Agenda and minutes

To receive any declarations of interest.

There were no declarations of interest received at this point in the meeting.

The minutes from You Matter to Us - Corporate Parenting Board, held on 28 November 2023 were submitted and approved as a true record.

Our Care Ambassadors will provide an update to Board from the period December 2023- February 2024.

A report of the Voice and Influence Manager was presented to update the Members on activity during the period December 2023 to February 2024.

During December 2023 the care experienced young people held their Christmas party at the Riverside Stadium and also enjoyed a bowling event.  In January the group met and discussed ideas for activities in 2024 which included budgeting, cooking, creating an independence checklist and visiting a theatre.  A talk on personal finances and how to budget was also provided.  In February a session was held to inform young people how they could get involved in their Children Looked After Review and how this could be improved.  A guide for young people would be created as a result of the feedback from the session.

The older care experienced young people/adults had participated in the following:

·        Attended the 'We Matter' groups in December 2023 and January 2024.

·        The Care Ambassadors supported the Participation Team with the engagement sessions at the special schools in Middlesbrough.

·        Helped set up the room for the 'We Matter' Christmas party and made sure all the young people had a great time.

·        Joined the Youth Council for their Christmas meal.

·        24 January 2024 - Interviewed candidates for the Director of Children's Care post.

·        24 January 2024 - Five older care experienced young adults met with the Care Ambassadors to hear all about the wonderful work they do. The group decided they wanted to create another Forum so they and others could have a voice. The first meeting was held on the 13 February 2024.

·        30 January 2024 - The Care Ambassadors, the five young adults who were going to attend the new Forum and two older members of 'We Matter' met with their Corporate Parents to talk more about the Pledges that had been made. An action plan had been created to make sure decision makers acted on what they had said.

·        31 January 2024 - Helped deliver a slot during the Mandatory Children's Services Induction session, where they explained their roles as a Care Ambassadors.

Planned actions for the next few months included:

·        Continue meeting with Corporate Parents and monitor progress with the Pledges.

·        Continue to work with the 'We Matter' and put on events to engage with more Children Looked After.   Engage more with older care experienced young people through the Forum and encourage them to become Care Ambassadors.

·        Have all our care experienced young people/adults set up as volunteers.

            Create ASDAN awards to provide accreditation for their work and the young             people they work with Work with the Commissioning team to create 'Young             Commissioners'

·        Meet with more care experienced young people who live in residential care.

·        Involve 'We Matter' and the Care Ambassadors to take part in the Regional Children in Care Council work, attend the conference on the 3rd April and go on the residential 12-14 April.

The group requested that six key decision makers were identified to attend to Regional Children in Care Council Conference on 3 April 2024.

AGREED  ...  view the full minutes text for item 22/4

Dawn Alaszewski, Director of Children’s Care will present Middlesbrough’s Performance data to the Board.

The Director of Children’s Care presented the latest You Matter To Us Performance Data.  The information provided had been compiled using the Children’s Services Analysis Tool (ChAT) based on OFSTED’s inspecting local authority services for children (ILACS) Annex A dataset (2020)/Inspection Report.

The following issues were highlighted:

·        Concerns around health and dental checks.

·        Updated assessments for children.

·        Children returning home to live with parents.

·        Unaccompanied asylum seekers.

·        Financial data set.

·        Care leavers.

The ChAT tool provided an overarching analysis of the key performance data and identified some trends around children looked after.  Comparison from January 2023 to January 2024 showed a reduction of 50% in children coming into care.  Work continued around improving performance on decision making and the timing for dental checks and health assessments.

Middlesbrough’s cohort of unaccompanied asylum seekers was currently below the quota and discussions were taking place with another Authority as to the infrastructure that would be required for Middlesbrough to support more young people.  This could also potentially provide a financial stream for the Council.

Regarding the number of children returning to live with family or parents, some analysis had been undertaken around the original decision-making.  It was clarified that the decisions that were made had been correct when children came into care but sometimes the work needed to ensure that they were returned home safely had not always been completed as quickly as would have been preferred.   

