Meeting documents

To review and make an assessment of progress against the agreed recommendations of the inquiry 6 months on.

Contributors

·         Mr Warren Whyte, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services

·         Mr Mike Appleyard, Cabinet Member for Education and Skills

·         Mrs Carol Douch, Service Director, Children’s Social Care

The Committee will also be joined by young people at this point to help assess progress.

Members to agree to delegate the assigning of the RAG status to the Chairman following the meeting.

The Chairman welcomed:

·         Mr Warren Whyte, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services

·         Ms Gladys Rhodes White, Executive Director, Children’s Services

·         Laura, Guest Young Person

·         Eve,  Guest Young Person

·         Mr James Fowler,  Youth Service Manager

·         Ms Emily Dover,  Youth Worker

Laura and Eve gave a summary of how they were involved in providing the views of children and young people and Ms Rhodes White summarised the progress so far against each of the recommendations from the report.

Members of the Committee asked questions about:

·         Transition arrangements for children and young people moving into adulthood.

·         Ways of engaging with young children to provide their views.

·         The quality and ease of use of the website for children and young people.

·         How well children and young people felt they were listened to and whether things were improving.

·         Hit rates of the website.

·         How the service let children and young people know what they have done to address feedback.

The following points were made by Laura and Eve in response to the Committee’s questioning:

·         Transition arrangements e.g. from school to college were good with support provided by schools and youth workers in a number of ways.

·         Laura was the joint chair of the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) forum which helped to ensure all SEND children and young people’s voices were heard

·         There was work going on to promote Youth Voice in schools e.g. publicity through assemblies and poster campaigns but there was still more to do.

·         Laura had worked on developing the "local offer" web pages but both Laura and Eve thought the websites for children and families could still be made easier to use particularly for providing feedback.

·         The Children and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMHS) website was good but needed to be publicised to children and young people more.

·         Some children and young people did not have internet access and so this needed to be taken into account when provided information and opportunities to feedback.

·         Eve and Laura felt that they personally were listened to but that they did not always know what had happened as a result of their feedback.

Mr Fowler advised that if children and young people were asked to contribute to service improvement work, they would be given IT equipment to help.

Ms Rhodes White confirmed that she would provide data on how often the children’s services website was used including data to show trends over time.

ACTION: Ms Rhodes White

Ms Rhodes White also explained the process for transition planning for children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities into adult services.

Mr Whyte confirmed that advisers and social workers were now working jointly on transition planning and that the "Staying Put Policy" was being refreshed to make pathways clearer.

Members of the Committee asked the service to engage the help of the Director of Technology Services and involve children and young people in further developing a website hub - (recommendation 4).

ACTION: Ms Rhodes White

RESOLVED: The Committee AGREED to delegate the RAG rating of the recommendations to the Chairman with the ratings being shared with the Committee after the meeting.