The
Director of Children’s Care will provide an update on the Performance
Scorecard.
Minutes:
The Head of
Looked after Children and Corporate Parenting was in attendance and provided the Board with information
relating to the Corporate Parenting Board scorecard.
The Director advised that the scorecard was in place for the Corporate
Parenting Board to see how our performance was progressing and have the
opportunity to challenge anything where you saw wasn’t meeting target.
The main points to note were as follows:
Demand
·
There has been an 18.1% reduction in overall numbers of children looked
after since November 2020, evidenced on graph 1.
·
Since the height of 702 looked after children during September 2020,
there has been a reduction of 167 looked after children.
·
The rate of looked
after children per 10,000 of the population has reduced from 165.1 in September
to 159.4 on 29 November.
·
This remains higher
than our statistical neighbour where the rate of looked after children per
10,000 is 125.5.
·
125 children and young people have ceased to be looked after in the last
6 months. 103 children have become
looked after in the same period
In November 2020 the data evidences that for every child ceasing to be
looked after, 1.8 children started to become looked after. This means that more children were becoming
looked after than ceasing and the looked after population continued to
increase.
There has been a month on month reduction in this throughout the year
until March 2021 when improvements resulted in less children becoming looked
after than those ceasing.
This progress has continued. In
June 2021 for every child ceasing to be looked after 0.6 children became looked
after. This has remained static for the
last 4 months.
Permanency
·
In October 25 children ceased to be looked after. Data evidences that the average number of
days that these children were looked after was 151.8 days. A review of the data shows that of these 25
children 5 had been looked after for 5 years or over. 3 of which had turned 18 years.
·
This evidences improvements from last month when
permanence was secured for children who had been looked after for long periods
of time.
·
There
have been 9 SGO/CAOs granted in October and a further SGO at the end of
September granted that was not recorded in the September performance report.
This is largely due to Innovate Phase 2 working through assessments and
reaching the stage where applications are lodged and considered by the court.
·
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SGOs have been secured in the last 6 months leading to permanence for looked
after children, 90 SGOs have been secured in the last 12 months.
Placements with Parents – There were
currently 51 children placed with parent.
39 of these children are subject to a full Care Order. All are tracked
by Permanence Monitoring Group through to revocation of Care Order.
·
In September 2020 there
were 99 children living at home and subject to a Care Order. This has reduced to 51 children in September
2021. This is 51.5% reduction. 6 children ceased to be looked after from a
placement with a parent in October.
·
Data shows an ongoing
downward trend.
Adoption
·
There is a 56% increase of
number of adoption orders in the year 20/21 (25) compared to 2019/2020
(16).
·
In this year to date 17
Adoption Orders have been secured. There are currently a further 32 children
progressing to adoption with Placement Orders.
Only 2 children are not linked to adopters
·
The local authority is on
track to increase the number of children subject to adoption orders
significantly in this financial year.
·
Data evidences that the
number of days between children entering care and being placed in an adoptive
placement has reduced from 641 in January 2021 to 382 days.
Placements
·
The Head of service advised that Graph 1 data shows an
increase in the number of children in placed outside of a 20 mile radius.
·
33 children commenced a new placement in October. Of
which 18 children were placed in Middlesbrough and a further 8 in the Teesside
region.
·
Of the 7 children that were placed outside of Teesside
– 1 child was adopted, 1 placed in a Young Offenders Institute and 4 children
were placed in external residential placements.
These were 4 complex young people.
·
Targeted work is underway to move children in a
planned way to in-house residential placements.
·
In terms of Graph 2 – Data shows an increase in the
number of children placed with in-house foster carers. 20.4% of looked after
children are placed in in-house placements which is 0.6% below target and
improved performance.
·
There has been a reduction in the number of children
in Connected Carers placements, evidencing more children securing
permanence. The performance in this area
is exceeding the target. Of 29% of children in care being in Connected Carer
placements. There are currently 24.3%
with less being better.
Placement Stability
·
The
data evidences that of all the children currently in Middlesbrough care, 65.9%
have had only one placement in the last 12 months. This was 4.1% below the target of 70%
·
At
the end of October 2021 – 37 children looked after by Middlesbrough had
experience 3 or move placement moves in the last 12 months. (6.9% of the cla population).
·
Positively
this has reduced from 39 in September 2021.
This has reduced from 136 in the same period last year. There has been a 71.3% reduction in the
number of children experience experiencing multiple moves. This is lower than the regional and
statistical neighbours and the England average and is very strong
performance.
Finally the Head of
Service outlined some of the quality and impacts:
Visits
96% of looked after children have been seen within the last 6
weeks.
This was a 1% decrease from last month.
This has been consistently high at over 90% since May.
Supervision/Management Oversight
91% of looked after children have had a supervision within the month of
October 2021. There were 36 children who
have not been supervised within October.
This was a 3% decrease from last month.
This has been consistently high at over 90% since May.
Personal Education Plans
Performance in relation to PEPs remains high at 94% of children having a
recorded PEP within the last 6 months.
This performance has remained consistently high and has not dropped
below 93% for the last 12 months.
Health Assessments
90.8% of health checks have been conducted and recorded within the last
12 months. This does not take in to
account those older children who have refused a medical assessment. This has been a 0.7% reduction since
September 2021. Performance has been
consistently high at over 90% for the last 12 months.
Following the presentation,
a Board Member asked whether it would be possible to view other data sets
linked to the scorecard, e.g. gender/ ethnicity/ aspects of special educational
needs to view targeted statistics.
The Head of Service advised
that at present there are more males in care than females, however would be
happy to provide closer analysis.
The Director of Children’s
Services advised that it would be useful for the next scorecard to focus on
slightly varied data, provided a different range (as discussed), which would
widen discussion. This would cover why children come into care and the number
of children who have been prevented coming to care due to the edge of care
service.
AGREED
·
That the information be noted
·
That the information be provided in another form at
the next meeting.