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Practice Standards for Children’s
Social Work and Child Protection
We
have now finalised an up-to-date set of Practice Standards for Devon’s Children’s Social Work and
Child Protection. The standards replace any previously published
practice or quality standards. Find out more.
Viability Assessments for Agency Decision Maker (ADM)
This
template is now available on fDocs. It is stored under Children’s and
then within the Adoption section. The template is called ADM – Viability
Assessment Chronology.
A
new document type has been requested for HPRM and should be available shortly.
What does good information about
special educational needs and disability look like?
It’s a big question, but in
February DIAS held their first Open Space event to talk about the
information that parents/carers need to support their child or young person to
achieve their full potential. In the latest update, DIAS explore:
- capturing a young person’s view… This is Me
- Early Years? DIAS can provide support to
parents and carers…
- children
with medical needs
- revised leaflets.
 Have you checked your caseloads with reference to the 'Domestic Abuse in Household' classification?
The deadline for completion of this task for existing
cases is Monday 3 April.
Read the guidance and find out more.
In addition, new cases should have the classification added when appropriate.
It is a quick and simple process.
Recording
of Permanency Planning Meetings
From Monday
20 March 2017 the L9 – Child Permanency Planning Meeting Minutes form will no
longer be available on CareFirst. Practitioners are to use the D6 –
Record of Meeting form to record the minutes of a Child Permanency Planning
Meeting.
Guidance
on how to use the D6 – Record of Meeting form can be found here.
Social care case document deletion and
amendment – CareFirst and HP Records Manager (HPRM)
From Monday 3 April 2017, requests for
document or data deletion or amendment in CareFirst and HPRM will only be
possible using ICT Self Service online. This is to enable ICT
systems to record an audit trail of who requests actions, when and why.
SCOMIS ICT will no longer accept telephone
calls requesting these actions. Find out more.
Care leavers: enhanced
service provision through better data collection
You
will all be aware of the concern Ofsted had about the high number of care leavers
in Devon that we were not in contact with, at the time of our last inspection in
March 2015. A lot of progress has been made since this time and we have traced
and made contact with almost all of the young people we had previously lost
touch with.
In
order to improve our services to young people and adults that have care leavers
status, changes were made CareFirst.
Information Sharing
The Information Governance Team receives many information
sharing requests for example requests from other local authority (OLA) social
workers who wish to view archived child in care information, or CAFCAS officers
who wish to view children’s records. The process for dealing with such
enquires, including a process chart for dealing with OLA requests, can be found
under the Business Support Guidance Access to social care
records on the web site.
 Are
you a BME social worker?
There is now a new on-going opportunity to
discuss and share experiences for those social workers who identify as being
from a Black or Minority Ethnic Group (BME). Next meeting is Friday 5 May 2017, find out more.
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Dear colleague,
Starting with good news again… I’m really pleased to be able
to tell you that a permanent Head of Service has been appointed following a
Members' Appointments Panel and will be starting with us on Monday 8 May. Mark Lines is
joining us from Argyll and Bute (west coast of Scotland). He has around 30
years of experience of service improvement as a manager of children’s social
work and health teams and will certainly understand the issues of working in a
large rural area. He also happens to be my brother, in case you were wondering!
What are the chances?! I will be ensuring a smooth transition once Mark arrives
and I am sure he will want to be getting out to meet as many of you as he can
in his first weeks.
We are at a very exciting time for the service as we are
about to move into a new senior management structure bringing together children’s
social work and early help within a locality model. The idea is that
this creates the driver to develop service integration and engagement in early
help by all partners in each locality, increases the number of families getting
support from early help and enables us to move away from an over reliance on
statutory interventions when they are really not needed. As well as the new
locality management arrangements we are looking at other changes that will
support this shift, for example how our MASH can better support families to
access the ‘right service at the right time’ in localities and how our services
for disabled children and their families can better integrate with early help.
I hope by now the results of the recent staff survey
have been shared with you. I was really pleased that the findings indicate how
improvements, such as in learning and development and supervision, are starting
to impact on the quality of practice and that staff feel engaged in service
improvements. However, a theme in some responses was of the need to strengthen
communication – that staff don’t feel engaged in the changes that are being put
in place. This newsletter is key to that, as are the monthly service
development meetings that we hold with the whole management team, including
your team manager. If you’re reading this
newsletter then you’re probably not one of the people who don’t feel
communicated with! However, you can help ensure all your colleagues are as
informed by making sure the key items from this newsletter are added to the agenda
for your team meeting.
I also hope you had the chance to be involved in an activity
when we ‘stopped the clock’ to focus on the Council’s new Leadership Charter last
Thursday. There were lots of events taking place around our offices which gave
us all a chance to start the conversation and reflect on the kinds of
behaviours we are looking for across the Council for the future. If you haven’t
yet done this please ensure you take the time in a team meeting soon to review
the Charter.
The new practice standards are now complete
and have been issued, this is a really important document which clearly sets
out standards for our work with families including assessments, plans, reviews,
direct work, management and supervision. Team managers will be ensuring these
standards are consistently met when discussing cases and when they are signing
off work so you need to make sure you fully understand what is expected.
These practice standards are also critical to our new quality
assurance framework. We are already doing audit differently, including
targeting audit in ways which support service improvement and including more
discussion with practitioners. Services such as our complaints, participation
team and Independent Reviewing Officers (IROs) are already working together differently to keep a focus on what
we know about the quality of our practice.
A few months ago many of you will have attended ‘Takeover
Day’ in the Council Chamber where our young people presented some
really powerful messages about supporting them with their mental health,
understanding self harm and key messages for social workers – such as making
sure new social workers are introduced properly to children when they take over case
management responsibility. At the next Corporate Parenting Board we are going
to be held to account by young people for what we’ve done differently as a
result of what we heard so I’d like to finish by encouraging you to revisit
this in your team meetings. They were very powerful messages.
Vivien Lines, Head of Children's Social Care (interim)
Legal planning and Public
Law Outline (PLO) documents
We have been working for some
time on strengthening our legal planning and Public Law Outline (PLO) processes
and have updated a number of documents to support improved planning and
outcomes for children at this stage.
From now on, it has
been agreed that decisions about PLO and legal planning meetings will not be
agreed at Children’s Access to Resource Panel (CARP) but should take place in
advance of CARP to establish whether threshold is met and whether the child is
going to be subject to PLO. Find out more where to find the new letters and template.
Family Solutions Service
There has been a Family Group
Conference Service within DCC for the last seven years. During this time the
service has gradually built and received national accreditation, and the team has restructured
This came about by a
willingness to build on good practice and outcomes for children, and
acknowledged the need to offer other ‘types’ of meetings to help families find
their own solutions and make the changes their children need them to.
Find out more about the opportunities, lifelong links and how we work to engage with families
 Jo Olsson is now on Twitter!
Jo is going to use Twitter to communicate our good news stories, celebrate success and show how we listen, learn and adapt! Follow @joolssondcc
Who
is nominated as a STAR this month?
Well done... Lucy Gooding
You can nominate a colleague or team now and log your compliments (Jan-Feb-March). Winners will be
chosen by Dave Black, Head of Planning, Transportation and Environment.
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