Decision details

Councillor Lucy Smith, Cabinet Member for Children and Young People, presented the report which ought approval to engage with the Centre for Family safeguarding in Hertfordshire and to collaborate with the local partnership, by establishing a local board to explore the opportunity and consider the feasibility of implementing the Hertfordshire Family Safeguarding model of Practice within Bury’s safeguarding social work teams. It was noted that this approach drew strength from partnership working, which would increase relationships between bodies across the borough and address a point made in the Ofsted inspection.

Decision:

Cabinet:

1.    Approved Children's Services engaging Hertfordshire as Sector Led Improvement Partners, and to establish a partnership group with representation of local partners and the Centre for Family Safeguarding to work collaboratively to consider the feasibility of implementing a plan to deliver the Family Safeguarding model;

2.    Agreed in principle the additional investment of £1.081m and £0.992m in the event that the board recommends moving to implementation; and

3.    Agreed in principle to progressing with the recruitment of staff.

Reasons for the decision:

Within Children’s social care there is a requirement imposed upon us by the DfE to improve the quality of practice to children in need of help and protection, this is a key priority of our improvement plan and necessary to ensure that children are safeguarded and that support to families is effective, these are the pre-requisites of achieving improved outcomes for the children of Bury who are at risk of harm or are suffering harm.

Family Safeguarding has been identified within the independent review of Children’s services 2022 as best practice. The model has been independently evaluated and has also been positively evaluated by the DfE’s Innovation unit, who are now supporting the scale and spread of the model. Evidential evaluation indicates improved outcomes for children and parents by successfully reducing risk of harm to children; this leads to a reduction in entry to care, and cost avoidance by those authorities that have fully implemented the model as outlined in the Business case appended to the report (Appendix 1). Details of the independent evaluation can be found at Appendix 2 & 3. Successful implementation of the model will result in cost avoidance to the Council. The Department for Education (DfE), Independent advisor and regional improvement lead support Bury in adopting this model because of its evidential base and because of the need to evidence improvement. The DfE have made available £140k grant funding to support with set up costs and have indicated that they would, via an improvement grant, fund the cost of Hertfordshire acting as Sector Led Improvement Partners to support implementation of the model which is estimated to take 10 months.

Alternative options considered and rejected:

Other models have been considered and discounted, including further development of our existing model of practice Signs of Safety. The rationale for identifying Family Safeguarding as the preferred model of practice is its strong evidence base of delivering improved outcomes for children by reducing risk of harm.