Transcript

emergency drills are planned in the event of a fire or other emergencies, you should vacate the building in an orderly manner through the nearest available exit, make your way to the fire assembly point in the car park. Please can I ask that the live stream is started and verbal confirmation provided when we're broadcasting. Thank you very much. Welcome to this meeting of the Children and Young People's Scrutiny Committee. The agenda papers and other relevant information for this meeting are available for public viewing on the Herefordshire Council's website. The Council is streaming this meeting live on the Herefordshire Council web YouTube channel and also making a recording. The recording will be available via the Council's website shortly after the meeting is concluded. Other attendees are permitted to film, photograph and record our public meeting, providing that it does not disrupt the business of the meeting. If you do not wish to be filmed or photographed, please identify yourself so that anyone who intends to record the meeting can be made aware. I can't see anyone. To ensure that recording quality is maintained, could members speak as clearly as possible and keep background noise to a minimum and ensure that mobile phones and other devices are turned to silent and can I also ask, please, when you're speaking, if you could put your microphone on and then if you can remember to turn it off when you finish. That helps with the video. Thank you. So joining us remotely today we have Councillor Claire Davis. Thank you Claire. Claire can you hear and see us, okay? Yes I can Chair. Thank you. Thank you very much. That's great. Thank you. Any members of the committee or co-optees with voting rights who join the meeting remotely are not able to vote on any resolutions of the committee but they can participate in the debate. We've got a number of officers and other attendees present and I will ask them to introduce themselves as we come to their specific items if needed. Have we received any apologies for absence? We've received apologies for absence from Councillor Rob Williams and Hilary Hall. Thank you. And have we received details of members nominated to attend the meeting in place of a member of the committee? Yes. Councillor Frank Cornthwaite will be substituting for Councillor Rob Williams and Councillor David Davies is sitting on the seat which is standing vacant at the moment. Okay thank you. Do any members of the committee have any declarations of interest in respect of any items on the agenda? No. All right. Thank you. I would actually just at this point also just like to welcome Sylvia Cockroft who is one of our co-optees and this is her first meeting so welcome Sylvia thank you. We go to item number four on the agenda is the minutes. So the minutes for the meeting held on the 7th of May have actually just been published on the council website as a supplement to the agenda but obviously members haven't had a reasonable time to review them so I would suggest that the committee defers approval of those minutes until the meeting of the 30th of July if that's okay with everybody. Any objections to that? And apologies for the the late publication of the minutes. Okay thank you. I've just been notified Councillor Davis by the scrutiny officer that you will need to actually give apologies for the meeting even though you are actually online so if we can just make a note a note of that and i think it does get noted that you have attended but that you are a virtual attendee just as a formality. Thank you. Thank you right so no objections to looking at the minutes for the next at the next meeting. Have we had any written questions from members of the public? No accepted questions from members of the public. Okay so and so obviously there won't be any supplementary questions either. If I can just mention about questions from members of the public. So we really do appreciate getting questions from members of the public. If we could just ask the public please to make sure that we we do get the the questions in time so that if there are any reasons for the the question being rejected that the question can be sort of looked at and then brought back to us. So obviously you know officers are constrained by the constitution in terms of of timing of questions and getting the questions in. If we receive questions at the last minute that are rejected it doesn't give us an opportunity to actually hear those questions in a revised form but I would just like to make it very clear that it is important that we get questions from members of the public and we do appreciate them so if if you could please bear that in mind. Have we had any questions from members of the council? No questions received from members of the council. Alright thank you. So we'll move on to agenda item seven which is the workforce challenges in children services. The purpose of this report is to update the committee on the workforce challenges in children services and to outline the work being undertaken to address those challenges. So if if we could ask Tracy Sampson if you could just introduce yourself and your role and then perhaps you can just talk us through the report that we've had and then we'll ask for questions after that. Thank you. Thank you chair. So I'm Tracy Sampson I'm the Director of HR&OD in the council and I'm the author of the report that you've got before you today. I've produced this report in response to a very detailed brief it was a two-page brief and I've done my very best to stick to that brief. And with the report you've got three appendices and again I've included those because that was what was requested in the brief. So the first appendix that you've got sorry appendices that you've got there is a summary table and that shows the proportion of agency and permanent workers that we've got by role over the past two years and that in itself tells a story. The second appendices that you've got is a draft workforce strategy for children's and I would emphasize that this is still in draft. There is an opportunity to contribute towards it, it's not a final document. And the third appendices that we've put there is the, it's the summary of the responses that we had from the employee survey that we did in 2022 for children's services. So we've just extracted the children's services element of the employee survey. Due to timing it's really unfortunate but that is two years old that data now and the next our survey is out now, it opened yesterday so there will be a fresh pile of information for you to consider which will be available in the autumn. I've got no doubt that you'll want to scrutinize the outcome of that survey when the times come, but the most recent data we've got is before you. In terms of the report itself, I've tried to give an honest account of why we are where we are. I haven't glossed over the challenges but I hope I've managed to convey that we have made significant improvements and we are in a much better place than we were three years ago without diminishing the fact that we've still got an awful lot of work to do. I am confident that we are taking the right actions. I don't think there is anything significant that we are missing. What we do need to do is do some of the things we're doing quicker and better. And in some cases we have to do things that we've already put in place again and again and again. And I think I'd like to just recall the first meeting I had with our DFE advisor, which was she looked me straight in the eyes and said you have to be relentless and she is absolutely right. We have to be relentless in everything we do with our workforce challenges. But I'm confident with the plan that we've got it will get us where we need to get to. I think my standout message that I would like to communicate with the committee today is I think our biggest challenge remains dealing with our reputational issues and the potential damage that does to our ability to recruit. I think we've had limited success in telling our story outside of the Council and for me that's where my priority lies next. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tracey. And thank you for the report as well. Before we just open up the line of questioning, I think what I wanted to just bring to the fore is that in terms of the improvement plan, the workforce and the sufficiency and stability of staff across the workforce is an absolutely key aspect of this. And I think important to remember that at the very heart of that are children in Herefordshire. So we need to remember all the time that this is actually about how we use workforce to do the very best for children and their parents and families, making sure that there's a timely response to needs identified. So in the improvement plan, it does actually talk about the action of reinvigorating the workforce strategy informed by comprehensive workforce profile, increasing recruitment and retention activity. So there's an increasingly stable permanent skilled and experienced workforce providing continuity of support, intervention with children, young people and families. And within the improvement plan, that is marked, the activity on that is marked as green. So I assume that that is because we've got the draft workforce strategy in place and we're actually making progress on that. But the impact of that, which is obviously where that is felt by the children and young people of Herefordshire, really is red. So there is a real risk. And I think I know that you've raised some of these issues here, but potentially Rachel Gillett, you could sort of say, what is the risk? If we don't get the workforce strategy right, what is the risk in terms of how that is felt for children and young people in Herefordshire? Over the last two years, children and families have had a number of social workers. We track how many social workers families and children can have and it's varied at times. Each time that happens, a family or a child has to retell their story. That is why workforce is our number one priority, as well as for all the improvement that you do, each time you, we've trained 500 workers and the training in restorative practice is going really well. If we don't get permanent workers, we've got to continue to do that training and continue to do that training again. So there's a stop start. So it's vitally important for us to get permanent work staff. We've made huge changes. You can see it from the tables alone. MASH is fully permanent. Fostering is almost fully permanent. All managers will be permanent. Team managers, which are the heart of the work that we do, will all be permanent by July, touch wood, in case something. But by July, all of those managers will be permanent and what that then allows is the restorative framework or our practice model to be fully embedded and that allows the traction that we need to move forward. We also know that team managers bring with them workers, just as agency managers leaving can take with them workers, and so you want to have a permanent workforce. It is challenged. We are challenged with our reputation. We are challenged with the history. But all the indicators at the moment, which we can go through in various detail, I'm sure, through the questions, are showing that we've turned the curve on that. There is currently a period of unsettled - people are unsettled because obviously our DCS is changing and there have been some changes at senior leadership. Managers matter, but we've made such progress I believe it will just be a small blip and we'll continue on because we've also recruited two team managers today. So we're continuing on. But the challenges are in our core teams and continuing the children in care team, although there is sustained improvement within that area, but I track it weekly. Okay, thank you. So I think the question is sort of how will we know that we're making the difference? And I think this is a question that we've sort of grappled with a bit in the committee, sort of looking at where are the metrics? What is going to tell us that we are making a difference? Now, I'm not sure if any of the councillors - Councillor Carter, did you want to raise some questions around that in terms of the strategy? I mean, we've looked at what is the role of the workforce strategy and how trying to take apart the actual elements of the strategy. And I think that there's some question over the actual strategy itself, which I realize you've said is a draft strategy, so councillors have and co-optees have also raised questions about that. Have you got anything that you would like to raise now? Let's see if we can start with what the chair just said. So can you talk a little bit about what this document is for? Who will be using it? What they're expected to do with it? Just explain a bit about what the role of a workforce strategy is. Apologies, thank you. So we've got a corporate workforce strategy which sits above this and that covers the whole council. This is the workforce strategy specifically for children's services. I think the first question is, why would you have a second strategy? And fundamentally, the