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 lot of work had been completed with managers and the workforce as a whole on the culture within the service which was about being respectful and being kind.

There was not enough in the report around being equal, but you might see more in relation to Plymouth SEND improvement work where we’ve been thinking about children with additional needs, children with speech and language needs and how Plymouth made sure that those children were supported to engage in mainstream education to have the same quality of opportunity and the same outcomes.

Those principles of being equal, kind and safe had gone through all our work in both education and children’s social work. An away day took place yesterday with David Haley’s (Director of Children’s Services) senior management team and equal, kind and safe was part of those discussions and whether Plymouth was really achieving it. The next head teacher conference would be called equal, kind and safe to keep that focus.

There was probably more progress in some areas than others at this point in time, but Plymouth remained committed to that being the way we work and being committed to those three principles and delivering on them more comprehensively over time.

Councillor Laing added:

Plymouth was working hard to bring children and young people that were in placements outside of Plymouth back to the city to ensure all children had equal access to a placement where they ought to be. Plymouth was creating its own provision in Plymouth to ensure that there was more opportunity to have residential placements in the city. The service was also working hard to increase the number of foster carers in Plymouth so that we have fostering placements. The council was actively trying to have foster carers who could deal with young people with more complex and challenging needs that were in residential placements but could be in a foster placement if the foster carers were available who had the right skills to support them to be in foster care.

Question.

How are you making sure young people’s voices are being heard when writing these reports?

The service had kept checking in with Plymouth’s Youth Parliament and in the last quarter I (Vivien Lines) had been back to Youth Parliament and to our Young Safeguarders to talk about progress and hear your views. In specific areas of work we’re really making sure that we have young people’s views embedded in what we’re doing. Councillor Laing talked about our children’s homes developments and we are making sure that we really co-design those homes with our care experienced young people so that their views feed in all the time and not just into a report at the end, but into the work as it progressed.

The service had young people involved in its recruitment work, children’s homes development, the on-going work for the three year plan and we’re just starting a piece of work in response to government reforms which will really change the way we’re delivering our support to families. It was also discussed at the away day yesterday, how we get young people and families co-designing this with us and making sure that we are asking key questions and listening to the views of children and families along the way.

Question.

Do you think there’s any area of your work where young people’s views could be better assimilated or increased?

Response:

The Children’s homes work presented a really crucial opportunity to get that right and do that well. We’ve had to get the work started quickly and so we want to make sure that doesn’t mean that we do it without thinking about what children this is important.

Councillor Laing added: David Haley and I reflected on the Listening Care Council in which I used to go periodically to the meetings and meet young people and there was a good, ‘you said, we did’ model. That model had dropped off, but as a result of a conversation which was had today, we would look to revive that model or look to ensure that the right channels were in place to be able to challenge Councillors or David Haley.

David Haley added: We would look to provide the forward plan for scrutiny and the Corporate Parenting Board across the year and you would choose which reports to would like to be part of in writing as it would have your direct voice woven into the reports.

Question.

What is the simple step by step plan for you to achieve the improvements that children, young people, parents and carers identified?

Response:

A key part of the improvement plan and the approach that we’ve taken over the last year had been about stabilising our workforce. We’ve really focussed on recruiting and retaining permanent social workers across our service. We have around 200 social workers in the service and 25% of them (40) were agency social workers with some vacant posts which impacted on the things you were talking about such as relationships between the worker and the young person which helped them to understand their plan, help them to understand what was needed, what’s the work that was happening and having a good relationship so they felt listened to, felt valued.

We made good progress in stabilising our management team and all our senior managers were permanent. We’ve reduced the number of agency social workers and increased the numbers of permanent social workers, but there were still too many agency workers in the service. This was a national issue and not just one being seen at a local level. The service had tried to introduce a number of different ways to attract people to come to Plymouth and make sure that we were investing in their career and keeping them here, but it was still challenging so we’ve got a lot more to do, we’re going to keep focussed on that. The other side of the plan was in ensuring that the workers that Plymouth did have were highly skilled, that they’re good and knew how to communicate well with young people. Our workers have been developing the ways in which they write all of their documents, their assessments, their plans, they write them to the child now so they use language that is accessible and help the child to understand the concerns at the time and what is the plan in a family friendly and child friend way.

Councillor Laing added:

At the Star Awards we had three events at every year for the different age groups and our 18 plus care leavers this year was the best attended. Everyone received a certificate and their workers fed into those where you could then see the individual nature of them and their achievements and what they’ve done and the progress they’ve made in that year is celebrated with everybody in the room. That was one way for Councillors to meet and talk to young people.

