Agenda item

Croydon Safeguarding Children Partnership Annual Report 2019/20

Meeting of Cabinet, Monday, 14th December, 2020 6.30 pm (Item 99/20)

Cabinet Member: Cabinet Member for Children, Young People & Learning, Councillor Alisa Flemming

Officer: Interim Executive Director of Children, Families & Education, Debbie Jones

Key decision: no

Decision:

The Leader of the Council delegated authority to the Cabinet to make the following decisions:

RESOLVED: To note the Croydon Safeguarding Children Partnership (CSCP) Annual Report for 2019/20 which sets out:

· The transition achieved to the new multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.

· The CSCP contribution to the improvement journey of Children’s Social Care.

· The Good Ofsted inspection outcome for Children’s Social Care

· The progress relating to the priorities of the CSCP

· The assessment and scrutiny of safeguarding arrangements against the six safeguarding standards

· Summary of safeguarding issues across the CSCP

Minutes:

The Cabinet Member for Families, Children and Education introduced the report. She commended the work the partnership had contributed to children with disabilities, vulnerable young adolescents and neglect. The partnership also notably helped the council’s improvement journey and the ‘Good’ rating awarded by Ofsted. The report detailed the transitional process to the new multi-agency arrangements.

Di Smith, Croydon Safeguarding Children partnership (CSCP) Independent Chair & Scrutineer, gave the presentation outlining the first annual report of the partnership and its work.

The Interim Executive Director of Children, Families & Education stated that she would be speaking from her current council role and as a former national multi-agency facilitator for local authority arrangements. She stated that the improvement in partnership arrangements would have contributed to the recognition Ofsted gave to Croydon’s overall improvement, which was reflected in the report. As this was the first report of the CSCP, naturally there would be transitional changes to come and challenge had been reflected in the discussion seen at the Scrutiny Children & Young People Sub-Committee. Members of that meeting asked the CSCP to provide assurance in relation to antenatal and development checks and more information regarding the partially met aspects of the neglect priority group. The report detailed the work planned for the ‘Neglect’ priority group during 2020, however the work had experienced delay due to pandemic.

In common with other partnerships, Croydon developed a neglect screening tool to enable greater awareness, which was a crucial instrument in identifying child neglect, early health and prevention. Other elements included the graded care profile, the development of locality arrangements and community of practice approach. In the end the impact of the newer safeguarding arrangements could only be judged by the difference in outcomes and impact on young people and the extent to which the work that was being pursued by all partners to ensure timely and early intervention to support children and families. Those monitors were appropriately requested by Members of the Children & Young People Scrutiny Sub-Committee.

The Cabinet Member for Families, Children and Education thanked Di Smith, CSCP Independent Chair & Scrutineer, Elaine Clancy, Joint Chief Nurse for Croydon Health Service NHS Trust and NHS Croydon Clinical Commissioning Group, Neil Cochlin, Detective Superintendent & Business Change Manager at Metropolitan Police- Head of Safeguarding, Croydon Bromley and Sutton and the Interim Executive Director of Children, Families & Education for their roles in the CSCP work. They had seen a dramatic and reinvigorated change in how the partners worked together. It was also important to highlight the work of the local authority into partnership, although it was not named as a lead partner in statue.

The report detailed the partnership’s work earlier in the year on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) agenda, which was a powerful message to the community. A wider nationwide piece of work that the partnership contributed to was looking into school exclusions of Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic (BAME) pupils. Some of the key commitments in the report was work around the youth offending service, supporting the reduction in disproportionality of BAME children who came to the attention of gangs, supporting the complex adolescent panel and incorporating the multi-agenda group for child exploitation.

In response to the Cabinet Member for Culture & Regeneration asking what the impact was of the ratio of Unaccompanied Asylum Seeker Children (UASC) in the looked after children population on the council’s ability to care for looked after children, the Interim Executive Director of Children, Families & Education stated that Croydon consistently responded to the challenges faced by UASC as they would any other vulnerable young person. One-third of looked after children and three-fifths care leavers in Croydon were UASC. Croydon delivered quality services to those young people from the point of entry to exit from the system.

