Children’s Trust Board(CTB)-November 26th 2009

Main areas of discussion

Ofsted improvement action plan:- Richard Hubbard, Interim Director Children’s services authority (DCSA), comments that issues around lack of clarity, poor communication and variable compliance need to be addressed. One of the first actions has been to re-align the line-management arrangements for acute & complex services to ensure there is a direct line to the DCSA. The improvement action plan will be monitored by an Improvement board which will be independently chaired by someone appointed by the DCSF. Ofsted will review safeguarding in March but ‘Mystery Shopper’ activity will take place prior to the review.
LAA (Local Area Agreement)funding:- Board agree to proposal for continuation funding for children’s block of the area based grant for 2010/11. A task group from the CTB has been set up to look at the Performance reward grant element of the LAA funding to develop sound proposals around spend linked to improvement plan.
Serious Case Review (SCR) feedback:- A SCR is held when a child or vulnerable adult dies or suffers serious harm as a result of abuse or neglect. The SCR is to identify whether there are any lessons to be learned and to feed back their findings. The most recent SCR, identified common themes. - losing focus on child/vulnerable adult, - poor assessment and analysis of risk of harm, -issues around thresholds, -poor information sharing, -not following child protection procedures.

Information items

Issues the voluntary sector need to respond to are ;