Agenda item

The Strategic Director for Social Care and Education will provide a verbal introduction to the commission on Children’s, Young People and Education Services.

The Strategic Director for Social Care and Education gave a verbal presentation on the portfolio of the Children’s, Young People and Education Services Scrutiny Commission. 

The various service Directors presented the following:

Childrens Social Care

• Caroline Tote had now retired from her role as Divisional Director in Childrens Social Care. The Council had a  new recruit Damian Elcock, who essentially does the same role at Luton Council and will be starting on 21^st August.
• 65M a year is spent from the general fund on Childrens Social Care. the vast majority, around 85% goes on our 641 children who are looked after either at placements or the support team works around them.
• The number of unaccompanied asylum seeker children that we have, has grown very rapidly over the last year since the Government moved from it being a voluntary process where councils would offer to take children who had arrived.
• The Government initially said that it would be a series of cycles, where are share as a local authority would be 3 children per cycle of 500 children, with 4 cycles per year, where we are currently going through cycles every 3 weeks.
• The number of unaccompanied asylum seeker children we look after in Leicester has doubled in less than one year. These children rapidly become adults as they tend to be 16 or 17 years old. 
• Leicester is now in a position that 1 in 6 of our care leavers are a former unaccompanied asylum seeker children.

Tracie Rees, Send and Early Help

• Across the city there are 12 Children and Young Families  centres which provide support to families across the city.
• The Council  has been awarded  a government grant to enhance the support for families via by creating a network of Family Hubs across the city.
• Commissioning and project  management  across the whole of children’s social care.
• Statutory returns have to be completed on a very regular basis for Ofsted, the Department of Education and other organisations.
• Responsible for staff and administration across Childrens Services.

Pauline Killoran, Head of Service, SEND Integrated Service 0-25 

• The team writes Education, Health and Care Plans using information provided by a range of professional
• Responsible for the Educational Psychology Service, who contribute to plans and support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.
• Delivery of the  the Disabled Childrens Service, that provides short breaks and respite for disabled children and their families
• .
• Responsible for the Connexions service that supports young disabled people to secure employment, training and further education.
• Responsible for increasing sufficiency, to ensure that there are enough special school placements across the city for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.

Jessica Nicholls, Head of Service for Send Support Service

• Responsible for the delivering a range of services to support children and young people with disabilities, this includes:
  • Early Year Service – providing specialist nursery provision.
  • Hearing Support
  • Visual Support
  • Social Emotional & Mental Health – for those with neurodiversity needs.
  • Learning, Communication & Interaction
  • Quality Inclusion Team 
• All of these teams work  closely with mainstream schools, special schools, academies and local authority schools to support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities to achieve the best educational outcomes as possible 

Sue Welford, Principal Education officer handing over to Sophie Maltby from August.

• Work to strengthen out structure and the importance of building connections is around those vulnerable children. Those children will mainly have SEND needs and a support plan and some will have needs that arise later on.
• Key education tasks revolves around early education, the sufficiency and quality the provision provides from childminders and the private, voluntary and independent sector.
• With the government’s announcement for children to receive 15 free hours from nine months from September 2024 and 30 free hours of childcare from nine months from September 2025. Work will be completed to ensure those children with special education needs are identified early.
• Early years support teams are working to support children in early years education with challenges around speech, language and communication.
• Admissions service, who particularly looking at in terms of in year admissions to all out schools, state maintained schools across the city including academies, local authority and foundation schools. They work very closely across all our education provisions, particularly mainstream to identify where DSPs are needed and working closely with SEND provision as well.
• They also ensure school building are suitable for children to attend. There had been big challenges around some of our school building conditions.
• Welfare Services is a key area and their work focuses on children enrolling on time and receiving a suitable education at the school they are attending. That children are attending school and identifying children that are missing school.

The commission wished Sue Welford well in her retirement and thanked her for her hard work.

AGREED:

1.     A presentation on work completed to create family hubs and what they will be doing to support families to be taken to a future commission meeting.

2.     The key issues discussed be added to the work program.