Agenda item

To provide Brent Corporate Parenting Committee with information about the ‘Your life, your care’ survey, which was carried out with looked after children and young people in November/December 2020, and how the Council is responding to the results.

Sonya Kalyniak (Head of Safeguarding and Quality Assurance, Brent Council) introduced the report, which provided information about the ‘your life, your care’ survey and how the Council was responding to the results. She advised the Committee that the survey was conducted through the University of Oxford. It had been developed with children and young people to ensure it was easy to access and quick to complete, meaning the Council could get a really good representation of children’s voices. The Committee heard that the Council put a lot of effort into promoting the survey through schools, foster carers and Independent Reviewing Officers, and elected members could be confident that this was a fair representation of young peoples’ experience in care. There were responses from 36% of eligible children, meaning the survey was statistically relevant.

The key areas the results of the survey showed had gone well were; children and young people felt safe at home; a high proportion of respondents said they trusted their carers; children and young people knew who their social worker was and trusted them, which was an improvement from the 2018 survey results; and there had been an increase in young people with less variation in social workers, with 40% of respondents aged 11-18 having had one social worker in the last 12 months, compared to 16% in 2018. The areas children and young people said needed to be improved were; feeling settled, with 76% reporting feeling settled compared to 90% in other local authorities benchmarked against; knowing their personal history and why they were in care; and contact and spending time with birth families. When Care in Action had discussed the results of the survey, they had discussed the topic of bullying, which had come up in the survey, and how the local authority could support people experiencing bullying. They also spoke about having a pet and contact with families.

The results of the survey were considered at a local partnership meeting to address key themes, which had good attendance from looked after children, care leavers, social workers and senior managers across the different service areas. Onder Beter (Head of LAC and Permanency, Brent Council) would lead on the improvement plan following the results.

The Chair thanked Sonya Kalyniak for her introduction and invited comments from the Committee, with the following points raised:

In relation to the timescales of the survey, the Committee were advised that the service was committed to doing a survey every 2 years, as it took a while from completion to get the results and then implement the improvement work. It was felt that 2 years would be sufficient time to see the impact of the improvement plan.

Sonya Kalyniak confirmed that the service would go back to the young people who had taken part in the survey as a ‘you said, we did’ exercise to show the respondents that their voice had made a difference, which would encourage them to complete the survey again in the future.

The Committee noted that young people had chosen not to prioritise the theme around young people feeling that they could talk to an adult they lived with, and queried what could be done to help in that area to open up conversations. Sonya Kalyniak advised that, although the CIA and CLIA groups had chosen specific areas to look at, the service would look at all areas that needed to be worked on. Training for foster carers about how to open up conversations and encourage vulnerable young people to share with adults they lived with was part of addressing that priority.

The Committee commended section 4.3.1 of the report, which stated that 40% of Brent young people reported they had one social worker in 12 months. They asked what further work would be done to improve that even more. Nigel Chapman (Operational Director for Integration and Improved Outcomes, Brent Council) agreed that the results indicated the impact of having a stable and permanent management group. He advised that the caseload in LAC and Permanency was manageable, to enable social workers to feel that they could do direct focused work with their children, and there had been a lot of work within the management group to develop and support that approach. The recruitment and retention challenge for the CYP department was frontline child protection teams, which was an issue nationally. The Council had agreed to increase resource for some frontline child protection teams to reduce caseloads, which would be proposed to the General Purposes Committee. It was hoped that package would strengthen the progress made in this area even more.

Councillor McLennan was invited to contribute to the Committee, and asked about the feasibility of children and young people having more contact with their families in the context of child protection processes and regulations. Gail Tolley (Strategic Director Children and Young People, Brent Council) advised that the level of contact families had was ordered by the court and not a decision made by the Council in care proceedings cases. In some circumstances, it would be related to the experience they had with their birth families, and having a more stable social worker workforce would not necessarily increase the contact time children and young people had with their birth families. Onder Beter reminded those present that the survey had been undertaken after the first national lockdown where in-person contact had been restricted, and may have been completed in a context where children were missing seeing their birth families face to face.

The Committee noted that the report highlighted children and young people would like more opportunity to do different activities, recalling the earlier conversation with CIA representatives about expanding events. In relation to how the programmes were designed, Sonya Kalyniak advised that the activities were driven as much as possible by what young people wanted to see. The CLIA and CIA groups were the Children in Care Council so did a lot of work outside of activities, co-ordinating and ensuring young people had a wide variety of opportunities on offer. The responsibility for organising and arranging activities sat with the LAC and Permanency Team. Gail Tolley advised the Committee that through the Virtual School at half term some looked after children were going to an event at Oti Mbusi’s Dance School which everyone was looking forward to. There had been restrictions which had meant the service were not able to do as many face to face activities, but they were now being put back in place led by the interests of children and young people. Onder Beter concluded by highlighting that an expansion of activities was also heavily reliant on resources.

RESOLVED:

i)              To note the report.