The Cabinet Member for Croydon Renewal stated that in previous years the annual report of the board included details of internal meeting records, however this year those were not included. He asked if that was a conscious decision to not include those details for the partnership report. In response, Di Smith, CSCP Independent Chair & Scrutineer, stated that the new partnership arrangements did change the responsibility and requirement. Under the old arrangements, the lead member was invited to attend in an observatory less open capacity. The executive group now had the three agency representatives and were run more as events rather than business meetings with more focus on learning and raising awareness. As mentioned by the lead member, the partnership responded to the BLM movement, as it was raised by a number of voluntary organisations as a safeguarding issue and an important subject for young people. The new arrangements enabled the partnership to be more responsive to emerging needs, rather than what previously occurred of being limited to set reports.

In response to the Cabinet Member for Communities, Safety & Resilience asking for more information in relation to the response from the partnership to BLM and Covid, Di Smith, CSCP Independent Chair & Scrutineer, stated that the executive group decided that it was important for one of the events to involve community and voluntary sector organisations and to hear directly from children and young people. Young people’s words and experiences around the killing of George Floyd were presented at the group, which was a valuable and profound involvement to the partnership.

The Shadow Cabinet Member for Children, Young People & Learning thanked colleagues for the detailed report, as well as the Review into Vulnerable Adolescents that received national coverage in 2019. She stated that the report was even more important during the impact of Covid on children. It was encouraging to see the partnership responding to new challenges, collating new data, new forward plans, new training and new ways of working going forward. In common with the comments from scrutiny, she stated that it was not clear in the report the effect of the safeguarding arrangements and the outcomes for the vulnerable children, which would be useful in a future paper. Additionally, she praised the inclusion of a glossary and said that this work should be accessible to any reader, however more could be done to achieve that. In relation to the local authority as one-third of the partnership going bankrupt, she firstly asked how that would affect the partnership work going forward in safeguarding children, and secondly, how the number of children in care could be safely reduced in the best interests of the child.

Di Smith, CSCP Independent Chair & Scrutineer, replied that in terms of the financial contributions, the safeguarding partners gave the same amount and rationale to the partnership as they did previously to the board and there were no plans in place for that to change. The Interim Executive Director of Children, Families & Education stated Croydon Council was making a higher contribution than the other partners did not affect the levels of accountability across the partnership arrangement. The good work of the CSCP was strong alongside the Children’s Improvement Board and the work of the Children & Young People Scrutiny Sub-Committee. Safeguarding remained the service’s top priority, whether in financial challenges or not, and they would maintain statutory responsibilities to children. In terms of children in care, decisions would be based on the best interest of the children and young people and not financial factors. Croydon would continue to significantly invest in edge of care services and aim to keep children out of the care system and at home wherever possible, and when in care, to give them the best possible care – which did not necessarily equate to the amount of money in the system.

The Opposition Lead Member for Scrutiny and the Chair of the Children & Young People Scrutiny Sub-Committee thanked colleagues for the report and praised the accessible format. He drew attention to the pre-decision scrutiny section of the CSCP report which referred to the Sub-Committee held on 3 November 2020, Page 9 of the agenda. He highlighted the following comments: there was no police representative at the meeting so no judgement could be made on their involvement in the partnership, some targets were not quantified therefore progress and outcomes were difficult to track and health checks were statistically significantly lower than neighbouring boroughs and there were no plans for improvement. Development checks were another opportunity to identify the potential for neglect, identified in the Vulnerable Adolescents Review, however the synergy for this appeared to not yet have been realised. He also noted that it had been repeatedly raised that there was not an equal funding agreement between the partners. He stated that in future the CSCP annual report should include concerns raised by scrutiny and reflect a more balanced summary of findings.

Di Smith, CSCP Independent Chair & Scrutineer, replied that there had been limitations in progress made last year in terms of the ability to deliver training during the pandemic and the concerns raised were not related to a lack of synergy between the priority groups. During that period, there was still a commitment to roll out the graded care profile which was a key tool for all partners to identify neglect.

In response to comments regarding the partnership funding agreement, Neil Cochlin, Detective Superintendent & Business Change Manager at Metropolitan Police - Head of Safeguarding for Croydon, Bromley and Sutton, stated that the police share was centrally distributed by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC). The funding formula was not in the gift of local leaders and was set by MOPAC. Concerns surrounding this issue not just in Croydon. Elaine Clancy, Joint Chief Nurse for Croydon Health Service NHS Trust and NHS CCG, added that the CCG and NHS had maintained their level of financial contribution, despite those partners working much closer together, by recognising the partnership and the financial challenges across the Croydon system. In relation to health visits, she stated that the CSCP would be reporting to the Children & Young People Scrutiny Sub-Committee on 19 January 2021 to talk through a detailed action plan organised by the Public Health and local authority commissioners.