The Strategic Director for Social Care and Education will provide a verbal update in relation to a review of scope of the Commission, including the work done within the department to deal with the impact of Coronavirus on Leicester’s Children’s Services and schools.
Minutes:
The Strategic Director for Social Care and Education submitted a presentation and commission structure chart in relation to a review of scope of the Commission, including the work done within the department to deal with the impact of Coronavirus on Leicester’s Children’s Services and schools.
The various service Directors presented the following:
· The Education service area focussed on schools including ensuring the readiness for school, that children attended school and that sufficient places were available for children to attend school.
· In addition this area looked at the education welfare of children, early years settings and Connexions - which IS a careers service for young people who live in Leicester City aged 16-19 or up to 25 years for young people with Special Educational Needs (SEN).
· In terms of improvements the team also worked in and with schools to improve outcomes, performance and to support governors, as well as ensuring the right data was in place to determine how well schools were performing.
· Social care services and families in need of ongoing support, was noted to cover: children’s services, looked after children service area, supporting ages 16+ into the adult world, fostering and adoption services, safeguarding teams/ safeguarding for all schools, quality assurance and management programmes, investigation, responsibility for health assessments and many more aspects.
· Special Education Needs (SEN) service area delivers services to children and young people with disabilities, including physical disabilities, learning disabilities and those with neurodevelopmental conditions. There are currently over 3,000 children and young people with a statutory Education, Health & Care Plan and a further 10,000 who have lower levels needs who are also supported by the SEN service. This support includes specialist teachers and support staff based in schools. The key priority for the service is to ensure that children and young people with a disability are taught in mainstream schools wherever possible and are prepared for adulthood as they grow and develop. The service also works closely with children and young people, their parents and carers, schools and the parent/ carer forum.
· Further to the structure of the commission’s services, the budgets for each service and key challenges faced was also presented.
· It was requested that the Commission be aware of the external scrutiny the department receives from Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which includes a SEN re-visit in May 2021. It is also anticipated that Children’s Social Care is likely to be subject to an inspection in Sept/Oct 2021.
Following queries from Members of the Commission, the below responses were provided:
· Further to a Members request, the Officer agreed to bring to a future CYP&E Scrutiny Commission meeting a view about the population and the ethnic breakdown of children in schools across the whole of the city. In addition, it was agreed that details could be provided about all the different groups in the various sections that the service had data for. It was noted that last week external national data sets published of data were published in relation to the January school census around children in schools, however Officers would provide some analysis internally. Following the request, it was clarified that the service could not provide an ethnic breakdown of the staff as some of the staff were not employed by the Council.
AGREED:
1. It was agreed that the presentation slides and the scope of commission structure chart presented at the meeting for this item, would be circulated to Members of the CYP&E Scrutiny Commission.