reason why we've got a second strategy is the LGA recommend it as good practice to have a specific strategy for children's services. So that's why we've got a second strategy. And it does fit and it does dovetail with that document so that they're not going to be arguing with each other. What it really does for me is, it's our pitch to the workforce and it tells people what they can expect when they work here. What they can expect from their manager, what they can expect the culture to be like, how they can expect to be treated. Our consultation with the unions tells us that the unions love it because they think they've got something to hold us to account for. They've got this document and I think our workforce can do the same. So for me in a nutshell that is essentially why we've got this workforce strategy. The detail of how we make it live and how it has an impact is actually contained within the action plan. And the action plan sits under the workforce delivery board, which is separate to the workforce strategy in that we haven't put another action plan under this strategy because I don't think we need another action plan. The actions that make this document happen and make all the promises in this document real all sit under the workforce delivery board and the work of that board is monitored by the children's improvement board. So thank you. There are several questions that's been out from that. Let's start with it's the corporate workforce strategy has in basically every section some measures by which we all know that we're making progress whereas this doesn't. Is that not an oversight? I think I'd call that good feedback because it is in draft and that is absolutely something we could incorporate. Can we put that as a draft recommendation? I'm also interested in the relationship between the corporate strategy and the strategy. So you said they dovetail. So taking for example well-being the corporate strategy says quite a lot about a whole set of different things the council is doing on well-being whereas this strategy is almost exclusively around mental health. Is that additional mental health things that only happen in children's services and it assumes that everything else is happening? Is that how we're supposed to read those two documents together? I think when drafted we were trying to highlight the issues that are particularly pertinent to children's services and stress is the highest cause of absence that we've got in children's services. So we were trying to tailor it for its audience but it doesn't mean that everything that we've put in the corporate strategy doesn't apply it does. That was a bit opaque to me so in terms of sort of feedback, recommendations, the links between the corporate strategy and we're not clear to me reading it and it might be helpful just to make that a bit more explicit. I know that other members of the committee will want to get on this bit but since I'm talking and I guess there are two other things that were not clear to me in the documentation. So it's clear what the problem is and it's clear what the strategy is but it's not clear why this is the right strategy. That isn't necessarily something you would put in a strategy but can you just talk a bit about how the work we've done to decide to do these things in the strategy rather than some of the things that we might have done? I've been running a group called Aiming High which has been permanent staff, only permanent staff to begin with, for about 15 months now and that group was brought together to bring the voice of many workers who had been through previous leadership groups etc so that they could feedback about what they wanted. Running concurrently was another group called Staff Reference Group which included all workers and that is a feedback group which tells us and others about what they think their priorities should be and what they wanted. We brought both of those groups together to talk about the strategy and the feedback from them is it talks to them and they feel that it looks good, it is what they've said, it speaks to social work, so it may not speak to corporate but if you're a social worker it speaks to you and the feedback was very positive. I also took the strategy to the wider teams which there's a meeting every Tuesday where I present to all of the service and their feedback has also been extremely positive. They like the way it looks, they like the way that you will deliver this by. They're also going to feedback about some of the measures themselves but they didn't necessarily want the measures in the strategy. They said that if you were going to come to Herefordshire as a social worker this is what they wanted to see. What is your practice model? How are you going to be treated? What are your case loads likely to be? And one of the challenges in talking about case loads is if you give it a defined number, you might have 20 that are fairly simplistic children or cases but you might have 12 that are in court and that would be unbearable. So talking about simplistic, it's that your case loads will be manageable and that's where it gets challenged. So it's gone through a variety of groups, even the way it looks has gone through some of the groups so it looks very different to other strategies. It has children on the front. Children are mentioned all the way through it so it's about focusing on children about what they wanted to see in a strategy and one of the challenges that we have and it is used for recruitment is when you send out an application you also send out what is the promise that we will give you as a local authority because social workers will ask well what is your practice model? Do you use signs of safety? Do you use restorative practice? What are the other systems that you do and this sets out what they are. Thank you. Can I just ask then in terms of the practice model, so if we've got a lot of agency staff as social workers, how do we know that actually they're going to have, they're going to use the same practice model as everybody else within the council so currently at the moment we're focusing on restorative practice. So is there an induction for agency staff that goes through that? Can you just sort of talk us through that process please? So there are three separate parts to induction. Anybody take it back prior to that. So prior to them starting there are ongoing conversations and there's manager and social worker interaction because it's a very competitive market out there so we have to build a relationship straight away. As soon as a person is onboarded, there is the corporate day so that is the day that all members of staff go through. Then there is a second service day where we talk about our practice model and the systems and mosaic, mosaic training that's a separate day but what we expect, what our practice standards are, what is our model and then there's a service specific day that is undertaken by different staff. So a fostering social worker would need to know something different than a court protection or a MASH social worker would need to know something different than a looked after child social worker. So there's a third specific one. That can be broken into a number of days because there's also other aspects that people need to do so they need to do the mosaic training, they need to do the core prevent data protection information governance training as well and all of that takes three to four days in total. So it's quite a, it has changed and moved over the last 18 months to what it is now and we were talking about it at a recent managers group about what else we could do, what else could we do that would make it more effective. So those conversations are ongoing and we get feedback from the staff that have just been on board with and our recruitment team takes some of that. Thank you Rachel. Sam you've got a question. Yes please. So Sam Pratley from the motivations of Hereford, like Councillor Proctor I was looking at the strategy for the section on the key performance indicators, the resource and financial implications, the sort of strengths and weaknesses assessment and some clear deliverable actions and I didn't see them. So I can see that this is a document that would be very helpful for recruitment and for existing staff but it isn't what I would describe as a strategy because it lacks those those things particularly. So I wonder whether it's the action plan that you described that sits below it that has all of that in which we haven't seen which makes it difficult therefore to make an assessment on it. But I have sat on scrutiny for quite recently for about six years now and every year I've heard a very similar set of aspirations and actions that we think we will do and this reads very very similar to those previous iterations and I wonder what learning we've done from the previous attempts to do exactly these same things and why why we think kind of doing them again this time will be more successful what have we learnt and what are we doing differently and particularly what new things are we doing because if we just keep trying the same techniques. I think your table does show an increase in permanent team leaders but you've still got a huge number of agency workers in social work and some of the other roles have always been easier to recruit to permanently and your data suggests that. So kind of what new things are you doing that you think will really make a difference. There's a few questions sorry. Thank you. I think I have to disagree slightly because we've never had a document like this for children. This is the first time we've managed to present our story in this format in a document like this. This is a first for children's services. Now the themes and the messages you might have heard before but we've never had a document like this which helps us properly pitch our story to the workforce. I take your point about the key bits that aren't in here and they're deliberately not in here and it might be useful if perhaps we have links to those documents because we have a really clear three year financial plan for managing the impact of agency workers and the cost of the workforce. We have a really clear action plan which underpins this work. So we could provide links to those documents because they are live and they are available and that perhaps might help tell the story in a more complete way. Thank you. Did you want to come back at all Sam? Well just to clarify so we might not have had a workforce pitch document but we definitely have presentations and documents with actions that say these are all of the things that we're hoping to do. So the question still stands about what have we learned from previous attempts to recruit and therefore what are we doing differently and the question also still stands about what new things are we doing. You know what's going to be different. These are lovely words but these are all words we've heard before. So we have a separate recruitment team who do all the onboarding do all the adverts, make sure that there is a swift response to workers whether they're agency or permanent because it's equally challenging for both. I think it's a very different time. So previously it was about how you can get agency workers and in actual fact gaining agency workers to come and work in Hereford was really challenging as well which is why we brought in the managed teams and at one point we had four managed teams. And for those people who don't know what a managed team is, it's where you bring a manager and the workers in with you and they come at huge cost and at one point we had four of those. The improvements that we've seen mean that all of those teams have been exited. The last one exited in February and we exited them in a very measured way to make sure that the workforce remained stable and we've been able to recruit agency workers. And many of those agency workers have stayed for two years, 18 months, so they remain with us and yes we have had the conversation to see whether they want to stay but it's a very lucrative market. So what is different? The recruitment team is very different. The site that people land on is very different. We've done a lot of secret shopping, so even myself have done an application on a Sunday evening to see how easy it was and each time we do that we make some changes. So previously, 18 months ago, two years ago, people had to fill in a whole form, including all their qualifications, even if you were an internal worker and you wanted to change to a different post. Now it's CVs and for internal workers it's a separate process so you can just approach another manager. You know there's a vacancy and say I'm really interested in coming to your area. Could we have a conversation, have a conversation and team members can move across? That has helped with retention because previously if you wanted to work in a different world, so say you've been working in assessment but you're really interested in adoption or in fostering, you had to go through that whole interview process and now you don't. You can just have that conversation. Two managers will have a discussion and that means