a)     

The Improvement Plan was a detailed and comprehensive plan to ensure Plymouth improved it services in the city. Each month the Improvement Board met to hear of and review progress of the Improvement journey; 

b)     

The Board was chaired Theresa Leavy (Executive Director of People, Dorset County Council) with Councillor Laing (Portfolio holder responsibility) and Councillor Evans OBE (Leader of the Council) in attendance. The Board also had attendance from numerous partners from across the city;

c)     

The improvement had not been for just Plymouth City Council but for all key partners including schools, early years, voluntary sector and Plymouth’s further education sector;

d)     

The Improvement Board had been advising Plymouth it needed to take its practice back to basics. From Plymouths assessments, to its plans, to its supervision, to its management oversight and clear records on the systems Plymouth uses;

e)     

The Board had been working with staff to make changes since January 2023 and work would continue as part of the Department for Educations Improvement notice until such time that the notice expires or ceases.

f)      

The measures within the report were reviewed every month by the Improvement Board to see progress in key areas but also systems that required change to improve outcomes for Plymouths children and young people;

g)     

The Council had increased its Early Help cohort and following discussions with schools in the city it was acknowledged that the Council could do more to support children in that space. The Council had increased those teams which were formed and they were working closely with the Education service. This presented a new way of working for the service from a silo one to a more integrated system;

h)     

The focussed visit in December highlighted that the Front Door of the service was not working as well as it should in terms of supporting the children of Plymouth but there had also been an issue in terms of consent to make a referral;

i)      

An event held by Plymouth City Council on 26 April 2023 had all schools within Plymouth in attendance where it was reaffirmed the need to work together. Feedback from head teachers across the city had advised that the systems were improving and changing and that the service was much more responsive;

j)      

Caseloads within the Children’s Social Work service had remained high which decreased the quality of practice. The workforce in Plymouth was relatively new in terms of experience with newly qualified social workers having low caseloads and the more experienced social workers having high caseloads. The Social Work Academy in Plymouth remained at 100% and provided assurance that there remained a steady pipeline for the future;

k)     

For the Permanence service who work with children in care, the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 6.

a)     

Unregistered placements were used as a last resort by the Council in circumstances where it had not been able to find registered Ofsted provision often due to short notice of placements ending or due to a complex situation on a young persons entry into care;

b)     

The service over eight months had made significant progress and would continue to reduce the council’s use of unregistered arrangements and drive a culture shift to avoid them. The council would work to find the right placement within acceptable timeframes for those that were already in those arrangements;

c)     

Unregistered placements had never been appropriate or acceptable to the council for its children and young people in care;

d)     

The law had changed in September 2021 in which the care planning placement and case review regulations were amended to prohibit the placement of a child under 16 in such arrangements;

e)     

For a small number of cared for children, often with the most complex needs, there had been times where, on the day a placement could not be sought and in those circumstances the service had to set up an arrangement to keep them safe and have their needs met whilst the right placement was actively sought;

f)      

The impact on children/young people in unregistered arrangements were significant and the arrangements that they were being placed in were not regulated by Ofsted and would not provide reassurance that Plymouth’s most vulnerable children were in high quality, safe and stable homes;

g)     

The Council had very tight robust guidance around the setting up of those arrangements and would have leadership management grip on them;

h)     

Unregistered arrangements were financially high cost arrangements as to ensure safety, there were higher staffing ratio’s than would necessarily be required in a registered home;

i)      

From 1 June 2022 to 31 May 2023, the Council used unregistered arrangements for 19 cared for children during that time period but individually, were not in those arrangements during that timespan. The youngest cared for child was 11 and the oldest was 17;

j)      

The service hit a peak of 14 children/young people in an unregistered arrangement in August 2022 and in June 2023, this had reduced to two young people;

k)     

Key themes identified for the council using unregistered arrangements were:

·         Previous placement breakdowns

·         Mental health difficulties particularly around self-harm and suicidal ideation and young people that had required hospital admission

·         Physical aggression towards parents and carers

·         Harmful sexual behaviour 

·         Children missing out on education

·         Children that had been adopted or been under Special Guardianship arrangements

l)      

The service had worked hard with partners across the city in Health, Education and placement providers to prevent these types of arrangements from occurring or to limit the time  ...  view the full minutes text for item 7.

a)     

Plymouth had taken a real focus on its child exploitation work and the workforce had increased. The Reducing Exploitation and Absence from Care and Home (REACH) team had increased from three full time equivalents up to seven full time equivalents and were now placed amongst the services adolescent support and youth justice teams which had equally grown in size to ensure a robust response team to child exploitation;

b)     

Usual child protection ways of working did not work for children/young people experiencing extra familial harm and the service needed to take a different response. Plymouth adopted the Adolescent Safety Framework (ASF) in January 2022 but there had been issues in embedding the framework across the city and the service was actively refreshing the training to support that;

c)     

It was difficult to obtain data from the Police in relation to County Lines as it was very fluid but it was known that there were two to three county lines coming into Plymouth and the service was actively working with Devon and Cornwall Police to disrupt that, but it was acknowledged county lines would never go and would be a constant piece of work for the service;

d)     