Work was also being undertaken with Connected Carers, who were classed as Foster Carers and on Special Guardianship Orders, to try and reduce the numbers of children in care. 

Audits were undertaken on the last ten children or young people that came into care to try and learn from those experiences and ensure that there were consistent thresholds for early help and prevention.   

It was noted that all Corporate Parenting Boards used this same level of data.  The service needed to ensure that children received timely reviews and visits and, when it was safe to do so, were returned to parents or under a Special Guardianship Order.   

AGREED that the information provided was received and noted.

Maria Farrow-Tait, Interim Designated Nurse Safeguarding Children/ Children in Care (Tees Valley),  will provide an update to the Board from health information relating to our Children Looked After.

The Interim Designated Nurse Safeguarding Children/Children in Care NENC ICB presented a report, the purpose of which was to:

•           Demonstrate the duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in             care.

•           Assure the corporate parenting board that health services to children in care             were provided without undue delay or geographical prejudice.

•           Demonstrate the aim of the Looked After Health team was for sustained

            improvement in the health and wellbeing of children in care and those             leaving care.

•           Ensure the child’s voice around health issues were included wherever             possible.

•           Report on compliance to statutory targets from the Looked After Health Team             for Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust.

The report considered compliance for initial health assessments, review health assessments, health registrations and health passports.

Local Authorities were responsible for ensuring a health assessment of physical, emotional, and mental health needs was completed for every child within 20 working days of becoming looked after.  Statistics relating to the  Initial Health Assessments undertake in Quarter 3 were detailed at Table 1 of the submitted report.

Review Health Assessments had to take place at least every six months before a child’s fifth birthday and at least once every twelve months after the child’s fifth birthday within the month they became looked after.  Statistics relating to the Review Health Assessments undertaken in Quarter 3 were included at Table 2 of the submitted report.

Compliance with initial health assessments within timescales was less than 10% and with review health assessments, less than 90%.

Challenges faced included:

•           Delays in receiving medical consent for initial health assessments was 100%             in Q3.

•           A lack of available clinics for initial health assessments accounted for over             89% of the delays.

•           Throughout Q3 the Harrogate and District Foundation Trust team had             experienced significant sickness within the team, which impacted the             team’s capacity to undertake review health assessments.

Actions taken to address the issues were as follows:

•           Rapid improvement workshop remained in place.

•           A service review with the Designated Nurses and the Senior Clinical             Commissioning Officer was in progress and regular contract meetings             remained in place.

•           Tees Valley CiC service introduced the RHA risk assessment tool to ensure             that children and young people had their health reviewed in accordance with             need as opposed to due date.

•           This risk assessment had been used throughout Quarter 3 to assess the risk             in relation to the team’s capacity. The Named Nurse risk assessed the health             records of all the children who had been allocated to the staff members not at             work. It was reassuring to see that out of 36 risk assessments, there was only             one young person who had increasing risk and needed seeing as a matter of             urgency.

A Member queried the delays in receiving medical consent for initial health assessments (IHA).  It was clarified that the consent had to be obtained by the Social Worker and signed by parents to agree to their child receiving an IHA.  Social Workers had  ...  view the full minutes text for item 22/6

Dawn Alaszewski, Director of Children’s Care will lead the discussion regarding the Top 3 priorities for our care experienced young people.

The Director of Children’s Care gave a presentation in relation to the Corporate Parent Pledges to Care Experienced Young People.

The purpose of the pledges was to ensure that young people were holding the Corporate Parents to account and that progress on the pledges was regularly monitored through the Board.

The following updates were provided within the presentation:

On 23 October 2023,  care experienced young people met with the Interim Director of Children Care and the Service Manager for Residential and Resources to talk about what additional support they wanted to improve their experiences.

On 9 November 2023 at the You Matter To Us (Corporate Parenting Board) wider engagement session, Corporate Parents heard what young people had said and made pledges to improve their experiences.  The pledges were included in the presentation.

On 30 January 2024 – at the You Matter To Us (Corporate Parenting Board) wider engagement session, Corporate Parents worked with care experienced young people to understand more about what they wanted.

