Council and democracy

Agenda item

Portfolio Holder for Children's Services and Adult Social Care Update

This item is a verbal update.

Minutes:

Councillor Halden Portfolio Holder for Children's Services and Adult Social Care, thanked the Chair for allowing him to attend the meeting to update Members on the work of his Portfolio.

 

During his presentation Councillor Halden stated it was his first Corporate Parenting meeting since he had taken over as Cabinet Holder for Social Care at the start of March.  He commented that coming out of Covid-19 officers were still as ambitious as they were before and certainly not letting it get in the way of wanting to achieve the commitments made.

 

He continued to advise the two main area in which he wished to focus on over the coming months were mobility and vulnerability.  Mobility to keep looked after children well and support them achieve their ambitions, and at the same time looking at the change in profile of vulnerability.

 

Councillor Halden observed in terms of vulnerability from recent inspections Thurrock was a safe borough and as such, didn’t want to become complacent so he had requested an independent review of the local safe guarding children partnership arrangements.  This was to ensure that if the council was to have a serious event that the council investigated in a timely manner and secondly he wanted to make sure that the partnership had enough capacity, that it was not just the serious events that trigger a statutory threshold, that were investigated but the wider events; so to see what else we can learn with our partners.

 

In addition officers were working together with the Police and Crime Commissioner, to find ways to better integrate the youth offending service and other services across the system.

 

The Portfolio Holder moved on to mention the Council had been rated through Ofsted as good, Officers were now pushing forward to be outstanding. It was explained this meant the Council improved on getting transitions right and making sure that it’s young people were put in the position where they could achieve their ambitions when they left care and not simply just going through the motions of them going through the system.

 

Finally he mentioned one of the areas he wanted to consider more closely was working with the council’s partners in Fostering and Adoption, and wider to consider the standards to hold themselves too. He continued to state the council had some brilliant figures coming out from the Covid -19 crisis, 94.5% of all looked after children had had their visits completed within time scales. However there had been other figures which were not as good for example, only 58% of pathway plans were completed in April, so he had asked to have wide partnership discussions about the standards to apply to ourselves because ultimately everything the council did for this young people, should be about how positively the council was impacting the life chances of young people and not simply processing them through the system.

 

The Chair of the Committee, thanked Councillor Halden for this update and sought if the Committee had any questions.

 

Councillor Akinbohun firstly thanked the Portfolio Holder for his update. She then queried as to how badly Covid-19 had affected the councils Looked After Children.

 

Councillor Halden stated that Covid-19 had affected every part of society, however one of the things he was proud of was what the team had achieved, with both Social Workers in the council and Foster Carers in trying to maintain normality. He continued by mentioning the work of the virtual school has done a marvel of things over the last few weeks. 

 

The Portfolio Holder commented officers had made sure all of the internal systems were still working, and all working together. It was important to make sure the financial resilience was in place, so as lockdown was starting to be lifted, should there be another wave Covid-19 the Councils Looked After Children would have the support and advice they needed.