that person stays rather than applying out to another local authority. So that has helped with retention. And some of those things came from feedback from staff where they they were able to say this is really irritating, this part really annoys me. Or one of the big things they brought forward was that some, well, posts were being advertised externally for agency when people internally would have liked to try for them and so we made a commitment to staff that we would advertise or post internally as well. All of those things bring about trust when we're nowhere near at the end but those things are different than what happened before. Parts of this were co-produced which would never have happened before. Word of mouth is the biggest indicator. Reputation, obviously it's easier to recruit to an outstanding and a good local authority because it looks good on your CV and it makes it it's it's normally an easier place to work because everything's in place. So we are first is reputation and second is word of mouth. And our retention figures are extremely good and have improved massively over the last two years. And if you look at this table, you can almost begin to see a reverse of what happens. Team managers, it's very difficult to apply for a job if you don't know who your team manager is going to be, however nice the agency manager may be. And let me not negate our agency staff are excellent, majority of our are excellent and have made a difference but to permanently change, you need to know who your manager is going to be. So to get all managers in a permanent place and then the senior the service managers and the heads of service in a place is the springboard that we've just never ever had never. Thank you. And Councillor Harvey, you had some questions. Yes, I did chair. Thank you very much. And you know, I'd like I'd like to say how much I welcome this strategy coming forward specifically in the children's area. It's good that we're taking on board the advice in terms of best practice on this. And I must say in terms of a strategy document, it is a very different looking document to the sorts of strategy documents that I'm used to seeing being produced by this council. The fact that you're saying that it's had a large amount of co production and involvement from staff is extremely encouraging. And I'm glad that they like the way that it it it looks and the way that it comes across. We're not in preparing for this meeting very much. I I saw this document as an outward facing document very much almost a marketing document. So I'm pleased to hear that you're saying that it's the kind of information that is provided to people who are expressing an interest in in coming to us because it has a very outward facing dimension. But I'm really pleased also with what you're saying about it being something that is speaking to our our own staff, the people who work for us, whether they're agency or or permanent, about how we are wanting to do things here. For me, I can I can, I can understand the comments that are being made by committee colleagues wanting to see performance measures and actions in detail. And, you know, historically, that's very much the space that I inhabit when I when I'm talking on on committee. However, for a strategy document, I agree that actually the place for it is in the delivery plan for a strategy document, which again, we generally as a council, I don't see enough of our strategies translating into delivery plans, which are then managed and reported against in terms of the progress that's made against achieving the objective set out in in our strategies. So I'm pleased to hear that we've got a delivery board. It would be great if that delivery board had some kind of a plan that it was working to rather than just an overall strategy that it was sort of sitting underneath. And I hope that there is some kind of a of a plan that the board is is working with. And it's it's encouraging to hear that there are action plans that the the delivery board has. So I'm kind of guessing that that that structure is is there. And clearly, as a committee today, what we're looking at is the strategy. And it's a difficult line to walk. When you engage with a strategy, you immediately have a zillion questions that you want to ask about the detail and you're kind of heading into delivery territory. So excuse us if we merge and weave across that line a little bit in in the way that we discuss things today, some of the information will be before us some of it tantalizingly won't. But it's encouraging to hear that it's it's there still. The figures that we've got an Appendix A showing the journey that that we've we've walked in terms of our balance between permanent staff and agency from January 2023 is instructive. And again, it's hugely encouraging. And I congratulate everybody involved for the the progress that's been made in moving those numbers. And we can see even across this, this sort of 1516 month period, the the way that the numbers have fluctuated, gone up and down as we've had to balloon our workforce in order to address some of the issues. And then, as you've said, stand whole teams down and, you know, sort of revert to a different way of working as the workload has shifted and some of the change programmes have become implemented. So seeing that story told in the numbers here is really helpful and also encouraging. Accepting that we're still at 5050 in terms of frontline staff between agency and permanent, it's good to hear that so many of our agency staff are have with us for a sustained period of time. You know, to retell your story to new people over and over again is to retrigger that trauma. So one of the things that you know, I'm really keen that we do try and do and I know it may create some additional burdens in terms of writing stuff down, which I know is a tough balance to get right in terms of the back office paperwork that we ask our frontline social workers to complete. But when there is a churn in our staff, the important thing is to do that translation from what you know in your head to what's actually documented so that it is capable of being read through and to a degree picked up by the next person to minimise the amount of retelling that needs to be done over and over again if people are faced with new faces in terms of their frontline contact as families and particularly as children. So I mean, that's diving down into the detail of the doing as opposed to this is a strategy. But I think overall, what we've got here in terms of a first strategy for the workforce just in the children's area is coming across as something really positive. And I can certainly see when I look at the appendix that you've got as appendix C to this report, which is the employee survey summary, albeit from two years ago, quite a lot of the areas that staff were saying needed to have improvement I'm seeing in those top line statements. But I do kind of support some of the questions coming from Sam about how, what have we done between 2022 and now to make progress on that and some of the comments that we were having back in 2022 were talking about us, not walking our talk. In that, you know, we say we're going to do these things and then we don't actually do them or we expect our staff to behave in a particular way. But then they don't see their managers. Exampling those behaviors. And I'm just wondering how far since 2022 you feel we've we've moved on that. I recognize where we just pressed the go button on a new staff survey. But, you know, how far have do you think we have we have made progress in some of those areas? And what would you be identifying as the things that we really need to be focusing on in order to give confidence to our staff that we are walking our talk now? OK, so we've had a recent health check. And I've got it in front of me to just that. That's a recent survey that just come through. It is actually a survey for occupational therapists and social workers and residential workers. I'm not quite sure why they all get joined. But but nevertheless, it's a health check. It's run by an external group. It was talked about at the recent Staff Reference Group. It hasn't gone out to the wider group, but it is on Tuesday. Some of the messages that come back from that are that they felt well-being support was good, useful conversations with supervision. Team managers can freely share work issues. I'm treated fairly and respectfully. In the last 12 months, I felt safe at work. That's a big issue for social workers. Whether it's physically safe, emotionally safe or holding their the risk because obviously we work with families and those risk is part of our core business. I'd be happy to recommend my employer to a friend as a place of work came out green. So that was a very good one. I have access to reasonable adjustments, came out positive. I have access to facilities, physical space. And if I have concerns, I feel safe in raising them. So all of those were were parts, parts of the positive. Some of the negative, not negative challenges which we need, we need to address and where compliance with internal procedures does it makes it difficult for me to be creative in work. So, as you know, we've got the workforce delivery board. We've also got a service and practice delivery board and some of those will cross over. So our practice framework sits in another one because it's obviously so large. Supervision sits in that one too. So we've got the core purpose and how we recruit as well as the wider service needs. And part of the how do you make internal procedures better sits within that board at the moment. And they the service feedback to us and then we feedback to them. You said we did. I'm often required to do more with less resources is probably what public services will say all over the country at this time. So that was a negative one. I experienced excessive pressure in my job. I'd say that was probably true of all services at this time with having to do more with less. And the current organisation may not set a good example for me to follow. That was a really interesting discussion with the staff teams about who do they see as managers, who do they see as senior managers and who do they see as others. And so that was a really interesting discussion. This discussion is ongoing. I think it gives us chutes for the future that we didn't have previously. It'll be interesting to see where where the next survey goes. But our feedback loops and are taking not only getting it, but then taking it back into the teams to say what can be different? What do you think about this? What do you think should change? And people taking that lead within the service is important. For example, the managers meetings now, they or the managers organise the meetings, they do the agendas and they take it forward. So that gives ownership to the change. Whereas previously, we all have seen in management say you need to do this. If there's a sea change that's coming with that will bring with itself some challenges along the way. But I think we're on the right path. So we are checking as we go along to see if we're doing the right things. Could I ask that was a lot of different sort of staff professionals, as you say, group together into a into a big that was just our children's services. That was our children's services feedback. Right. Okay. What what percentage response was there to that as a survey? I'd have to I'd have to go through it. Sorry, I'd have to go through it. Okay, well, can I refer in that case to the the staff survey appendix that we've we've got. And this is a point that I know was picked up by a member of the public who was interested to pursue this as a question. The largest staff service area group in the survey is the Safeguarding Quality Assurance and Improvement Area with two hundred and forty six members of staff. And that's roughly 50 percent of the workforce that was recognized in in the survey. Only four percent of staff in this group responded to the staff survey in twenty twenty two. And with a new staff survey about to be undertaken, our actions have been taken since twenty twenty two to explain the importance to staff of these feedback tools and surveys and to encourage our staff in this, you know, particularly in this service area to engage with the process in twenty twenty four. If I might answer this one and if I could just go back to your previous question about some steps that we've taken corporately to address leadership and management, because that definitely was a theme in the previous survey. And so firstly, in terms of the response rate, I think we looked at this really carefully at the time. And if you look at the picture overall, it shows that in safeguarding and family support, 97 percent of people responded. I don't believe that for one minute and neither does anybody else. I think what we've got here is a situation where the people who worked in those two teams misidentified where they worked because we had two service areas, both beginning with the word safeguarding. And I think the work that we did, we think it's reasonable to assume that we've got an average there. So