a)     

The delivery of the transitions for adulthood project was a fundamental project in the One Children’s Services programme with the intention to help children and families at the earliest sign of need and to provide support ranging from advice through to specialist intervention;

b)     

It aimed to, in collaboration with all key Plymouth partners, to build on the existing transitions offer to develop a network of services, processes and interactions that were able to understand and predict the need and respond together to help children, young people and families at the earliest opportunity;

c)     

Plymouth’s vision which was co-produced with young people was that all children and young people in Plymouth would have their voices heard and have the right support and ambitious opportunities for their futures;

d)     

A multi-agency project board was operating since October 2024 with six key priorities with individual work streams;

e)     

It was important to work hard for those transitions, starting at an earlier stage to ensure it was as smooth as possible for each individual person;

f)      

The project was essential and was going towards ensuring that Plymouth was enabling its young people to live meaningful and fulfilling lives when they were reaching adulthood;

g)     

Children and Adult services needed to work more collaboratively to ensure that young people could easily access the right support and advice at the right stages in their lives in order to prepare for adulthood and to live as independently as possible;

h)     

Significant progress had been made and Cabinet were committed to ensuring that the project made a positive difference in delivering a better future for Plymouth young people;

i)      

At an LGA peer review in January 2025, Plymouth’s direction for transitions was recognised positively.

j)      

Plymouth was strengthening its universal offer for all families in the city;

k)     

It had been announced that Plymouth would be given a fourth year of government funding on top of the three years funding that had already been allocated to deliver the family hubs programme;

l)      

Members were requested to help people understand within their communities what offers were in place as the offer was good, but not enough families or children were accessing those universal provisions;

m)   

Work stream six: Universal advice and guidance was behind schedule due to not having the right support in place to move the work forward. Work as part of that project would look to ensure advice and guidance for children, young people and families was accessible to all;

n)     

The transitions work took into account all factors in the families lives and was person centred to ensure that there was not an oversaturation of support which could overwhelm;

o)     

The work aimed to resolve issues of silo  ...  view the full minutes text for item 96.

a)     

The Local Area SEND Improvement Plan progress report summarised the progress made against the SEND Local Area priority action plans;

b)     

The update had been collated as part of the SEND Critical Review across January 2025 and aimed to establish what progress had been made since the inspection to test what impact this had on children and young people;

c)     

The review had six distinct elements:

·         A new local area SEND self-evaluation form (SEF);

·         Parent Carer Voice Survey (PPCV);

·         A critical review workshop to review progress against all the action on the Local Area SEND Improvement Plan;

·         The creation of a strategic case study from each of the nine priority areas to demonstrate progress and learning since the inspection;

·         Collaborative audits of six children including multi-agency partnership auditing of the children’s files and a visit to each of the children in their schools or settings ;

·         Discussion groups with children and young people in three mainstream schools about their experience led by the Participation team.

d)     

The SEF had been fully updated to represent and evaluate the current work of the local area to support children and young people with SEND and to be in line with the Ofsted Local Area SEND inspection criteria;

e)     

The team had robust governance arrangements in place which had a cycle of review and challenge to endorse what happened on a regular basis;

f)      

The SEND Critical Review workshop was held with all partners on 09 January 2025 to review the SEND action plan. The workshop facilitated groups including the Department for Education (DFE) Advisor and the Head of SEND from Telford and Wrekin Council;

g)     

The findings from the critical review were moderated by the Service Director for Education, Participation and Skills and the Head of SEND. Of the 55 actions in the plan, seven were completed with evidence of clear impact on children and young people. 31 were completed and were being monitored for evidence of impact on children and young people. 17 were deemed to not be fully complete and there were clear actions in progress. The DfE advisor had endorsed the evidence base which would grow over a further two month period;

h)     

Significant progress had been made in implementing the Plymouth Local Area SEND Improvement plan with key actions being completed and on-going efforts in place to address the remaining areas;

i)      

The Critical Review, in conjunction with the action plan tracker provided evidence of the impact and effectiveness of those actions, demonstrating a commitment to improving outcomes for the children and young people with SEND in Plymouth.

j)      

The module of learning disability and autism had been created in partnership with the NHS, ICB, Livewell SW and PPCV and it had been rolled out across the Local Area Partnership;

k)     