Sexual exploitation had increased significantly during the spring 2023 and the service had been training and retraining its workforce to be more curious around sexual exploitation;

e)     

Knife crime in the city had not been hugely prevalent and the service has seen two young people in the last 12 months relating to knife crime and a further six young people were stopped or arrested in the same period;

f)      

The ASF would be combined with Plymouth’s strategic base and its operational Missing and Child Exploitation Group to ensure Plymouth adopted the new approach;

g)     

Reviews were taking place with the Police to ensure data collection was appropriate as Plymouth had gaps;

h)     

Children going missing had been on the increase which had been due to the summer;

i)      

Increasing the workforce in this area would allow for greater chance of developing relationships with those that go missing and it was acknowledged that children in the care of the local authority were more likely to go missing than those not in care;

j)      

Daily intelligence briefings (DIB) were introduced due to an increase in some of the risk associated with some young people. Briefings would take place the Police Child Protection Team, Youth Justice Service, Edge of Care service, REACH service and Health. More partners from the city were attending the briefings;

k)     

Where a child/young person was arrested with drugs as part of County Lines activity, the Police would seek to treat them as victims and not as perpetrators in the first instances. The service would attempt  ...  view the full minutes text for item 8.

a)     

There were six red risks which would increase to seven and the new risk concerned CaterEd, which fell within the remit of Children’s Services. There had been increasing costs due to cost of living issues, inflation, energy costs and increased costs to food pricing. There were concerns of its long term sustainability;

b)     

There was a red risk scored at 20 for ‘failure to meet statutory duties due to growing volume and complexity of demand for Children’s Social Care services’. There was however additional mitigation provided such as enhanced oversight of the improvement plan and service redesign which was underway;

c)     

Further risks included:

·         Sustainability of the Schools Improvement Partnership which would be removed from the risk register but monitored;

·         and failure to deliver required improvements following an Ofsted inspection.

d)     

The council would seek to recruit to an Interim Director of Children’s services following the resignation of Sharon Muldoon (Director of Children’s Services) before looking to recruit to the permanent Director of Children’s Services position. The service also had an interim Service Director for Children, young people and families but below that there was a professional, dedicated and passionate workforce who wanted improvement to happen;

e)     

The Department for Education had been happy with the improvement plan and the improvement work that was underway;

f)      

Tracey Lee (Chief Executive) was chairing the Children’s Services Transition Board on a fortnightly basis in which key people within the service were meeting to discuss progress and ensure the improvement journey was continuing in the same trajectory;

g)     

74% of looked after children and young people would be within 20 miles of the city, those that are outside of the city would have reason to be there either because they were in a specialist provision or because they had extended family elsewhere. There had been placement sufficiency difficulties for 16/17 year olds which had meant that some young people were living outside of the city;

h)     

The service had implemented a new edge of care offering for the city which was seeing a reduction in the number of 15/16 year olds coming into care;

i)      

The reduction in the number of children on Child Protection (CP) plans had followed a review of the cohort in ensuring that there was no drift or delay for those families. The number of children on CP plans had stabilised since the reports release and the service would continue to monitor the data in relation to families on repeat CP plans;

j)      

Plymouth had launched its attendance strategy which would dovetail with the national strategy and would look to get children back into school which COVID seemed to have affected. Attendance workers from the Council would  ...  view the full minutes text for item 9.

a)     

The Children and Families budget for 2022/23 was set at £51.381 million and the final outturn was £55.793 million with a resultant overspend of £4.412 million primarily due to the cost and volume of an independent sector placement and an unachieved delivery plan, they were offset by saving in different areas within the service;

b)     

They had been a trend of overspend since 2018/19;

c)     

There had been an overspend in 2021/22 of £9.802 million which was offset by COVID funding. Continued costs from the increased care entrants in that period had continued as some children remained in the care of the local authority;

d)     

The Education, Participation and Skills team budget for 2022/23 was set at £10.749 million with the final outturn positioning being £12.353 million and an overspend of £1.604 million due to pressures of home to school transport and SEND short breaks;

e)     

The combined pressure for Children’s services was £6.016 million;

f)      

For 2022/23 the budget for unregistered and bespoke arrangements was £1.529 million however there had been an adverse variance of £3.716 million. Costs were reducing in this area since October/November 2022;

g)     

There was a residential placement overspend of £1.3 million last year with the supported living cohort having close to a £1 million overspend;

h)     

The Children, Young People & Families service was given a budget uplift of £3.053m in 2023/24 to allow for expected cost & volume pressures within Placements, resulting from increases to National Living Wage, Cost of Living & Inflation. However additional Medium Term Financial Planning targets were also identified by the service of £4.575m, to give a net budget decrease of £1.732m;

i)      

Education, Participation and Skills were given a budget uplift of £1.370m in 2023/24 to allow for the additional pressures within Home to School Transport and SEND Short Breaks;

j)      

Members were advised of savings proposals for the 2023/23 year of £1.732 million for Children and Families budget and £3.942 million for Education, Participation and Skills;

k)     

They would be changes in attendance duties for Local authorities that come into effect in September 2023 but there was no additional funding allocated as part of the required changes;