we don't believe that one team responded four percent and the other team responded ninety seven percent. It's more likely to be somewhere in the middle for both of them. What we've done this time, though, is we're more careful about how we've labeled it so that we don't mistake make that same mistake again, make it far easier for people to self report where they work. That's in terms of the response rate, what are we doing overall to increase the response rate? Well, if you work in the council right now, we'd probably drive you nuts because every time you go on to the Internet, something about the staff survey flashes up in front of you to tell you it's now time to complete it. And there's also a page, a message, which said you said we did. And it shows people what we did since the last survey. Because when it comes to surveys, it doesn't really matter what you tell people, it matters what you do. And people will only invest their twenty minutes if they think it's worth it and you're going to listen to them. So we have worked really hard to show people what we've done that's different. And we've tried to get that campaign not just in the last week, because people see straight through us. We've tried to keep that going throughout the last two years. Every time we've made a difference, we've tried to tie it back to the employee survey to show that we've done it because of that. In terms of just leadership and management, if I could just run through just a couple of things that we've done since they're directly as a result of the last employee survey. So for instance, we've introduced a coaching culture, which will help improve the experience of people who work in this council by having managers who take a coaching approach. We've got a new manager's induction to help our managers be properly equipped from day one. We've got a new leadership group, which is essentially our top 50 managers. And we meet with them on a monthly basis to make sure that they've all got the same messages. We've got, I think we've learnt to assume less and write down more. So we've got a new document now, which specifically sets out line managers' responsibilities, which will be coming to CLT in a couple of weeks, and then we'll publish that later in June. And that specifically sets out as a manager the things you have to do. And you might wonder why we need to do that, but we've just learnt now. Stop assuming. Write it down. Make it really easy for people to do well in their jobs. We've got a new training offer for managers and we've completely refreshed our values and behaviours and launched new ones in April. And that again was as a result of direct feedback we got from the employee survey, where people told us that they didn't really understand our values or some of them didn't resonate with them. So there are lots of things we've done to put ourselves into a good position to get a good response rate from the survey that's gone out yesterday. And just to give you a flavour, in terms of headline numbers yesterday we had more people complete the survey on day one than completed it in the whole of week one last time. So we've already had a good response rate and we won't give up. Okay, that's really positive. That's really positive to hear. And thank you. That's good news. Yes, Councillor Highfield, have you got a question? Well, I have, please. In table A, if I can scroll through the hundreds and hundreds of posters that go between table A and table Annex A and Annex C, it's a bit hard to follow. They're very nice. The Appendix A raises more questions to me than answers. For example, looking at the years since I've been a Councillor, in social workers there is a trivial difference between the number of agencies then and now. However, there's been a 50 per cent increase in the number of permanent workers. So that's improved the ratio. It doesn't seem to have reduced the number of agency workers that are on our strength. So there doesn't seem to have been any significant progress. And this table doesn't tell us which of those permanent workers are people who switch perhaps from agency to permanent, which would be an encouraging sign if we saw that, because it means that we're attractive enough to attract people away from agency. So I don't know if there's any way that that can be incorporated in future as a way of sort of an indicator of how we're doing with our attractiveness. But also note that we've managed a small reduction in the number of agency team managers, but a very significant increase in the number of managers overall, team managers overall. And that increase is in the area of permanent, which is encouraging. But it does mean that we've now got a substantially larger number of managers, which has cost implications. And I don't know if that's efficient. And in other areas, I was told when I first asked about agency versus permanent workers, that there was a benefit in having a proportion of agency workers, because it gives the council flexibility. We don't want 50/50, but it was considered to be a benefit to have a certain proportion because, frankly, they're easier to remove if we don't need them or to recruit quickly if we do need them rather than permanent workers. But in many areas here, we don't have any agency workers at all. I don't know if that is relevant. I don't know enough about the detail of their work, for example, the non-qualified support workers, family support workers. We don't have any agency workers as of now. And for some of them, we never have had. I don't know if there's any negative effect on not having any agency at all, so we'd like to look at that. I'd like to know what you think about that. And the final thing was something that was raised in relation to what Liz was saying just now. The response rates here, I was looking at the table that showed the treated fairly by characteristic table, which has got nine different areas, and the only one with a significant disagreement area was the one on position in the organisation, which seems to be the one with the most people who disagree to one degree or another. In other areas, that strong disagreement seems to be trivial. So I may wonder if you can comment on if you know what the reason for that is. Thank you. So if I go back, I think your first question was about whether we're attractive to agency workers. Are they switching? Does some of those numbers represent people who have gone from agency to permanent? A small number of people have switched, but I think I need to be really clear that we are not financially attractive to an agency worker to switch. There's no agency worker that would switch because of money, because we pay considerably less than they would earn on the agency market. But we are financially attractive for permanent workers, so our pay package is competitive. That said, some agency workers still want to convert and we've recently done a survey of all our agency workers and I think it's about 28 per cent of them, high 20s, have said that they would be interested in staying with us. They're open to a conversation. The biggest barrier for them is location, and that's probably an area where it is going to be non-negotiable for us because we're pretty clear that frontline social work has to take place face-to-face, and so we do need our social workers to be present in the county. So financially we are not attractive to agency workers, but we still have managed to convert a small number of them and I've written down your feedback about whether can we show the actual numbers that have converted on here and we can try to do that for you because we know where they are. Yes, because our improvement in proportion is simply reflected in increased numbers, which we've managed to do with mostly permanent workers. So at least they were from the permanent, but it's quite a substantial increase in the numbers and that's the only reason the ratio looks better. Yes, and I would say we've had huge investments in children's services and every time we have investment that's normally in the shape of additional posts that are created, and every time we create a new post we have to initially fill it with an agency worker and that's why the number of agency workers we've employed has continued to increase. But that's stopped now. We're in a very different position now where we're not expanding the workforce now, we're in a position where we are reducing the numbers in proportion to the reduction in workload that we've got. Rachel might want to say more on that, otherwise I'll get myself slightly confused on that. But in terms of your question, do we want to get to a position where we've got no agency workers or is a degree of agency workers desirable? My view is that we would love to be in a position where we have a 100% workforce who are permanent, we'd love it, but realistically we're aiming for a proportion of about 80 permanent, 20 agency. That kind of proportion is where we would like to be. I don't think there's any benefit at all in having a deliberate strategy where we would like to retain a number of agency workers. Very quickly on that, have we got an idea of when we might achieve that? Okay. So the financial modelling suggests that two and a half years is where, and that's where our savings plan is set, we have, it's a complicated, which is why my colleagues aren't stepping in, it's to do with full-time equivalent minus how we manage the budgets moving forward. In that, we have to be within our own portfolio. Now, say for example I'm having some challenges in my assessment team or I've got quite significant sickness, if I'm bringing in a worker to cover that, I have to pay for it by holding other posts, et cetera. Parts of the financial modelling are about us managing that. The number of increases in managers' posts, our budgets are set in the September, October, prior to the April. But for the year that Ofsted came in, our budgets were set earlier. So at the point Ofsted came in, the outcome was that we had to immediately increase the number of managers in MASH and the numbers of managers in assessment because they actually determined that it was unsafe. When those managers came in, they're not actually in the budget until the April, so the agency covers that. And then as we've adapted over time and let other managers go, when we build a post, for example the increase in ECHO, so that's our prevention of care team, that's been part of the investment that we've done, the managers initially will be temporary and then they'll become permanent. And some of that is played out in this. It's quite complex but your original question was when do we think we'll get 80, 20, we're thinking about two years. If we get it prior to that, then that'll be great. On a current trajectory, we look as if we'll hit it before then but that's the trajectory. Councillor Hayfield, did you want to ask a question around that particular point? Yes I do, a quick one. One of the observations I've noted is that, if I'm right, it's not possible to qualify as a social worker within Herefordshire, the local college don't do those courses, am I correct? We have a number of ways of building our own social work teams, you're right, it is not done internally within Herefordshire, we've got agreements with Birmingham, we've got agreements with Worcestershire and we've also got the apprenticeship scheme that's done with Coventry. We've just had two cohorts of ASYEs go through, one in March and one this month, of which there are eight. We've got seven new ASYEs starting as well, so those are just the year post-qualification. So we grow our own and then we also do the ASYE, all of our ASYEs, so that's your advanced year in practice, have remained with us. That's encouraging. Obviously the disadvantage in not having a local place to qualify is first of all recruiting people to that field from local schools and colleges who may want to take that up, they would have to move away, and if they do choose that career and they move away to Birmingham or some other university to do their courses, they get into that environment and they get boyfriends and girlfriends from that area and they don't really want to come back to Herefordshire, so I wonder if we could look at any way in which we could sponsor or encourage that qualification to be done locally? So it is done locally and it is done on site here. For one or two days they go into the university and then they come back on site, there are three different ways of doing it, but the staff remain here and remain living here and then we pay their fees to get backwards and forwards to that. Sam, you wanted to ask a question, was it particularly around that training and recruit training element? Sort of, I've got two quick questions. Can I just say thank you for these answers, they're really reassuring, it's good to hear. Two quick questions, we talk a lot about agency and permanent, what I'm interested in, because a lot of the feedback we hear is about where people are from and where people are based, so I'd be quite interested to know how much of the workforce is essentially based in Herefordshire 100% of the time, office