Issue - meetings

(Mrs J Wainwright, Director, Commissioning and Partnerships, Mrs R Turner, Managing Director, and Mrs S Hohler, Cabinet Member for Children, Families & Education)

(Mrs A Agyepong, Equality & Diversity Manager and Mrs J Wainwright, Director, Commissioning and Partnerships were present for this item)

(1)         The Committee discussed a report that outlined the aims of an updated draft Equality and Diversity Strategic Action Plan 2010-2013.

(2)         The Chairman asked that Mrs Wainwright introduce the report.  Mrs Wainwright explained that it was important that this report was produced and before Members now as KCC was committed to equalities and diversity and there was a need for a Strategy to plan and implement the work across the Directorate.  Reports of this kind were also essential in the inspections that apply across the County Council and as part of the Comprehensive Area Assessment and other inspection processes.  KCC had made a commitment to achieve excellence, under the Equality Framework for Local Government during 2011, a higher rating than currently held across the County Council. The Children, Families and Education Directorate was working toward providing the necessary environment to achieve excellence.  The report gave a series of examples and a strategic action plan over a number of years on how this would be achieved.

(3)         Mrs Agyepong highlighted the five key areas of performance within the strategic action plan and gave examples of work being carried out in those areas as follows:

·         Knowing your community and equality mapping;

·         Place shaping leadership, partnership and organisational   commitment;

·         Community engagement and satisfaction;

·         Responsive services and customer care;

·         Modern and Diverse Workforce.

(4)         Members were given the opportunity to ask questions and make comments which included the following:

(5)         In response to questions by Mr Critchley, Mrs Agyepong advised that measuring best practise would be carried out by looking across KCC and across several partners to see how new ways of working were being developed, which could then be implemented across the County.  She gave the example of colleagues based in a Children’s Centre in Ashford who were developing a framework for questions that needed to be asked for children who came from families where English was a second language as they began to enter the education system.  They had been doing this piece of work just for their Centre and had not thought about other parts of Kent that were experiencing the same issue  that they could share that practise to produce good outcomes for the children.  Mrs Agyepong said that she had worked with them to pull the framework together and linked them back to the Early Years Team so that once this was piloted the practise could be shared more widely and the impact it had measured. 

(6)         Mrs Agyepong said that work was being undertaken to look at the Customer Impact Assessments to ensure that the people who needed our services could access them taking into account the equality measure.

(7)         In response to a question by Mr Vye, Mr Abbott stated that for future meetings the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 27