The Resource Directory that was also co-created  ...  view the full minutes text for item 97.

a)        

The report summarised information produced in the latest pupil forecast model based on the January 2024 school census data;

b)       

The information was used to forecast the number of school places which would be required across primary and secondary schools in Plymouth;

c)        

The birth rate in Plymouth had been in decline since 2017/18 and as a result there would be a decline in pupil numbers across the city and nationally;

d)       

The academic year in 2027/28 would see a reduction of 13% across the primary age cohort across all localities in the city but the localities in the west and southwest would see the largest reduction in numbers;

e)       

Secondary school numbers were expected to continue its increasing trend in numbers until 2026/27 when it was expected to decline as the primary school reduction in numbers flowed through;

f)         

The SEND sufficiency plan had seen the council work with schools to develop resourced provision for children with Educational Health and Care Plans (EHCP). One primary school was confirmed and the council was moving forward with planning in respect of buildings. The council was holding initial discussions with one other primary school and two secondary schools;

g)        

In addition to resource provision, the council was working with schools to develop a targeted funding model which would start in April 2025. The model was for small cohorts of children with SEND in schools and schools would need space to me the needs of the children.

h)       

A meeting had taken place with the Schools Forum to produce a strategic pupil place plan and the plan was in the process of being update and would be available after April 2025;

i)         

It was commented that the forecasting model used was as accurate as it could be and was using live data from the NHS for births in the city. The subnational data would be updated in May 2025 following Brexit and COVID-19 pandemic pausing that national work;

j)         

The Targeted Funding Model was one of the streams of work which would look to redirect teaching expertise rather than losing some teachers as part of the national recruitment and retention issues;

k)        

Where the local area was opening the resource provisions for children and young people with an EHCP, Plymouth was targeting those areas where there was a significant need and where families required support. Plymouth was working to ensure that there was a community approach to prevent children and young people travelling across Plymouth and out of their communities.

a)        

The performance report gave data for Quarter 3 which represented October, November and December 2024;

b)       

Children’s Social Care Benchmarking had been updated to figures as of 31 March 2024.

c)        

Children’s services predicted a rise in the number of Child Protection Plans following its response to the Ofsted inspection in 2022 and as a result of improving it response to thresholds and decision making. The next phase would ensure that children and families were receiving the right help and support;

d)       

It was acknowledged that there were some children that if they had received different support other than statutory child protection intervention which was earlier, harm could have been prevented;

e)       

There was a high proportion of children who were experiencing neglect that were subject to re-referrals into the service. The service would see improvement, but that improvement was not sustained following the stepping down to universal services. It was acknowledged that the re-referral rate was high, but there was a high level of quality assurance in that space. The service was also building capacity better around the family to make the change and improvements more sustainable. The council was also strengthening its early help offer to ensure that when a social worker was not involved, there was sufficient support in the families community;

f)         

There was a reliance on agency workers due to the vacancy rate within Children’s services which was pressuring the service to maintain good caseload levels for its workforce to provide a successful intervention;

g)        

Plymouth’s number of children and young people in unregistered provision had decreased to two and was positive for the service in which that number had fluctuated significantly. The two young people in their provisions were in provisions that were CQC registered but not Ofsted registered;

h)       

Councillor Laing had a number of conversations with Ofsted and the Department for Education to speed up the process for registering provisions as this was having an impact on children and young people using unregistered provisions;

i)         

There were around 20 children and young people that were in residential placements ready to step down to high support foster placements, but those foster placements were not available for the city. The Family homes for Plymouth children was a new scheme which was developed to not just provide additional financial support to Plymouth City Council foster carers that were able to take children with more challenging and complex needs, but also a better support package wrapped around them. The model provided an additional £800 month fee to Plymouth City Council carers as there was a requirement to have at least one carer at home all the time to meet the needs of those complex children;

j)         

The inaugural Fostering Summit that took place in 2024 was successful and of the actions identified most were implemented.  ...  view the full minutes text for item 99.

a)     

The report provided an update against Plymouth’s Children’s Services improvement plan which was put in place following an Ofsted visit in January 2024;

b)     

There continued to be improvement in key areas highlighted by Ofsted;

c)     

There was consultation on the development of an integrated front door to Children’s services which was a key first step in Plymouth’s implementation of the Children’s Wellbeing and Education Bill;

d)     