I have been a Councillor for a while and we were seeing those young people growing up and it’s a really lovely way to celebrate what they do and I was taken by how many of our 18-25 years olds came to that because that not people whose foster carers or people they lived with bringing them, they come of their own accord and they want to come because they are celebratory events.

The Corporate Parenting Board which I chair has good news stories at the end of every agenda so we could hear about young people getting into university or someone representing the country. We will write a card back to young people and I’ve been to a graduation of one of our young people who kindly invited me, so we do have those connection points.

Supplementary:

Can you elaborate on the question particularly around the step-by-step plan on how you can achieve the improvements for the children, young people, parents and carers that were identified in the report.

Response:

The step-by-step plan looked to ensure that Plymouth had a stable workforce, skilling them up and training them on key areas that needed to improve and the final part of that was how we would see results. The third part was to evaluate our improvement work to make sure that the difference that we were expecting was happening under the quality assurance framework.

David Haley added:

We did a really good piece of work with young people and parents on the SEND action plan which was to present the plan in a child and young person friendly way and I wonder if we need to do that with our plan. We do have a three year improvement plan in place which is set out in a very adult speak way and it might be helpful if we could work with you as a group, or the right group of young people to make that plan accessible to young people in a better way so if that would be something you want to work with us on, then I would delegate that to Vivien to follow that up with Stuart Hogg.

Councillor Laing added:

I would reiterate what I said about the Listening Care Council and was something that needed to be restored because it did work well before and young people in those groups did value.

Question.

What are your priorities after this report and how can we see results having an impact and making a difference?

Response:

Priorities for us in the next phase are making sure that families get help earlier so that we’re working with our colleaguies in education, schools and health services to make sure that when families need help that they get that help quickly so that we’re not waiting for things to become really complex or problematic but that support is preventing needs from escalating and you’ll see results from that by seeing fewer children needed to come into care, fewer children needing child protection support and more families will be receiving that earlier help. Families would get the help they need the first time and one time instead of families needing to come into the service three or four times before they get the help they need. Se we would see some really improved patterns, trends and outcomes. Children and young people would also be telling us that they’ve got a good relationship with their worker and they understand what’s happening. We would also expect to see fewer complaints and more positive feedback from children and young people in our audits when looking at practice.

Councillor Laing added:

We had an item at today’s meeting which looked at data and we talked about re-referrals within 12 months which is what councillors usually go to first as a real indicator of we’re getting things right because families are having the right intervention for the right amount of time which means they don’t need to come back to us.

We’ve done a lot of work on the MASH which is the first contact that families will have, that’s been a really intense bit of work because we weren’t getting things right there and we’ve seen that the changes are being sustained which is really encouraging, so I think those are the indicators that the plan is working.

Care Leavers and their outcomes and their futures is something that we need to keep working on and when we see that more of those young people were in jobs or further education or education of some other kind, then that will also be another indicator that we’re making improvements.

Our recruitment of foster carers was important which would enable the service to provide stable long term relationships with that person. Recruiting more local authority foster carers would also be another part of delivering this plan and again we are making good progress on that.

Supplementary:

We do a national consultation called ‘Make your Mark’ every year that highlights young people’s priorities from across the UK and sometimes here so how can you take those priorities around what we voted for into account when you’re making these plans in the future?

Response:

When we were designing our plan we came and spoke to you and you helped us shape the priorities which worked really well and that’s why we ended up with a plan that had ‘equal, kind and safe’ embedded in it, because that’s what you told us was important so we can do that again and we can come and co-design this with you. We can agree priorities and plans with you, shape them with you through our mechanism whether that’s with Youth Parliament or our children in care of young safeguarders.

l)       

There were a number of areas why a practice auditor would advise work was not where it should be and a common factor was drift in the plan, where actions had been set but hadn’t been achieved on time. This was a common factor where there had been changes to workers disrupting progress from families and not achieving the outcomes that were set out. The plan looked to improve the supervision and management oversight of caseloads. Where it was identified that practice was not at the level required during the audits, the service would quickly put that right and feed learning back into the workforce;

m)    

Within practice week discussions there was always equal weight to good practice and identifying practice that still needed improve;

n)     

The service was building a better library of good practice;

o)     

It was a requirement within the audit work that the service made contact with the children and their parents to seek their views as part of Plymouth’s evaluation of whether something is inadequate, requires improvement or good;

p)     

As part of Practice Weeks, children and young people would be spoken to a part of those weeks.