Issue - meetings

A report by the Director, Families & Children’s Services is attached. The report provides an overview of the performance and outcomes of children’s social care.

The Local Authority delivers children’s social care in Wiltshire. The performance of the Local authority is inspected by Ofsted. The last inspection was in 2016 and was a Joint Targeted Inspection to examine how local partners, including local authorities, police, probation, and health services, work together to protect children living with domestic abuse.

The committee is asked to provide comments on the report and attached dataset in appendix 1.

A report that provided an overview of the performance and outcomes of children’s social care was presented to the committee.

Points made included:

That the Local Authority delivered children’s social care in Wiltshire. The performance of the Local authority was inspected by Ofsted. The last inspection was in 2016 and was a Joint Targeted Inspection to examine how local partners, including local authorities, police, probation, and health services, work together to protect children living with domestic abuse. The outcome was positive, recognising many good aspects but JTAI’s were not graded. In 2015 the Local Authority was inspected by Ofsted under the Single Inspection Framework which whilst finding a significant number of strengths declared the outcome to be “requiring improvement to be good”.

In October 2017, a new Safeguarding and Support Service was created which expanded the work of the previous social care safeguarding and assessment teams to include resources to support children and families just below the social care threshold - support cases.  The number of support cases had risen as the service continued to develop and embed reaching 422 at the end of March 2018. These cases were either new referrals (via the MASH) or from social care as step-downs.

That there had been a drop in the rate of referrals into social care which had continued from the end of last year and was being monitored as it was below our target range for this year and below comparators.  The overall rate (350/10,000) might be expected given the Wiltshire population profile of relatively low deprivation and there was some reassurance that it is appropriate given the re-referrals remains low. (SN 457, Eng 548)

Re-referral rates had remained stable and were currently just below 18%. This was low supporting our position that the quality of social work practice and step-down arrangements had improved.  (SN 22%, Eng 22%)

The numbers of open social care cases remained relatively stable.

Resolved

1)    That the Children’s Select Committee noted the report and data set.

2)    That the report would be viewed on an annual basis.