Agenda item

To receive a summary of the activity alongside strengths and areas for growth in supporting care experienced children and young people in Brent. This report fulfils the Council’s statutory obligations to present an annual report to the Corporate Parenting Committee, in line with the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review Regulations (2010).

Kelli Eboji (Head of LAC and Permanency, Brent Council) introduced the Annual Corporate Parenting Report 2025-26 detailing outcomes for Children Looked After and Care Leavers and a summary of the activity across the reporting year.

The Chair thanked Kelli Eboji for the report and then invited comments and questions from Committee members with the following raised:

The Committee asked how the Council retained local foster carers. Nigel Chapman (Corporate Director Children, Young People and Community Development, Brent Council) advised that when foster carers were asked why they fostered for Brent, many responded that they wanted to give something back to their community. Fostering a child who lived in Brent meant it was easier for a local foster carer to get them to school and support contact with their family. If a foster carer looked after a child from another borough, then there was a need for them to travel more. Carers who continued to foster in Brent fed back that they enjoyed the support and relationship they had with their supervising social worker and training offer. Kelli Eboji added that the Mockingbird Constellation Model of Support, which Brent had introduced during the reporting year, provided an additional level of support. The Council was now looking to establish a second constellation working with carers to build communities between themselves.

In terms of recruitment of foster carers, Kelli Eboji advised that there was a lot of work in that space which would be detailed in the next fostering update report. A report was due to be submitted to Cabinet to extend the current recruitment programme the Council had with West London, which was a West London Fostering Hub made up of 8 West London Boroughs with a shared Front Door for recruitment. The extension of the agreement would include foster carer assessments and approvals. Nigel Chapman added that the principle behind that agreement was to share resource, work more collaboratively across boroughs to avoid fragmentation, and deliver a more co-ordinated offer across the region which offered an alternative to independent fostering agencies.

The Committee looked to understand whether there was a particular type of foster carer the Council needed, such as short term or long-term carers. Kelli Eboji advised that the Council needed more foster carers across the board and had many different types of foster carers. Some carers provided only respite care, some were short-term carers and the Council was currently exploring options for people wanting to provide shorter periods of care such as those who had weekends free to provide care. The Council was much less likely to place a child with a long-term carer straight away and therefore short-term carers were equally needed. The Committee advised that this messaging may incentivise more people to apply to foster. Officers added that word of mouth was very powerful and that councillors could play a role in spreading that message and letting the service know of anyone in the community interested in fostering. Nigel Chapman added that work had been done with members in the past around fostering which the Council may benefit from repeating now that there were new councillors elected.

The Committee asked what feedback mechanisms the Council had for foster carers. Kelli Eboji advised that there were many avenues for foster carers to feed back such as biannual questionnaires, monthly support groups, coffee mornings and during their annual review.

Noting that the report detailed some foster carers had found it difficult to get support for older children in care with complex needs, the Committee asked how the Council was addressing that. Kelli Eboji responded that Mockingbird was one way to address that through finding a respite foster carer. The Child Resilience Service also provided therapeutic input with foster carers for young people they found challenging or were struggling to work with and foster carers also received training from a therapeutic view and, depending on the needs of the young person, were offered various options of support such as individual work and joint work. In those circumstances the foster carers relationship with their Supervising Social Worker was important and their social worker should tailor the support offer to what that placement needed for stability.

In relation to placement stability, Nigel Chapman drew members’ attention to table 6.5 which demonstrated a reduction in the number of children who had 3 or more placement moves over a 12-month period which was a positive improvement. This had been partly driven by having a more stable workforce, but he felt there was still further work to do to improve stability further. He also drew members’ attention to the positive work being done to increase participation and engagement to hear the voice of children and young people through Empire, with Empire contributing to the Annual Report.

Nigel Chapman advised that children at risk of exploitation or missing from care had been reviewed during the inspection and there was a lot of audit activity taking place to assure the service that when children were missing from care they were followed up to understand the reasons that might drive them to go missing on a regular basis. As such, he reassured the Committee that the Council knew who went missing regularly, was working to understand the reasons behind their missing episodes, and undertook follow ups with young people to prevent that happening on a more regular basis. In response to a query on how Brent’s missing from care numbers compared nationally, Nigel Chapman advised that it was difficult to compare across boroughs because the ways in which missing episodes were recorded may be different and there was no national definition for that data. Anecdotally, in Brent, predominantly early teens around the age of 15 years old were more likely to have repeat missing episodes. As there was no benchmarked position on this, the Council used the position from previous years and quality assurance work to show the impact of activity.

The Committee asked what services were in place to support Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children (UASC), particularly those waiting for a decision from the Home Office. Kelli Eboji responded that UASCs were supported until the age of 25, including those who did not have their Home Office status and therefore had no recourse to public funds. When they turned 25, the young person would be referred to the Home Office for accommodation and support as an adult and would then be supported through solicitors. UASCs were eligible for legal aid which could be easily accessed. Whilst UASC were being supported through children’s services, they had access to a Personal Advisor, accommodation and subsistence if they were eligible for public funds. A dedicated mental health and wellbeing service had recently been commissioned specifically for UASCs due to the increased levels of isolation, uncertainty and anxiety for that group of young people. Some UASCs also took part in Empire, and previously a group called Brothers had enabled UASCs to come together to talk about their challenges from home.

The Committee asked whether the levels of staffing were sufficient in this area. Palvinder Kudhail advised that the Personal Advisor service was very stable with most posts filled and managers appointed in that service. In relation to Social Workers, she advised there was a national shortage with every area looking to recruit more Social Workers. As a result, many Social Workers were agency staff, but in Brent this was slowly moving to a more permanent in-house workforce, with a significant reduction in the agency workforce to ensure young people had stable Social Workers.

The Committee asked what training Personal Advisors received. Kelli Eboji confirmed that they had access to the full training programme and some training was commissioned specifically for Personal Advisors, such as advocacy training. As the job description required an NVQ in Social Care, many Personal Advisors came into the role with a lot of experience.

As no further issues were raised, the Committee resolved to note the report.