Agenda item

To receive a report from the Cabinet Member for Specialist Children’s Services and the Corporate Director of Social Care, Health and Wellbeing, which presents the Specialist Children’s Services Divisional Draft Business Plan for 2017/18. This sets out the high-level priorities for the coming financial year and also describes the agreed business planning process for 2017/18, on which the committee is invited to comment.

Mr M Thomas-Sam, Head of Strategy and Business Support, and Dr J Maiden-Brooks, Policy Advisor, were in attendance for this item.

1.            Mr Thomas-Sam introduced the report and explained that Business Plans for the coming year had been prepared using the new Directorate names which would come into being in April 2017.  Dr Maiden-Brooks added that the Business Plan included a new section on operating environment and a simplified list of services.  As part of earlier consultation, the Cabinet Member for Specialist Children’s Services had asked that safeguarding be listed as the first priority in Section C of the Plan, and this change would be made. The Cabinet Committee was now being consulted on the Plan content, and any changes requested would be made before the final Plan was approved by the Corporate Director and Cabinet Member.  Mr Ireland and Mr Segurola then responded to comments and questions from Members, as follows:-

a)     to the amendment requested by the Cabinet Member and any comment made by the Cabinet Committee, any comment or recommendation made by Ofsted, following the current inspection, would need to be included in the final Plan;

b)    in response to a question about the target listed for performance indicator SCS03 in Section J of the Plan, Mr Segurola undertook to check the figures and advise Members outside the meeting of the correct target;

c)    in response to a concern about recruitment and retention of qualified social work staff (priority 4 in Section B), Mr Segurola reassured Members that the posts not filled by permanent social workers were filled by temporary, agency social workers. No frontline social work posts were filled by unqualified staff; a social worker must be fully qualified to undertake regulatory work;

d)     in response to a concern about the expense of employing agency staff, balanced with the short-term nature of their employment, Mr Segurola added that employing temporary agency staff offered flexibility at a time of change. It was always the hope that some staff recruited via agencies may wish to join the County Council as permanent staff, and the tax incentive attached to agency working was soon to be discontinued. The usual pattern of recruitment was that a quantity of newly-qualified social workers would join the County Council each summer;

e)     regarding development of the corporate parenting agenda (priority 3 in Section B), Members of the Corporate Parenting Panel had never been as well informed as they currently were, but many other County Council Members clearly did not understand the corporate parent role they all shared as elected Members. A challenge for the forthcoming election was to boost corporate parenting training to help new Members to better understand this role, and attendance at such training should be compulsory for all Members. Mr Ireland commented that many Members retiring in May had long-term experience of the corporate parent role, and building the understanding of remaining and new Members would be a challenge for the period following the election. The presence of this target in the Business Plan was welcomed and would raise the profile of the need for increased training;

f)     in response to a question about missing children, how many of these were UASC and how the risks around this group were managed,  Mr Segurola advised that there were currently no citizen children missing but several UASC. It was known from past patterns that some UASC tended to go missing early, soon after arriving in the county, as they used Kent as a stopping-off point en route elsewhere. The County Council retained its duty of care to these UASC and monitored numbers of those going missing. Every UASC arriving in Kent would be risk-assessed, to try to predict their risk of being trafficked and of going missing. It was suggested thata report on missing children be made to a future meeting of the Cabinet Committee, to set out figures and patterns, what was and could be done and the process for handling periods of absence, eg return interviews. Although any figure quoted would only ever be a snapshot of a moment in time, any repeated absence was a concern to be addressed. Some young people reported missing had simply returned home late, but their foster carer was obliged to report them as ‘missing’, while other young people went missing for longer periods, or did so repeatedly; and

g)    the inclusion in the Business Plan of aspects recommended by the former Corporate Parenting Select Committee was welcomed, and officers were thanked for their work in developing the new Plan.

2.            RESOLVED that the draft Directorate Business Plan 2017/18 for the Specialist Children’s Services Division be welcomed, and the comments made by Members, set out above, be noted, prior to the final version being approved by the Corporate Director and the Cabinet Member.