The Committee received a report that provided an update on progress in delivering improvements to Children’s Services in response to the report published by Ofsted in April 2017 which rated LBTH services ‘inadequate’.   The Council’s improvement plan aims to achieve a standard of ‘good’ by April 2019, which is the minimum our children and families deserve.   

The body of the report it was noted included a commentary on progress in the four themes of our improvement plan, which was submitted to the Department for Education and Ofsted in July 2017.  Whilst some progress has been made in all four themes, this first quarterly report identifies that there remain significant challenges in moving the service towards a ‘good’ standard.

The questions and comments from Members on the report may be summarised as follows:

The Committee:

Noted that:

·         Progress will be monitored by Ofsted through quarterly monitoring visits.  The first of these visits took place on 30-31 August, 2017.  In their informal feedback, Ofsted noted the considerable progress that had been made in improving the management of contacts, referrals and assessments in our Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) and Assessment and Intervention service, which was the focus of their visit.  In their next visit, to take place in December, 2017 they will focus on the Family Support and Protection service where further progress needs to be made.  As this was the first monitoring visit they recognised that it is early in the improvement journey and whilst good progress has been made, there is still a lot of work to do to ensure that improvement is fully embedded and the Service meets a consistently good standard;  

·         Whilst Ofsted feel LBTH are ambitious with the initial targets the longer term aim is for an outstanding service;

·         LBTH is working to ensure that the Service needs to provide early help to families and there needs to be robust measurers in place;

·         After a judgement as received by LBTH from Ofsted the number of referrals a Service can anticipate will increase; 

·         The 3 Divisional Directors will have over sight to ensure the families have the correct offer;

·         The improvement in social work training;

·         Both Staff and Managers are getting a clear message the focus of the changes needs to be what children need in LBTH not just about performance indicators;

·         Supervision audits give social workers the support that they need and the recruitment is in hand to establish a stable work force and to lower of individual caseloads e.g. the volume of caseloads coming through the front door has surged after the Ofsted judgement and that this increase is working its way through the system;

·         Concerning the recruitment and retention strategy LBTH is working to provide incentives for staff to remain with the Council for a number of year’s e.g. Many LBTH staff have a real passion to meet the needs of those families that they are supporting; Need to use the passion of LBTH staff to illustrate why it is the best place to work and to convince staff to stay on from being on either agency/short term contracts;

·         Noted we do now have a stable agency cohort and have addressed poor performance so that the Service is the one needed to support LBTH children in their journey;

·         Noted in October there will be a Children’s Spotlight session to allow there to be a really focused debate;

·         Agreed that LBTH need to ensure that families have the confidence in staff to come forward to ask for their help and that the necessary structures are in place to address trafficking and adoption; and

·         The Portfolio Lead Member want the Scrutiny Lead to identify areas of concern for discussion at the Spotlight Session.