Agenda item

This report fulfils the Council’s statutory obligation to present an annual report to the Corporate Parenting Committee (CPC) on outcomes for Looked After Children and Care Leavers, in line with the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review Regulations (2010). The report provides a summary of the activity alongside the strengths and areas for growth in supporting Looked After Children and Care Leavers in Brent.

Kelli Eboji (Head of LAC and Permanency, Brent Council) introduced a report which provided a summary of the activity alongside strengths and areas for development in supporting looked after children and care leavers in Brent. In introducing the report, she highlighted the following key points:

·         The highest priority the previous year had been to address issues around staff recruitment and retention, particularly of social workers. There had been big moves forward in recruiting permanent social workers over the last year, compared to the previous year where the LAC teams were holding 1/3 of vacancies.

·         The improvements in recruitment and retention had been done through a range of actions including recruiting through specialist agencies, recruiting internationally and newly qualified social workers.

·         Over the reporting year the Council had continued to work with health partners to improve outcomes for looked after children and care leavers. Focused work had been undertaken to ensure young people had access to their health histories when leaving care and embedding in practice that updated health information booklets were provided.

·         The participation offer had been improved over the last year with an updated participation strategy. The Council was working with Barnardo’s through Brent Care Journeys which had finished last month, and there was now a transition period to ‘Brent Care Journeys 2.0’ which was due to launch in Autumn 2024.

·         Work was being done on accommodation pathways and developing independent skills for care leavers.

·         A Bright Spots survey had taken place and the Council was awaiting the results of that.

·         The social work service continued to work on life story work for children in care and would keep this as a priority as the Council moved into the new reporting year. There was bespoke training available on life story work through WEST. The service was exploring IT platforms to improve that work with children and their carers.

·         Three-monthly case summaries had been introduced for all children in care.

The Chair thanked Kelli Eboji for her introduction and invited contributions from the Committee, with the following points raised:

CLIA asked about the work on accommodation pathways. Kelli Eboji explained that the service was looking to expand the ways young people could move out into independence alongside promoting an independence programme as part of ASDAN.

CLIA asked what support was available for care leavers at university during the holiday periods when they had no access to their student loan. Kelli Eboji would get back to CLIA regarding their entitlements, highlighting that there was support available for care leavers during the holiday periods through rent payments, accommodation and subsistence depending on the needs of the care leaver. The support offer was tailored due to individual nuances which could cause confusion over entitlements. Kelli Eboji would work with the leaving care teams to improve the communications around the support offer to make it clearer for care leavers.

CLIA noted that the number of young people post-16 in employment, education or training had not changed from the previous year and highlighted that many children in care and care leavers found their education disrupted, resulting in poorer attainment than some would have wanted. CLIA added that the government no longer funded young people to return to education to improve their qualifications, and asked whether there was any financial or career support available to support young people to return to education to advance their careers. Nigel Chapman (Corporate Director Children and Young People, Brent Council) highlighted that this could be raised through the Brent Virtual School. If re-taking GCSEs or A-Levels was part of the young persons pathway as part of their career progression then he believed the Council should be supporting that. More generally in relation to education, employment and training, officers added that the Council department ran an apprenticeship programme that was made available to care leavers.

In relation to the paid Care Quality Ambassadors positions, the Committee hoped these would be further developed so that they could do more. Members were advised that those ambassadors had only just started doing semi-independent provision inspections so the role was still in development. Officers agreed that the service should be creative with those roles and how the ambassadors could be used to expand into other areas. Those inspections of accommodation for 16+ would take a while to complete as that provision was now regulated by Ofsted therefore there was a need for young people to be thorough and cover the vast range of providers.

The Committee was encouraged that the Council was now collecting further information on children and young people going missing. Based on return home interviews, members asked whether there were any key learnings or commonalities coming out of that about why children and young people were going missing. Kelli Eboji explained that return home interviews were standard practice and conducted routinely for young people returning from missing. She advised that each reason was unique to that young person, and often young people who went missing were particularly vulnerable to child sexual exploitation, criminal exploitation, and had connections with other young people who were vulnerable to exploitation and high risk activity. Where young people came out of their families and were in a placement with a lack of relationship or connection, the pull to people they felt connected with was strong which at times leads to them going missing from placement. The Social Worker Practice Consultant role leads on co-ordinating and overseeing missing and vulnerable adolescents in order to build up a rapport and be that consistent presence. This allowed for more quality information from the young person and enabled more robust planning with the professional network in terms of supporting the young person to sustain their placement and avoid them going missing.

The Committee noted the aim of completing care proceedings within 26 days, but highlighted that the report showed Brent going beyond those 26 weeks and the national average. Members asked what was being done to meet the national average with an overall aim of meeting the 26-week deadline. Kelli Eboji affirmed that the Council’s goal was always to complete care proceedings within 26 weeks, but the last few years had presented challenges. During Covid, court hearings had moved online and this had created significant delays in proceedings. Some cases went beyond 50 weeks because of their complexities such as international issues, fact finding and criminal matters. The service hoped to bring that backlog of court cases down over the coming year now that the courts were fully open and face to face. Nigel Chapman (Corporate Director Children and Young People, Brent Council) added that there were similar patterns of delays in other local authorities who used the West London Family Courts. Brent Council escalated issues with the courts where needed. The Committee asked for a percentage figure for the reasons behind delays for future reports of this nature.

In relation to the chart in section 6.4 of the report detailing the number of children who had 3 or more placements, the Committee asked whether there was anything being done about the number of placements they were having. Officers explained that the service did its best to minimise the disruption of placement changes. Some of those placement changes were not always due to placement breakdowns but could be because the young person was moving to a family member or coming out of care to return to their parents. To alleviate the impacts of placement changes, placement matching and sufficiency, as well as increasing the number of placements, was important, so officers were working closely on the West London Fostering Hub to try to recruit more foster carers. The Committee requested information on the percentage figures of placement moves that happened for positive reasons.

RESOLVED:

i)              To note the content of the report.