Issue - meetings

The Chief Executive to provide a verbal update.

Geoff Little, Chief Executive of Bury Council, provided an update on the progress of the Children’s Services Improvement Programme, which focused on the verbal feedback received after the 2-day monitoring visit that had taken place last week. It was noted that the verbal feedback might differ from the formal written feedback that would be included in a Cabinet report in November. The monitoring visit was effectively to a mini inspection, with the Ofsted inspection team speaking to social workers and senior leaders in the department, as well as going through records of individual cases and viewing a range of documents.

Scope

The inspection team were looking at quality and impact of plans that related to individual children and their families, in particular cases that were stepped up to Children In Need from Child Protection, and the process of how cases were stepped up and down from work preceding court proceedings. They also looked at children where risk had escalated to the point of family breakdown. In looking at those areas they triangulated improvements made in the service as a whole, including workforce, performance management, management oversight and supervision, and quality assurance.

Key findings

·         No cases of children at immediate risk of harm

·         Most cases were being held at the right level of threshold

·         No formal escalations of cases from the inspectors to the management team

Overall, the inspection team acknowledged we had now established a permanent leadership team that fully understood the issues faced and knew the improvement journey would take time. Recognition was received from the team that we are going in the right direction, that we have established foundations of support for improvement, and that leadership is visible. The inspection team saw pockets of improvement in practice, demonstrating that frontline practice is starting to improve.

The most important issue raised was already known: workforce. Caseloads were too high, the number of social workers that children see was changing too frequently, and there was too high a proportion of agency staff leading to drift and delay in cases being dealt with. We were able to show inspectors we have made progress in overall staffing levels, that we are recruiting more staff, working on recruitment from abroad, improvements to the level and quality of business support (so social workers could focus on cases), and how we are further increasing, in some areas, rates of pay to attract social workers. The inspection team also noted the support the wider Council was giving to the department, the investment being put in to radically change the structure of the department and increase the number of posts. It was noted that supervision in some of our internal teams was inconsistent and variable and needed further work (which had begun).

Geoff outlined five areas of detail:

·         Quality assurance – the framework we had adopted since the inspection was now working and enabled us to gather evidence of impact of practice. However it wasn’t always being used consistently to record the views of children and families,  ...  view the full minutes text for item 74