based and when they're out and about, so that would be interesting. But also just from a longer term workforce planning perspective, we talk a lot about the reputation of the local authority and the ability of the local authority to recruit, you've got some fantastic agencies in the voluntary community sector who work in the same sphere, what are we doing to invest in them to get their workforce up to speed because they're the best likely chain of people wanting to become the future social workers, the future apprentices, whether that be schools, whether that be venture, close house, all those sorts of organisations. And if you want to build trust in the community, investing in those organisations who've got the trust of the community will go a long way to repairing the reputation, and I'd be interested to know what your strategy is about investing in them in order to help your own workforce. If I might take the location question, because you might have noticed Councillor Powell got quite excited on that question, because only a week or two ago he asked me to do a piece of work, which was to do some postcode analysis of where our frontline social care staff and children live, which we did, and we've got a lovely table, so we're quite pleased with ourselves that we've got this information. Now this does not include agency workers, because we don't employ them directly, so we don't have access to their postcodes, but this is our permanent workforce, and what that shows is 77% of our permanent workforce live within Herefordshire, 94% of them live within Herefordshire or a county that surrounds us, so that's how many people live within travelling distance. Do you have that, because the early years will historically always be local, the social workers historically will be less local, should we say. So have you got that split for social workers only? I do, I don't have it in front of me, but I can provide that for the committee, I can set the data any way you like. Thank you. I think in your report you identified some of the challenges, and one of them was having sufficient capacity to respond to the high demand for social worker apprenticeship places, which sort of links to Sam's question about the local people that we have that are invested in Herefordshire. What are we doing to address that lack of capacity to actually deal with the interest in apprenticeships? We have to cost our apprenticeships, first and foremost, so we have to have the capacity to take them on and also train them, and you'll see in the paper practice educators, there's a shortage of those. We are working with the universities and we are working with the colleges, both as a children's service and how we build that, and we were at the Send Assurance Board recently, and within that we were talking about how do we all join together, too, because many organisations across Herefordshire, because of its small population, are having some challenges with recruitment. So that's part of an ongoing conversation with the Send Assurance Board, because we will be stronger together, and also if you've got somebody who may not wish to work in youth work anymore with one of the colleges but may want to work in RPA, with RPA's in Looked After Children, it's better that they stay within Herefordshire than perhaps go to Worcestershire. So those are ongoing conversations. I wouldn't say that we've got that centred yet about what we're going to do next. I am working with laughing, particularly with their recruitment and how they recruit from overseas. They have a fantastic recruitment programme of which they've recruited 400 staff, of which they've got an 80% retention rate after five years. That's extraordinary and it's on our doorstep, but I don't know how relevant that is. We're only having first conversations. But looking at really good practice with our neighbours and with the ICB seems to me that's in Hereford and would make a good way forward. So those conversations are ongoing. Our first tranche was to get all the structures in place, so recruitment because you could have the greatest campaign but if people aren't going back to them or it's not easy to apply. Your idea about locality and how we bring youth forward is one that I will take forward. Yes, I've been Councillor Powell. Thank you. I just wanted to pick up on the last point that Sam made, if I could, regarding

• I'm going to paraphrase this - but the work that we need to do to improve our early help and prevention. So we recognise that we need to do more, we need to progress that part of the system. Locally, I say we, there are some external third and community sector organisations that have accessed funding to do exactly that, so the Council take no credit for that, just acknowledge the success that other partners out in the community can help us with that improvement on our early help journey. So Sam mentioned a few organisations there that I've personally been having conversations with and have been connected to for quite some time and I've had some conversations with the incoming Director, who I'm told by one of the Chief Executive has already made a commitment to go out and meet with a particular, you know, quite large and influential third and community sector organisation to start to properly unpick, you know, whether we've got effective working relationships, where they need to be, and where we need to build on some. So those are things that I see as part of my role but also I'm talking to the Director, incoming Director, about how we improve those relationships. So it is recognised and acknowledged there's some work that we do need to do. There is some funding, which always helps, but it is not only about funding, it's about improving relationships. So, Councillor Conkle, I'll come to you now, if I can just sort of stick on that point a little bit because I would suggest that possibly we need to develop a recommendation around this, that there is a strategy developed to look at that sort of specific issue so that we -- because we -- it's been identified as the lacking capacity, we know that there are people locally that are interested and somehow we need to actually develop a strategy around that. So, yes. Did you want to come back on that? I would if I could. I'm not sure if you're aware, Councillor, but currently the Council have commissioned an organisation called PeopleTo and one of the elements of that commission has been specifically to look at early help provision, and this is not the targeted early help that the Council provide, this is early help as a system as required by Working Together
• So it's not for me to tell the committee what to do, of course it's not, but it may be useful for the committee to wait to hear the findings from that particular piece of commissioned work to see, you know, what the outcome is, and there may be some elements that, you know, it might do the job as far as you're concerned or you may want to probe and scrutinise further, but that's ongoing work right now. So -- and I appreciate that and I do know about that work and it is really good, and I think effectively we're talking about two things here. So we're talking about the early help provision and developing that around here and very important work, and hopefully we will hear back about that work. But also we're talking about what I'm talking about, and sort of correct me if I'm wrong, but it's developing a strategy to actually build on our capacity to respond to -- it says here high demand for social work apprenticeship places. They're two -- effectively they're two different things. And when we spoke to Leeds earlier this week, and you know, they were talking about invest to save, and this is part of that, investing to save. So I'm not sure if anybody else agrees that -- I mean, do you feel that there is a need to develop that capacity? It's been identified here. Okay. So we have an early help and prevention strategy and there is a -- obviously there is a work stream that reports both to the early help and prevention board, which in turn reports up to the children and young people's partnership board. You know, we've talked a lot today about different boards and delivery groups and all the rest of it. The local government association have been engaged in Herefordshire just to work through some of that and see if there is some efficiency and streamlining that we can do, because people across the system are saying to us, we are going to meetings, it does feel like there's a lot of duplication of conversation, so is there something more efficiently that we can do? And the people to commission will deliver some of that. I've worked in the county for quite a long time, as I'm sure colleagues will know. I'm very confident that third community sector, community organisations are good at what they do. They do provide early help, but we just might not understand it all, and I'm really cautious when I say we need to understand it all. I'm not saying that, because there is a tendency when you start to understand things, you start to count them and then you start to perhaps want to try and commission them, and that isn't always a helpful conversation. There is another dimension to early help, and that is this. There is a very direct relationship to the Children and Young People's Partnership Board. They have the responsibility, under Working Together 2023, to ensure that there is an early help system offer across all of the agencies, and that partnership is led by the local authority, the police service and the health service in its broadest sense. I think we might be wise to maybe have an offline discussion about the ambitions of the Early Help and Prevention Strategy, the effectiveness of the delivery work that is going on and its connectivity to the Children and Young People's Partnership, the Hereford to Safeguarding Children's Partnership, before we kick into a big piece of work, but I'm really happy to have that conversation outside. Rachel, did you want to come in? Thank you. I can offer some feedback on the apprenticeships. So we have already invested - we always had six apprenticeships that were going through in the last two or three years, I can only say always because I've been here for two years, so for me, for the last two years, we've had six apprenticeships going through. One of the challenges of having apprenticeships previously was that they counted towards caseloads because they were a set member of the team. What we did this year is we have funded seven more, and they are separate to the teams. So we've got 13 in total, we've got 13 apprenticeships that are running through. That at the moment, I would say, is the maximum that we can take because you've got to have them in each team. The way the universities run means that it's very time intensive, they do all of their work within the teams, so until we get more practice educators and others, I think that's a safe number to have within our teams, because we've also got social work students as well as ASYEs, and there has to be a balance within teams, those that are experienced and those that are new, newly coming through. Our career pathway starts from apprenticeship to the step-up programme or to the usual routes of sponsoring people through university. Then you've got your first level as a social worker where you do your ASYE, and then you gain some confidence over another couple of years, and then you can become a senior practitioner. And then what we need is a manager's step now, that how do we build leaders for the future would be my recommendation. But as for the numbers within the system at any given time, there can be 17, 18 people training, and if I include the ASYEs, you're looking at 20, 25, so in my view, I think we have enough. We've just done the interviews for Coventry at the outcome of their assessment centre. Seven staff went forward. All of those work within the service, which is positive, because they do need to have some experience beforehand, and five of those were successful, and those interviews, we got the feedback yesterday, so we've still got a lot of people coming through that want to be apprenticeships. For wider social care roles across the whole footprint of Herefordshire, I think there could be a wider strategy, but not necessarily just for children's services. I think it should be wider. Thank you. Tracey, did you want to come in? Please, I just wanted to clarify, forgive me, but is the question whether we have, whether if we disinvested in agency workers and invested more in practice educators, would we be able to support more apprenticeships in the workplace, or have we got the optimum number of apprentices that we can support for an organisation this size? I wondered if that is the actual question. So we have got the optimum number of apprentices that we can support. I just wanted to clarify that. Thanks, because it is in the report basically that having the capacity to respond to the demand for social worker apprenticeship places, and that is sort of one of the challenges, so is that still a challenge, or are we at you are saying that, Rachel, that we are at capacity, but actually is