. The Service was increasing the use of family network
meetings and the assessment service to ensure social workers were
inviting people into the family network to help support the
family.
-
A Member noted that much of the inadequate practice
pertained to older children and adolescents (youth offending,
missing young people, young people at risk of being referred to
children’s social care) and asked whether this cohort was a
specific priority area for improvement. The Director – Family
Resilience and Safeguarding confirmed that work with adolescents
was a priority area for the Service and the Surrey Safeguarding
Children Partnership and was supported by a targeted inhouse youth
support team and a safeguarding adolescents team. The Surrey Youth
Offending Service was rated inadequate in 2019 and thenceforth a
significant amount of work was undertaken to improve the Service,
culminating in increased confidence in the skills of the
practitioners and the outcomes for adolescents. The Service was
committed to improving the outcomes for adolescents and the Youth
Justice Board had expressed a high degree of confidence that the
Service was making the necessary improvements.
-
The Chairman noted that the Youth Offending Service review highlighted
that 43% of children were receiving an inadequate service
and suggested that the Directorate report on the improvement of the
Youth Offending Service to the Select Committee at its July 2021
meeting. The Director – Family Resilience and Safeguarding
stated the report found an overall positive trajectory of
improvements made since the Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of
Prisons inspection in 2019, however, the rate of improvements was
variable. The Director informed Members that some of the children
who were audited were from the cohort of children who were
previously audited as part of the inadequate inspection. In terms
of quality assurance, the (Targeted Youth Support service, where
the majority of the youth offending work happens, had not been
included in the audit cycle. They were now included and all of
their performance data was on Tableau. The Director agreed that the
Directorate should report the improvements made in the Youth
Offending Service to the Select Committee.
-
A Member asked whether
officers expected frontline social work practice to be of
satisfactory standard by the time Ofsted next visited or inspected
the council’s children’s services. The Director –
Family Resilience and Safeguarding stated that the last Ofsted
inspection (2018) showed that staff in the system did not know what
good practice looked like, because the majority of audits were
moderated down. There was now a tolerance rate of 10% moderation.
In November 2020, moderation was just under 10%, showing that the
managers had an improved understanding of what good practice looked
like. There was significant improvement in the system and
practitioners were working hard to meet their commitment of
providing families with timely responses. Now, the Service was
targeting its efforts on pockets of inadequacy. The monthly case
audit for November highlighted 12 ‘inadequate’ cases
out of 70. Of those 12, 8 were in the children with disabilities
service. Recognising this, the Service had made a commitment to
reviewing 402 cases of children with disabilities; since August
2020, the Service had reviewed 227. The Service was working with
leaders and had undertaken a rigorous self-assessment, looking back
to 2018 and at what was needed to get to ‘good’,
resulting in a detailed 12-month plan. The
Cabinet Member added that the former Commissioner for
Surrey’s Children’s Services had declared that the
Service had made significant and sustainable progress at the level
of required improvement. The audits showed the vast majority of
practice was deemed to be ‘good’ or ‘requires
improvement’ (7% of cases audited in September 2020 were
‘inadequate’).
-
The Director – Corporate Parenting informed
Members that Ofsted paused its inspection regime in March 2020.
Feedback from the council’s four monitoring visits that took
place between 2018 and January 2020 was positive about the work
being done and reassured the Service that improvements were being
made. The Director – Family Resilience and Safeguarding
informed the Select Committee that Ofsted considered the
Service’s Quality Assurance Team and performance monitoring
to be exemplary.
-
The Chairman referred to areas needing improvement
in front line practice and asked how the Service was improving
communication. The Director – Family Resilience and
Safeguarding agreed that effective communication was critical to
achieving very good practice and the importance of good
relationships and communications was emphasised within the
improvement work planned for the following six months.
-
A Member noted that their local youth centre had
been used to deliver alternate provision during the national
lockdown of November 2020 and asked why some education, training
and childcare was permitted in youth centre buildings during the
national lockdown. The Director – Family Resilience and
Safeguarding stated that the normal universal youth service was not
able to run during the lockdown period hence the buildings were
offered to other frontline services. The Service worked with the
Local Resilience Forum (LRF) to establish priority services and
conversations needed to take place to discuss how these centres
were to be used going forward. The Director agreed to provide a
written response to Members regarding the delivery of additional learning provision from youth centres
and related costs.
Recommendations:
- That the Children, Families, Lifelong Learning and Culture
Directorate provide a further update on the Children’s
Improvement Programme to the Children, Families, Lifelong Learning
and Culture Select Committee in July 2021; and that update include
the findings of any Ofsted monitoring and future thematic audits,
with audit findings broken down by quadrant.
- That the Children, Families, Lifelong Learning and Culture
Directorate report on the Youth Offending Service to the Children,
Families, Lifelong Learning and Culture Select Committee in July
2021.
Actions:
i.
The Director – Family Resilience and
Safeguarding to provide the Select Committee with a written
response detailing the use of youth centres during the national
lockdown in November 2020 and the associated costs.