The Committee are asked to note and comment on the contents of the attached report that is to be considered by the Cabinet at its meeting to be held on Tuesday 20^th March, 2018.

The (Time allocated – 50 minutes)

The Committee received an update on progress in delivering improvements to Children’s Services in response to the report by Ofsted in 2017 which had rated the Council’s services ‘inadequate’.   The Council’s improvement plan it was noted aims to achieve a standard of at least ‘good’ by April 2019, which is the minimum that the Borough’s children and families expect. 

The report indicated that the Council has now had two monitoring visits from Ofsted. In their letter reporting findings from the most recent of these visits in December 2017, Ofsted noted that improvements have been made and sustained within Children’s Services and that leaders and managers now showed increased in-depth knowledge of strengths and areas of weakness.  In particular, the way the Council assesses referrals of children and families for social care support had been identified as being timely and thresholds for help were appropriately applied, meaning that no children in the cases they sampled were at risk of immediate harm.  The letter also pointed to some areas needing further improvement and we are continuing our focus on these areas through our improvement plan. 

The body of this report also included commentary on progress in the four themes of the Council’s improvement plan at the end of the third quarter of the improvement programme.

In addition, it was noted that whilst the Council are making progress in embedding the changes that have been made in the first 9 months of the improvement programme, giving Tower Hamlets a firm foundation for improvement, there does remain significant challenges to ensuring that the service improves to meet a ‘good’ inspection standard and sustains this improvement.  Finally, the Committee were informed that the focus in the next stage will be to build on the progress made so that further improvement is achieved and sustained. The questions arising from the discussions on this agenda may be summarised as follows:

The Committee:

·         Noted that the focus of tonight’s meeting would be to hear from two of the Council’s service improvement partners (i) Debbie Barnes. Executive Director, Children's Services - Lincolnshire County Council and (ii) Sir Alan Wood - Chair, Children's Improvement Board) and to challenge them on the journey that they have been on with Tower Hamlets;

·         Was reminded that tonight as with previous discussions at Scrutiny on the Children's Services Improvement Programme would aim to maintain the transparency with the public through the process;

·         Noted with interest that both the DfE and Ofsted have been very positive on the progress although there is still a long way to go; 

·         Noted need for Tower Hamlets to have a cadre of highly qualified and skilled staff to take this forward and that is an issue that will need to be the focus of regular scrutiny going forward;

·         Noted that as part of embedding of Quality Assurance at all levels, Ofsted have recommended that the Council take forward a “Practice Week”, where senior leaders spend time with frontline social workers reviewing cases and shadowing their work with children and  ...  view the full minutes text for item 2