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Dear colleague,
Welcome to this month’s Children and Young People Bulletin.
It was wonderful to see so many of you at the National Children and Adult Services Conference last month. Despite the last minute changes to the programme, it was a highly successful event, and I hope you left feeling as inspired as I did. For those who couldn’t make it, presentation slides from the sessions are now available.
At NCASC, we launched our Bright Futures: Getting the Best for 30 Years publication. This outlines the work we’ll be focussing on at the LGA this year in our children’s social care campaign, focussing not only on funding, but on the early help and voice of the child that were central to the Children Act 1989 and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
At our Children and Young People Board meeting in January, we’ll be considering the priorities for the new government. If you have anything you’d like to feed in, please let your political group offices know (their details can be found at the bottom of our homepage).
Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a happy, healthy New Year.
Councillor Judith Blake
Chair, LGA Children and Young People Board |
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Publications
Bright Futures 2019
At NCASC, we published our latest Bright Futures report, outlining the areas we’ll be focusing on over the next year in our ongoing children’s social care campaign. Lobbying for sufficient funding remains our top priority, along with a focus on early help and putting children at the centre of decision-making.
Framework of Outcomes for Young People
In 2018, we commissioned the Centre for Youth Impact to produce an outcomes framework to help organisations across the youth sector to develop mutual aims for work with and for young people, helping to ensure the value of the local youth offer. Following more than 18 months’ consultation, development and testing to ensure both commissioners and providers found it helpful, the final document has now been published: a Framework of Outcomes for Young People 2.0 and an accompanying technical report.
Updated Resources Packs for Councillors – Corporate Parenting and Support for Care Leavers
We have recently updated our Corporate Parenting and Support for Care Leavers resource packs. These resources packs are aimed at all councillors, not just lead members for children’s services. They provide information on key definitions, council responsibilities, national legislation/guidance, key lines of enquiry and links to further resources to support councillors with their corporate parenting role.
Stories
Care Leaver Local Offer - Guide
The Children and Social Work Act 2017 places a duty on councils to publish a local offer for care leavers. Catch 22 and the National Leaving Care Benchmarking Forum have compiled a helpful report looking at current local offers, including what works and what could be improved.
Youth services
We recently responded to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s call for evidence on the review of youth services statutory guidance. The response welcomes the Government’s recent £500 million investment in youth services and calls for an ambitious national vision for youth services. It also highlights the key role councils have to play in coordinating local services for young people, and emphasises the need for sustainable funding and to ensure young people’s voices are central to services.
Adopter and Special Guardian self-declaration to schools
Children who have ceased to be looked after by a council because of adoption, a special guardianship order or a child arrangement order are eligible for £2,300 pupil premium plus funding (paid to their school). Schools only receive the funding if they know about and declare the child’s status, so please promote this in your communities and networks so that if parents and carers are comfortable to, they know to let their school know.
CSA Centre: Improving data on Child Sexual Abuse
Analysis by the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) has highlighted gaps and weaknesses in the data collected by organisations responding to child sexual abuse, making is more difficult to provide effect services to prevent, disrupt and response to CSA. The Centre has therefore developed a CSA data collection template and interactive data improvement tool to improve consistency.
Summary Report and Research and Academic Group Report - The Care Experienced Conference (CareExpConf)
The Care Experienced Conference provides a platform for care experienced people’s voices to be heard and is also a celebration of the creative diversity of the care experienced community. The reports attempt to offer a brief glimpse of the many views and different perspectives of those who attended conference, informed by the wisdom of years as well as the freshness of recent experience.
NCER update from your local authority data company
With membership from all local authorities in England, NCER continue to develop high quality data systems to help support improved educational outcome for all children.
Insight - 2019 has seen the release of significant new functionality supporting local authority school improvement services and schools called Insight. This new module in Nexus (for LAs) and Perspective Lite (for schools) provides a succinct overview of performance with a focus on clear data translation and visualisations to support a rapid understanding of strengths and opportunities for improvement. Insight covers key educational outcomes for EYFS to KS4 as well as absence data for your local authority. Future releases will include Insight for CLA data to enable Virtual School Analysis, exclusions data as well as more detailed analysis of pupil groups such as disadvantaged and SEN across all key stages.
NCER Early Data – in 2019 NCER again provided the earliest, reliable national and regional education performance data plus group analysis for local authorities, schools as well as for CLA children in virtual schools. We continue to work hard to get the earliest data possible for your local authority to support improvement for all children.
Watchsted - Ofsted have been using a new inspection framework since September and Watchsted has been update to be compatible with this new framework. View comparative national Ofsted statistics via Watchsted within Nexus for your LA.
Follow @NCERCIC on Twitter.
Return to Social Work
We will be re-launching the national Return to Social Work programme in January 2020. Designed to support councils to recruit social workers who have taken a 2-10 year break from work, this national scheme will provide free, high-quality training to 200 former social workers to enable them to return to the profession. Find out more information.
Knife crime
Tackling serious violent crime is a priority for councils, which requires a multi-agency approach with a focus on prevention and early intervention. Almost all police forces have seen increases in knife crime since 2014, and our upcoming free conference on 6 February 2020 in London will share best practice of how councils are helping to tackle this crime. There are also a number of case studies in our Breaking the Cycle of Youth Violence report.
Events
Developing and sustaining effective local SEND systems
27 January | London
Tackling knife crime
6 February | London
LGA/ADPH annual public health conference and exhibition 2020
24 March | Brighton
first magazine
LGA's membership magazine 'first' is received as a hard copy by over 18,000 councillors and 400 chief executives. In a response to demand, we have made it easier to read online by creating a dedicated website to read all of its articles, interviews and opinion pieces.
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