that only because we need to build more capacity, and is that something, a discussion that you still sort of need to have, because it has been identified as a challenge, so I am not entirely sure, is it a challenge or is it not a challenge? It is a challenge, but it is also a multifaceted challenge in that we have a lot of people who wish to become social workers, so it is a multifaceted challenge. We would need to build quite significantly, and I am not certain we would have enough teams to train them in the meantime as well, so we have got the optimum amount of workers who are currently in training for the size of our teams. Okay, so again it comes back to that question. Sorry to keep going on about it. I am just not entirely clear, do we need to build that capacity, then, but let's just move on to, it was Councillor Conthwaite actually, and then, but is this particular, okay. Just following this thread through, if we are aiming to reduce the number of posts, does that mean that we will actually have to reduce the number of apprentices in the future, because… No, the number of posts will be headcount, not headcount, full-time equivalent posts, but we know we won't have to, we are comfortable with the number of apprenticeships that we have at this time. If you had a whole separate pathway where everybody was supernumerate, then yeah, but you would also have to have the next step, which would be people being supervised through their ASYE, and the next steps after that, at which point they would take a post, it's always worth looking into, but currently we wouldn't have the capacity to do that. Okay, thank you. Councillor Conthwaite? It's less of a question really, and I think you said we may be at capacity in any case. I was just wanting to take you a step back before you interview people, or make yourselves known at colleges, is that actually we make ourselves known at the schools when they do mock interviews, because that's where I've found a great deal of satisfaction in getting out there and meeting young people, and I don't think I've seen anyone from the Council promoting any of the departments, but it would be fantastic if you're doing it at that level, because then they would know what they were going into the college to study, because you would give them that lead, and I guess there's already a chance that you might be doing work experience, because again, work experience, they're coming in from schools and they can suddenly decide, no that is the last thing I want to do, as I often find if I put them on a biscuit production line, but not always, so those are options that I'd like to throw out there, because I think schools in the last year are great places to regroup from. Tracey. Thank you. We definitely do have a work experience program, and we have just recently put a call out for managers to participate in mock interviews in schools, so that is an idea that was mentioned at a previous committee which we have picked up. Thank you. If I can just sort of go onto the point about what we learn from our staff, so things like exit interviews. I mean, are we gathering enough information from those people that do leave the council as to sort of how their experience has been, or do we need to develop more work on that? You know, what can we do? You're nodding your head, Tracey. Do you want to come in? No, we don't do enough. Yes, we need to do more for this. And so process-wise, we've got a corporate exit survey, which everybody gets a link to, and they can fill that in, and that's there for everybody, and that gives us a degree of information. In children's, as is quite standard, we've got an additional layer, a separate process where the principal social worker will meet with people when they're leaving, and that will give us richer information, and that's a standard process. That process hasn't been working as well as it could be, because we've had a gap at principal social worker level, but that now has been rectified, so that process is back up and running. What that does mean is we've got a gap in data. What I would say, though, to assure the committee is that since January 2023, our retention rates for qualified social workers is 94%. So we have very few levers. There's a myth that we have lots of levers in this sphere and we just don't. So we have very small numbers leaving, but do I have good enough data about why they're leaving? No. Okay, Councillor Davies. Sorry, my bad. I'm new to this committee, so ASYE, what does this stand for? Forgive me. You're right to pick me up on an acronym. So a pathway for a social worker to become formally qualified is you go to university or do it through some form of university, and then you become qualified, but then you have to do an advanced year in practice, and the advanced year in practice is known as ASYE. No logical reason. Advanced social - have you got it there? Advanced and assessed supported year in employment. There you go. It is in the glossary. So assessment of supported year in employment, but you have to pass the ASYE, otherwise you can't formally become a social worker. Thank you for that. Much appreciated. If I can come to the appendix A, Robert's already turned around and discussed the numbers in that. I'm very pleased to see the increase in permanent staff over agency staff, and I think we're heading in the right direction to achieve the targets. What would be beneficial for me to see and perhaps for the rest of us is the actual total numbers we require in each sphere, so a total number of - as in our target number of social workers for the council, target number of team managers, those figures aren't there, so what we have is just numbers of staff, and they both seem to go up and down, and it might be an idea to know where we have the biggest vacancy gaps in those different areas might be beneficial, just for information-wise. Moving on from that, on the recruitment front, do we have an understanding of why we hit the place we did and the requirement to take on more agency staff? What was the cause? Was it because there was suddenly an increase in the requirement for children's support, family support? Was there just a sudden loss of staff from the council at the time? Do we have any understanding of why that happened? Three years ago, there was what's known as the Y Y judgment, where the court issued a judgment against us, Judge Keenan ordered the judgment against us, and then there has been step after step of quite challenging situations, so we have the Ofsted judgment, which was in itself challenging, and also the Panorama program. All of those three, you may or may not know, after the Y Y judgment, the whole senior leadership team left, so all of that brings with itself a feeling across organisations, across Herefordshire, of an escalation in the number of children coming through the front door. In actual fact, it became three times, from the statistics, three times the statistical neighbours. So what happened is the front door became overloaded, the senior leadership team had gone, there was not enough quick response to that, and before you knew it, there were multiple people with huge caseloads. Over time, you can see that coming down, there's been some blips where it's gone up after Ofsted, and then it's come down. Our current rate is 462 per 10,000 rate, and it was at that time over 1,000, so that is what happened. The recent report from our lead colleagues, which is an independent report, has advised that the system has calmed, and that we now are at the rates of statistical neighbours and English national. The only outlier at the moment is children looked after, and that's because a lot of them came in during that time, but we are now calming the system. Do we feel that that's not going to happen again in that case, and that all those initial causes for that to happen have now been looked at, and we've got a plan in place that's going to prevent that from ever reoccurring? We have a wider improvement plan, which is just the second iteration. Third iteration is now being done with the incoming DCS. I was a little bit late for this meeting, because I was meeting with Judge Cole, so we have very good relationships with the judiciary now, and we have legal tracking meetings, and we track any high-risk cases within the court. Have we put everything in place as far as is possible? I would say yes, and it's monitored across the improvement board, and the corporate parenting board, and through scrutiny. So we are highly scrutinised, and we've still got a commissioner, and we've still got a DFE advisor, who met with yesterday, who give very good advice, and are helping us through. We're in a very different place than we were three years ago, and we're in a very different place than we were two years ago. The data shows that, but it isn't only data, it's how much, how well, and how do you know? So our data is showing it as good, and we know that we're doing a lot of it well. What we really need now is to show the impact, so what is the impact on families, and that's the conversation that we're changing to. That will be the conversation of the improvement plan, and that will be the changes that are made through across all the groups that sit underneath it now. How do we know? And that includes the audit, review, feedback from families and children. That's the part we're moving forward to now. Thank you for that. Do we do any benchmarking with other authorities that have been through similar positions, that have had high numbers of agency staff compared to permanent staff, and then have turned it back around? I mean, we can't be the only ones that have been in this position, so I don't know whether you've had any contact with other councils that have been through the same scenario. Georgia works within HR, works with many colleagues across our agency. We benchmark everything against statistical neighbours, and we benchmark everything against the English national average, so that's almost most of our data is done that way. As for specific local authorities that have become inadequate, no. But do we benchmark against our local neighbours from which we all recruit from? Yes, absolutely. I don't have that data in front of me, I don't know whether you do, Tracey. I don't have the data in front of me, but we benchmark our offer, our pay on a quarterly basis now, and that's monitored through the delivery board to make sure that our offer is still competitive. It is competitive. And in terms of actions and steps we need to take to give us the best chance of recruiting, we've talked to so many different local authorities about what they did that worked for them, and we will try almost anything once. Almost anything once. Councillor Highfield, did you want to ask something? Yes, and it's sort of related. Thank you. I have to say the good news is that you two are answering so well and clearly, thank you very much for that. The trouble is it invites more difficult questions because we think we might get an answer. We have had circulated to us the Leeds strategy. As you know, we're working with Leeds because they've gone through the same journey overall. So when we talk about comparison, we do know what Leeds are doing. Was this report informed at all by their strategy report, which I've seen? Did you look at that as part of … There were a number of reports by Leeds. So, I don't know which specific one you're talking to. It was the recruitment and retention strategy. We're working alongside Leeds about what they did because they also had a challenge at that time, and they're feeding into the recruitment and retention group, which sits underneath the workforce delivery group, and they've checked all the things that we've done and given feedback on everything that we've done. They didn't specifically say to make any progress, but we've taken every idea that they've given them and run with it, every single one, including their current recommendation that their partners will talk to our partners. So it's an ongoing discussion and relationship with them until March. That's excellent. On that topic, as an outsider, you look at the situation. We pay a certain salary and benefits to our permanent workers, or they could go and work for an agency, get paid more, plus a profit for the agency, and we pay that too. And so it doesn't make sense to an outsider why we would do that. And Leeds mentioned apparently an agreement about capping the agency fees. I wonder if you … Maybe Ivan would like to say something about that. Is there any prospect of that happening? Forgive me. Councillor Powell gave me a nudge to mention the memorandum of understanding, so you've just given me an in to do that. So regionally, we are part of something called a memorandum of understanding, which is where the local authorities have got together and agreed a rate at which we will not go beyond for agency workers, and that stops us competing with each other. That's the good news. The bad news is that because of our desperate position, and it was a desperate position, we haven't always stuck to that memorandum of understanding, and we've had to agree an exemption with our