Key management messages
Dear
colleague,
“Financially sustainable services are built upon
good practice achieving good outcomes for children and families. Weak
services are costly for the Council and more importantly they are costly for
children and families. That is why I and the rest of the Council are very
firmly committed to the improvement journey in Children’s Services".
In 2016 / 17, the Council increased the
budget for Children’s Social Work and Child Protection by nearly £11.4 million
and we all have to pull together.
Thanks to excellent partnership working across HR, Finance and Children's Services, we have stopped overspending on staffing. ASYE programmes continues to ensure excellent value for money.
Progress continues to tackle
child sexual exploitation
While we have a good deal of
work to do across the portfolio, we’re delighted that notable progress
continues to be made in our work to tackle child sexual exploitation,
(CSE). Reports to our People Scrutiny Committee just last week updated Members on that progress.
Councillors heard that
Devon’s multi-agency approach to tackling CSE is working well, with every
agency engaged and committed to identifying potentially at risk young people,
reducing that risk through prevention, and protecting young people through
appropriate interventions.
Our thanks go to our Devon
Youth Service for the valuable research that they’ve helped with, which is
aiding our knowledge of young people’s understanding of CSE.
Other research has identified
that children from seldom-heard groups are more likely to be abused or
exploited, which we’re addressing in Devon by focusing targeted prevention
activity on specific groups of young people, including children with
disabilities, LGBT, migrant workers and others.
In a separate report
presented jointly with the police, Councillors also heard some of the many
improvements that we have made within social care in relation to bespoke
training, the strengthening of assessments of relatives as part of special
Guardianship applications, and in focusing ourselves on understanding the voice
of the child and their experience.
We, alongside our partners, remain committed
to continuing to improve our safeguarding services, and towards our aim for our
services to be judged as good.
Kind regards, Jennie and James
Jo Olsson's update on core values, our improvement plan, and budget challenges
There's been great progress on steadily reducing caseloads – a huge well done
to frontline staff and team managers.
We’ve been working on a statement of our core values and these
will be coming out to you after the next service development meeting. I want every team to have a discussion in a team meeting about
what these principles mean and how practice can be shaped, to ensure we are
living out the values in our work. Find out more from Jo.
|
Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) briefing
In
Devon, we have been implementing the SEND reforms and have recently refreshed
the way in which we monitor our performance against SEND Code of Practice 2014. We ensure that we
improve outcomes for children and young people with SEND and their families.
This
is monitored and overseen by the SEND Improvement Board, which is a sub-group of
the Children, Young People and Families Alliance. This partnership approach
aims to improve the engagement of all agencies and ensure we work in
collaborative way to identify and meet the needs of children in Devon. Find out about the key priorities for the local area.
Are you looking after
someone else’s child? Is your child living with another family?
If the answer to either
question is yes, and the arrangement is for 28 days or more, this is known as private
fostering.
If a child or young person under 16 years old (or 18 if they
have a disability) is looked after by someone who is not a close relative, then
by law Devon County Council needs to be informed. A close relative includes
parents, grandparents, aunts/uncles NOT cousins, great aunt/uncles or friends.
devon.gov.uk/privatefostering
 BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend
As a
corporate parent, Phil Norrey, our Chief Executive, chose winners for
two pairs of tickets for BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend. Tickets were drawn
at random from a list of our care leavers and children in care. Our lucky young winners told us:
"The big weekend was absolutely
amazing! I didn’t think it was going to be anything like it was, and would
definitely go again! I wouldn’t of had the chance had I not been given those
tickets!"
|
Devon's care leavers at Radio 1's Big Weekend
|