All pledge-makers who were present at the meeting were invited by the Mayor to provide a brief verbal update on actions taken.

A plan of action had been developed to monitor progress on each pledge.  The Mayor suggested that the Care Ambassadors should sign off on completed actions.

AGREED that the information provided was received and noted.

Paul Harrison, Partnership Manager will provide the Annual update to the Board, with specific reference to the work South Tees Youth Justice Service provide and offer support for children looked after.

The report outlined the offer to children who were looked after and also open to South Tees Youth Justice Service.   Some brief caseload demographic information was included to provide some context to the Board.  The report also focussed on the key achievements in the last twelve months and planned future development.

The vast majority of looked after children and care leavers did not get involved with the justice system, however they remained over-represented compared with others in the criminal justice system.  In December 2022 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published information which showed that children in care appeared to enter the justice system earlier than children who had not been in care.  Whilst imprisonment was a relatively unusual outcome, a high proportion of those in custody had Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND).

Information contained within the Local Authority Interactive Tool, showed that in Middlesbrough in 2023, 3% of children who were looked after had been convicted or were subject to a Youth Caution.  This was in line with the North East (3%) but above the national (in England 2%) figures.

The breakdown of open cases between 1 January and 31 December 2023, was included at paragraph 10 of the submitted report.  The largest proportion of children open to the service were white British boys aged fifteen or over.   13.3% of children open to the service in 2023 were children looked after.  The STYJS Executive Management Board met on a quarterly basis and scrutinised caseload information relating to first time entrants to the system, re-offending and use of custody.  This multi-agency Board offered challenge to the service in relation to the data and had responsibility for monitoring and responding to any disproportionality issues.

The Service had successfully introduced three key new projects within the last 12 months: Turnaround, Immediate Justice and Custody Navigators.

Turnaround was a new programme developed by the Ministry of Justice (MOJ), providing funding to Youth Justice Teams to enable them to intervene earlier and improve outcomes for children on the cusp of entering the youth justice system.  The overall aims of the Turnaround programme were to:

•           Achieve positive outcomes for children with the ultimate aim of preventing them going on to offend.

•           Build on work already done to ensure all children on the cusp of the youth justice system were consistently offered a needs assessment and the opportunity for support.

•           Improve the socio-emotional, mental health and wellbeing of children.

•           Improve the integration and partnership working between YJS’s and other statutory services to support children.

Turnaround went ‘live’ in January 2023 and was funded until March 2025. STYJS had been given a target number of children to work with,  and to date only 1 out of 45 successful closures had gone on to re-offend.  Sadly, the eligibility criteria for Turnaround precluded Looked After Children, however it did allow the service to work with children subject to Early Help and Child in Need, and therefore the service worked closely with colleagues in  ...  view the full minutes text for item 22/8

Rob Hamer, Interim Head of Service – Placements & Resource will present the fostering report.

The Interim Head of Service, Placements and Resource, presented the Annual Report 2023/2024 on Fostering which included statistical data on the Fostering Service.

The Service continued to have the highest number of children placed with in-house fostering families.  Overall, there had been a reduction of 24 children in foster care over an 18 months period due to a number of reasons.  The largest number were children moving from connected care arrangements to family arrangements, such as Special Guardianship Orders.  In the previous 11 months there had been 17 connected carers deregistered in this respect.

In February 2023 Middlesbrough Council increased payments to foster carers and introduced level payments instead of banding.  This meant that Middlesbrough Council were now competitive with Independent Fostering Agencies (IFAs) and over the last 12 months there had been an increase in approved foster carers.  In 2023, 11 foster carers were approved compared to the previous 12 months when 1 was approved.  There were 7 foster carers in assessment which would increase the number of placements to Middlesbrough children by a further 12 placements.  There had been a number of new foster carers who had transferred from other Local Authorities (LAs) and a number from IFAs to Middlesbrough Council. 