There was continued stability in the Front Door with more families receiving targeted help;

e)     

There were sustained manageable caseloads within the service;

f)      

Families were receiving timely assessments;

g)     

There had been positive progress made from the services quality assurance work;

h)     

A high proportion of children and families were being seen on time and having an up to date plan;

i)      

The focussed work to improve Pathway Plans for care experienced young people was working well and there was good progress of young people being in Education, Employment or Training (EET);

j)      

There would be further improvements to service including maximising family and community resources and finding earlier permanence for children in care;

k)     

Further improvements to the service would continue with the support of Dorset County Council, Plymouth’s Sector Led Improvement Partners (SLIP) and the independent chair of Plymouth Children’s Services Improvement Board, Theresa Leavy.

Question.

When we visited we spoke about services needing to be safe, kind and equal and it was great that this was adopted in the plan, but can you tell us about how you were doing this as it was not specifically mentioned in the report. 

Response:

Keeping children safe featured strongly in the report and that had been an important focus for the service. We make sure we that any children who are at risk of any safeguarding needs are identified and protected quickly. The reported talked about numbers of children on Child Protections (CP) Plans and timeliness of reviews for those children who had CP plans and the quality assurance evidence would support that Plymouth had a safe system in place for children and young people.

In terms of being kind, Plymouth had a real strong priority in the improvement plan around relationships between children and their worker, whether that was a social worker for family support worker. That had been hard to achieve when Plymouth had a number of vacancies of social workers which resulted in the service bringing in a number of temporary members of staff which wasn’t a good thing and didn’t help to build relationships as part of a kind approach. The service had worked hard around its recruitment of permanent social workers and it had made progress in 2024/25, but more progress was required. It was still expected that those temporary members of staff were kind and a  ...  view the full minutes text for item 100.

a)     

The first Mockingbird model had been launched as there was a plan for a further three;

b)     

There was good progress on the council’s offer to Plymouth’s Kinship carers and for its Special Guardians;

c)     

The council was creating more provision in the city which would in turn look to tackle some of the services budget pressure whilst also gaining more control over provision used for Plymouth’s cared for children.

a)     

There had been a spike in October 2024 in which there were a number of girls committing violent offences which had almost doubled from 20% or the whole cohort of children pre-pandemic to 38.5% in October 2024;

b)     

Since October 2024, the Youth Justice service had worked with 19 girls and their families and carers whose offending was violent in nature. Much of the violence was outside of the home appeared to be pre-meditated in nature, being uploaded to social media;

c)     

Of the 19 girls that had worked with the service, only one had re-offended;

d)     

It had taken time to build trusting relationships with those young women to understand the reasons for the violence which had been predominately as a result of peer pressure;

e)     

To prevent other children following a similar pattern we realised that we needed to raise awareness in schools and the council had commissioned youth workers from Plymouth Argyle Trust to engage with groups in schools;

f)      

Violence involving boys had seen a 6% year on year decrease with the majority of violence involving them being linked to exploitation through county lines;

g)     

Child female violence had increased in all local authorities in Devon and Cornwall which mirrored a national picture. The council therefore continued to work with schools to educate children of the consequences of violence.

Question:

When we were discussing this the other week we felt like there was a lot of ambiguity with what was being said and we didn’t really quite understand. Can we have more detail around the numbers so we can understand the issues better. What were the levels of seriousness of the offences and how many of the 19 girls were against strangers and filmed for social media?

Response:

There was evidence of 11 offences that were uploaded to social media including Telegram to closed groups which were invite only. Of those 11 assaults on strangers which were filmed in various locations across the city. In terms of seriousness of those offences, there was grievous bodily harm down to physical harm of the victims receiving cuts and bruises.

An example was shared of 15 girls attacking three girls in Drakes Circus all of which didn’t know one another. The attack was premeditated and the girls had setup three points of view to record the assaults.

It was known that other assaults happened based on differing schools.

Question:

What were the numbers of girls like when compared to boys in the city. The report didn’t specify the rates of male violence which was happening at a higher rate than female violence.

Response:

There had been a spike in the numbers of girls coming through the system than ever before. The numbers of boys committing violent offences had dropped by 6% and a lot of the violence had been orchestrated by adults  ...  view the full minutes text for item 102.