colleagues across the region. They haven't loved us for it, but they've understood where we are. So we have had to agree exceptions to that, and it is our ambition to get back to that memorandum of understanding so that we can continue to pay the market rate. Thank you. Just going back to sort of staff and sort of work-life balance and well-being, et cetera, often what comes up is the amount of bureaucracy that staff have to deal with, and whereas they could actually be spending time working with children, they're actually spending a lot of time sort of doing paperwork. Is there any plan in place to actually help alleviate that? I mean, some places have looked at, for example, minuting meetings, using artificial intelligence to help minute meetings, one small example, but there must be kind of various other, and I'm sure this must come up through your discussions. So, yeah, any ideas on how you can improve that sort of balance for staff? It's been a topic of conversation over the last two years, I would say. The biggest issue at the beginning was about mosaic. What changes can we make to mosaic? It's an ongoing piece of work. I've just met the permanent new head for that. There's been a lot of changes made in that particular arena, and in some areas it's much more simple. The minutes of meetings came up about 18 months ago, and many of our business support now will do that, so they'll minute the child in need meetings, or they'll minute some of the core groups for child protection. And we've stripped out a lot. There's still a lot to strip out because we've had seven, eight years of people building blocks on top of it. The artificial intelligence is really fascinating. We're working with ICT about how we can make that a lot easier, so how can you record it off your laptop and then the minutes be done for you. Unfortunately it picks up some bits and doesn't pick up other bits, and cannot make much sense. So some of our minute-ing teams who take some of those recordings, in some instances it's very good and some instances it's not, it may well be down to two accents. We've all got different accents, haven't we? We're working on a business support review as well about how we may put business support back into the teams, which is more of a traditional model so they would organise, they would know the children, they'd know the families, they know the workers, they can just go in and out of their diaries rather than this centralised model, but that is currently under review. All of this is being looked at under the locality model, moving forward, which we've got a full team around. There is always opportunities with AI and we're looking at them, but we've also got issues with confidentiality, data protection. I met a young person this morning who said can't you just give all your staff tablets? No, we can't, but you know, we're looking at all the different options at this time and staff feedback at every kit, the things that are irritating them, and then I make a commitment to go back to see whether I can fix that particular part and touch what I could, apart from one thing, I've been able to fix most of the things that they've brought forward. Thank you. And I think it's really important, you know what you're saying, because staff feeling like they're actually listened to and that they're actually able to contribute is an important part of developing a healthy workforce, so hopefully that will be picked up in the staff survey, but it is a very intensive job in paperwork though, we can't, everything has to be evidenced because of reviews and all of that, we have to record quite a lot. I'd say the profession has changed massively in the last 15 to 20 years, and I know the Isobelle Traula was advocating less paperwork across the piece, which I know the National College are looking at, but at the moment it is a very intensive profession for recording. Okay, thank you. Councillor Davies online, you've got a question. Yes, thank you very much chair, it was very interesting and I've learned a great deal this afternoon, but what I would like to know, what qualifications do school leavers have to have to become an apprentice? And then the other one is what mature students or adults would have to have to become a social worker, please? So, to train to be a social worker at the apprenticeship level, you must have a qualification in Maths and English, you must have that to move forward, you can't qualify. If you're doing the step up programme, that is a programme, it's an intensive programme over 14 months, and you must have a prior degree for that, and so you're converting your degree, almost like a Masters programme and that's a very, very intensive way of doing, but it has very good outcomes. For others going through the normal university route, you would have to have your qualifications that allow you to get onto that course, which might be the traditional A level, but there is also a way of getting onto the course as an access to education, but you still need to have the Maths and English underneath it. Thank you. Councillor Proctor? So, I have a small number of questions, which are going back earlier on, so if that's okay now, or if you want to... No, that's fine, thank you. Sorry, these are just some notes I made and then the conversation moved on, so it's going right back to the Workforce Strategy, and I feel guilty because several of my colleagues said that it's a very clear and unusual strategy, and I should have said that too, because it is very clear to read, but my just three questions that I didn't get to, so you talked a lot about how the staff voice was involved in it, but were children and young people's voices involved in developing it? No, not at this time, this is about workforce, and of course the children and young people are vital in that. They're working on other strategies at this time, so they're working on a lot of strategies in the Parenting arena, the Engagement Strategy, the Participation Strategy, so no they're not involved in this one. Well, it's... bringing their voice in doesn't necessarily mean consulting with them directly over the strategy, so it's just about what we already know about what children and young people's experience and how that was brought into the strategy. And then, related to that, had you considered, because it's written to address the staff, had you considered writing it to address children? Because I've seen that can be quite powerful, and I mean there are Scottish Government national policies that are written to address children, so there's not the intention that the child will read it, but it's just a way of framing the conversation, so I don't know if... It's a great idea, yeah. Yeah, I'll take that forward. And then my final question, and this is picking up the last time the committee met, we were looking at fostering, and one of the concerns that seems to be raised by foster carers is not feeling to be part of the team. And I know that foster carers are not employees, and therefore they're not covered by this strategy, but I wonder if some reference to foster carers within this strategy might help both foster carers to feel part of the team, but also to emphasise to our staff that foster carers are part of the team. Councillor Powell, do you want to respond? So fostering, there have been some ongoing conversations following the most recent committee, not the least of which are some direct conversations between myself and other councillors, but obviously fostering forms part of the overarching placement and sufficiency strategy. I don't know right now the point that you raised, Councillor Proctor, if that is overtly in there enough. I was talking to Jas, the service manager, just at lunchtime, about some pretty rapid steps that we've made very recently. So I'll take that away for a specific conversation. What I would say in terms of some assurance is that recently we had fostering fortnight. This won't apply to every family who is currently fostering, I acknowledge that, but in a general level there was good engagement from fostering families, engagement with the service, lots of feedback about areas that we recognise still need to be improved, not the least of which actually was something which came up in a conversation with our support partners in Leeds yesterday with regard specifically to special guardianship arrangements and kinship care. I've taken that away and checked it out. It's already in progress as a consequence of some recent conversations. So there's been some progress made over the last year, some very clear progress in some bespoke areas in the last few weeks, but I will take that specifically away. There is a recruitment strategy for foster carers. There's also been a recent needs analysis that's been done by the fostering network and then there was a diagnostic that finished maybe six weeks ago that was run by the DFE and we've just had the report and that feedback I think went to foster carers last week, but forgive me, but it's in process of being cascaded out. When we've got the needs analysis and then we've got the diagnostic, all of that will be brought together in one specific strategy. But what I can say is the training that's available in here, so the 48 pages of training is also available to our foster carers, so there is some read across there. And the safeguarding training is also available to our foster carers and where we can join people together, that is obviously a way forward for building relationships and for building skills and knowledge. Across both, so for social workers to learn from foster carers. So both of those are based on clear evidence and by external reviewers and then we're going to move it forward. So that's where we are with that particular piece. Thank you. Councillor Harvey, you had some points and then Councillor Highfield. Yes, thank you Chair. Just first picking up on Councillor Proctor's point and our last meeting looking at fostering. I mean, we're talking here today about the workforce strategy and I think, you know, I'd like to reinforce the point that with two-thirds of our looked after children being in with foster families or in foster like family settings, that certainly in terms of the kind of things that we say in this workforce strategy we're looking at doing in order to make our staff feel listened to, heard, supported, trained etc. I think there's a strong read across to the sorts of things that we should be doing for our foster families and whether we formally do it or informally do it, acknowledging them as an extension of our workforce in terms of the relationship that they have with the council, the service that they provide that they're remunerated for and the relationship that they have. Recognising that in a slightly more tight, connected way and thinking about them as if they were part of our workforce might be helpful in retaining foster families in the same way as we're looking to act in a way which enables us to retain a high proportion of our staff once we've required them. Just picking up on a language point that Councillor Powell made in talking about early help and recognising the distinction between the kind of social care early help which happens formally within the social care system and the kind of preventative early help which is supported and in various ways delivered by external partners, third sector organisations and community groups. It's a use of the term early help which we've stubbed our brains on several times as a committee in terms of being in danger of talking at cross purposes between what we mean which is effectively the preventative early help. And I think that's some of the work that some of the groups that Sam mentioned earlier on are involved with and the formal social work early help that goes on inside the council. If there's another term or a slightly different way of consistently referring to that preventative early help, I think it would be really helpful for everybody so that we don't end up talking at cross purposes or meaning slightly different things, particularly when we've got social workers in the room who are very clear in terms of what they understand by early help within their professional framework. Going back to a point that Councillor Highfield made about the staff numbers in appendix A and the ratio between the combined agency and permanent staff and the number of team managers that we've got. The ratio in January 2023 was something like 3.7 members of staff to one manager. And in May this year, it's down to 3.2 to one, but we have more permanent staff on our books than we did at the back in January 2023. So I'm wondering if there's any explanation of that slight shift in ratio between staff and managers that can be explained away by that increase in the proportion of permanent staff that we've got, or whether it's just that we have reduced the span of control, if you like, between the number of team managers that we've got and the number of staff that they're responsible for. So if you look at the second part of annex A for the different roles, they'll be across the piece, so you'll have early help team leader, you'll have