Over the previous 13 months, no connected carers assessments had gone out of the 24-week timescale.  Timescales and practice guidance was in place on connected assessments making them more robust and child-focused.  The service was stable with no agency workers across the three teams.  A Social Worker was DDP trained to lead and offer Dyadic Developmental Parenting to carers and social worker consultations.  The fostering service now received the same training offer as both Residential and Resources, giving social workers and carers greater knowledge and support.

A weekly stability discussion took place between Futures for Families and Fostering to prevent placement breakdowns for teenagers in fostering arrangements and the impact of this would be detailed in future reports.

The creation of a dashboard for Fostering was underway which would give managers greater oversight of the service, and enable data to be more quickly accessible allowing managers to spend more time with staff as well as the ability to complete observations.

There were a number of issues causing concern which were listed as follows:

•           The number of children that continued to be placed in unregulated connected care placements as a result of no, or negative, assessments.

•           A failed launch of the “Mockingbird” fostering model in May 2023. This will be relaunched in May 2024 with consultation meetings currently ongoing in this regard.

•           The recruitment of foster carers and marketing was handled regionally, led by TFC, under the umbrella of Foster with North East. Since its inception in September 2023 there had been a reduction in enquiries leading to initial visits.

•           Available capacity with foster carers to care for teenagers in an emergency following placement or family breakdowns. Don’t have enough carers for teenagers.

Added complications included:

•           Restrictions on how the Council advertised for  ...  view the full minutes text for item 22/9

Adam Hart, Headstart South Tees Apprentice and Care Ambassador will present a report to the Board regarding the NENC Care Leavers project.

Also in attendance will be Emilia Soulby, Network Development Manager, North East and North Cumbria Child Health and Wellbeing Network and Jo Morgan, System Leader for Cared for Children.

A report was presented that provided an interim update on the Care Leavers project from the North East and North Cumbria (NENC) Child Health and Wellbeing Network.  The report outlined the key findings of a recent questionnaire, summarised the projects’ purpose, expected outcomes and next steps.

Within the footprint of NENC there were high numbers of cared for children and therefore the population of care leavers was significant.  Care leavers were more prevalent to suffer inequalities that their peers who had not been subject to the care system.   There was a commitment to levelling up and reducing inequalities faced by vulnerable groups within the region.   The project aimed to firstly engage with care leavers to understand what life was like for them and gain understanding of their day-to-day experiences which might impact on their wellbeing.  Consideration would then be given to  consider how services could work together, share good practice, and engage better with young people to improve life outcomes for them.

Using the Core 20 Plus 5 Toolkit, the population of Care Leavers had been identified in Middlesbrough.  Consideration of data around mental health, housing, and work/education was identified.

The Project Objectives were as follows:

1.         To hear the voice of our young people. To effectively work with our young people.  Capture their opinions which could help the development of a co-produced project that was meaningful to them both qualitative and quantitative methods.

2.         Data collection. To understand the needs of our young people on leaving care within an area of NENC to provide a representation of our cared for population using publicly available data.

3.         Share learning across the NENC footprint via the creation of a report to be shared with key stakeholders.

Research undertaken to date included:

•           3 health inequalities were identified through the core 20+5 analysis, those being: food insecurity, emotional health and accommodation. This information was used to shape the professional and Young Persons Questionnaires.

•           A 20-question survey was sent out to all members of Middlesbrough Children’s Services staff, asking for feedback on current services, what professionals thought were the key issues young people faced, and how services could be improved to ensure maximum efficiency.

•           A 24-question survey was sent out to senior management and team managers to pass on to every young person in their service to gain feedback on young people’s views on services on how they could be improved, this was still open for responses.

•           32 professionals responded to the survey.

The professionals survey covered three main topics: mental health, housing and cost of living.  The topics were highlighted as important through the core 20 + 5 analysis and the questions were structured around this.

Initial findings highlighted that the majority of professionals felt that emotional pressure had increased for young people leaving care.  Some professionals believed the lack of fostering provision and young people being placed in residential homes, also had an impact on young people’s emotional health.  One professional stated one of the biggest impacts of  ...  view the full minutes text for item 22/10

None.