steps team leader, the chat team leader, those will be managers. So the equation is not how many team managers and how many social workers, it's all of their aspects. Some of the roles, for example, due to the level of experience that is needed, say MASH, they wouldn't necessarily be supervising anybody, but they would have a role which means they need to make a decision. There are decision-making roles, so they wouldn't necessarily have that information. That's where the numbers become more challenging to try and explain, but you can see in one part there's the team manager roles which go across all the piece but wouldn't necessarily be supervisory roles, and then the normal team managers that we would know in children's social work are just simple team managers. They don't tend to have fancy titles, they're just team managers. So the devil's in the detail and it's quite a complex picture. Okay, well given that and the number of interim and agency appointments that we still have within the service structure, what are the tools and the information that's made available to staff to ensure that they always know who is responsible for particular functions from day to day, and is this information maintained and updated in the information management systems that staff have to use to document their cases, so they don't end up not being able to complete their documentation because they can't fill out a field because they don't know who the right person is anymore? I think if I don't answer it correctly, please come back at me. What I think you're asking is the practice standards, so what the practice standards say is who needs to do what and who needs to agree what, so which managers or which level of management needs to agree what to allow the system to continue to work. Whenever anybody starts, they'll get information about their team and they'll also in many teams get buddied up, so there'll be somebody who can help and support them and help them move through the intricacies. For 90% of decisions, you would just go to your manager, for 90 plus decisions would go to your manager. For some of those nuanced ones, so for example, you need somebody to agree a placement with a parent or a residential placement, that would then your manager would take that responsibility to put it to the right person moving through. I think the induction programme is vital so that people can see it and know where to go, but fundamentally, just like in any job or role, it is also a question of learning from others, so we can give all the information in the first three days, we can give guidance, we can give practice standards which could be 15 pages and that's just recently been redone to make it easier and simpler and also to make it clear who is responsible, so that's just been redone and cascaded out, but in any job, it is about who's sitting next to you to help you with all the questions that may not be written down. That's where I think it comes down to and that's where it comes down to being in an office, being visible as a manager or being available and having somebody next to or somebody you can ring. Thank you. Just talking about being in an office and all of those sort of relationships, the sense I'm getting is that relationships with managers are really good. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect sometimes between the sort of next levels up and that how does that get addressed if you're talking about, and is that where a one council approach comes in where everybody is actually working together, they know who's who, so there's that, and then also how does agile working fit in? So actually people, for example, some people may need to start later or finish earlier or something, so how does that fit in? I know that there's been a big drive to bring social workers back into the office because I think at one point there were very few to be seen, particularly after COVID, but it's just how those all those sort of pieces fit together would be good to understand. Okay. So the first question was about senior leadership and who is the senior leader? Some of the staff call higher up, so which is the person? And we're having those discussions because it's really quite interesting, so some people will suggest that service managers are senior managers, and some will say Paul, the chief exec is a senior manager, so all of that is interesting. It is about being visible and on the floor, so I think some senior managers are known better than other senior managers. There is an expectation that people are in at least two, preferably three, depending on which role you play in the office, and on some Tuesdays and Wednesdays there is no sitting room upstairs at all, and on the second floor, because as you know we take part of floor one and part of floor two. We try and make as many meetings as we can in person, so at the beginning of this week, Tuesday, we had all the managers at the town hall all there for nine o'clock and they were all on time and everybody was in person. We try and make those meetings face to face as much as we can. There is always going to be, there were some advantages to agile working. Some of the challenges previously for social work, and it's not a nine to five job, you may be visiting a family at half seven in the morning and you may be visiting at half seven at night, and if something comes in at safeguarding you may be out till ten and eleven o'clock at night, so it's never really been a job that hasn't been agile. One of the challenges has been how do you maintain that work-life balance. Part of that, the recent conversations we're having is, during COVID, there were some actual good things that happened in that teams would find ways of doing team building or would try different ways of engaging rather than just being face to face for a meeting, and we're talking about what can we bring back from that to build that kind of sense of team and ownership together, and some of the teams in their own time and with their own money have gone off and done escape rooms together or have gone and sat in a park for a picnic together, so it's, it's kind of bringing some of those good things that happened and came out of COVID. There is a, obviously people can apply for nine day fortnight and other bits for wellbeing, but most of that comes down to your manager knowing you and you knowing your manager and being able to talk in a way that allows social workers who also have families and or people and can get affected by significant trauma just like other people can, and people being able to recognise that trauma when it's within them, and also being able to say to somebody, do you know, that was a really, really hard visit, and then somebody being there to bounce against them, and that's one of the reasons we brought people back in so they could have those conversations. Those conversations are even more important for newly qualified social workers who may not have the resilience or may not come against it before or not quite know when someone's been super aggressive and how you, where you sit in the room and all of that sort of stuff, and that comes with modelling. We bring social workers into the office and some will start later and some will start earlier, but I think the virtual work allows people to get on with their reports and to get on with the things, because I know I do less when I'm in the office, because a lot of it's about talking and meeting people and having those relationships. Whereas if I really want to get a report done, it has to be at home. Could I just add, so the phrase that we've used quite a lot internally is that the work dictates your location, so whatever you're working on, wherever that needs to be is where you need to be. So the needs of the council, children and families always comes first, but the one thing I would have to add is that we have to be able to offer flexible working arrangements for our workforce, because if we don't, then Gloucestershire will, Worcestershire will, Shropshire will, and they're very, very happy to take our workforce. So we have to be able to offer flexible working arrangements to meet the needs of our workforce. It's so important. Okay, thank you. Does anybody else have any questions around the workforce? Councillor Nofield, sorry, I forgot you there. No, you don't forget me, Toni. I just have a few minor recommendations. I don't think they're big enough to be part of our official recommendation, but the first one was we identified one or two additions that might be made to the Annex A table that might be valuable, which included maybe showing how many we managed to get from agency to permanent, and also as David said about what the total target is in each area. And if that table can be made accessible, I'm not a fan of our county website as people have heard me complain before. So if there's a way that we can view the progress on that and easily access it, that would be nice. The next point I'd like to make is we did cover Fostering last time and Ben has raised it again and Liz has. There are some parallels in that in Fostering our own foster families and there's a competition between recruiting them and agencies recruiting them and exactly the same, we're paying the agencies anyway. The recruitment strategy, there may well be one, but at the moment it is clearly not working as can be seen from the figures. More strategy for the general social workforce appears to be working. There is encouraging signs but it's not working with the Fostering. We're losing too many Fostering families and not recruiting enough. So that's just an aside to point out. You are HR Tracy and you talked about the reputational problem that we have from the history, but in my job and Councillor Powell will really I'm sure resonate with this. We were both police officers in a previous life and both commanded police stations and I hated to go to a police station that was working beautifully because all I could do is maintain that or maybe screw it up. I liked to go to somewhere which was a bit of a mess, although I didn't like it to be a mess going downhill and we're not. We're a bit of a mess that's going uphill and that's actually a positive for our reputation and for our recruitment. We should stress the fact that there's an opportunity to join an organisation that's definitely getting better and there's work to be done and they can be part of that. So I'd recommend that when you're doing your HR pitch you try to stress the opportunity to be part of something that's going to be really good later. And the final small recommendation is that when you're doing staff feedback I choose with enormous success, far more than I expected, the Japanese system of quality circles. I don't know if you know about those or ever tried it out, but what they do largely is they remove the management from the discussion group and they're free to say what they like. They don't have to impress anybody and it doesn't come from an individual who could be perhaps, What are you questioning that for? It comes from a small group so they're sort of a little bit anonymous. But the recommendation that came out of it was spectacular in my organisation so I'd recommend that you might consider introducing that system, quality circle system, to get feedback from the staff. And that's my points, thank you. Thank you. Councillor Harvey, you wanted to say something? Yeah, it's not a recommendation, but I just wanted to come back right at the outset, Tracey. You were saying that one of the things that we weren't winning the messaging war on yet was the outward facing, sort of this is how we're improving, these are the good news stories. Now I know everybody seems to have been really keen to pick up on the bad news stories and talk about them a lot. We've heard today a lot of good news, and I'm just wondering how, what the plans are for how we're going to encourage the promulgation of that good news. Because building, bless you, building public confidence back up again, as well as building confidence in our foster carer base, in the families who are working with us at the sector organisations, is really important as we go on this journey. So Rachel and I did a bit of double act on this on Monday, our workforce delivery board, and I think we've managed to release some funding specifically to recruit someone on a temporary basis just to help us do this. Just some dedicated resource to help us change our message. Because our comms team do not have the resource to do this, if they did they would have done it differently. So we've developed a programme, we're clear about what we want to achieve, we just need someone to do it for us. And I think we screamed loud enough on Monday, didn't we? We just want to make it a priority now, because we believe this is our biggest barrier. Okay thank you, that's good to hear. Councillor Davies, yes. Can I just throw in, because we're discussing fostering, I would like to suggest that perhaps we should look at the fostering offer for kinship fostering as well, so they sort of mirror each other. And that might encourage more then on the kinship side of things. Also on the recruiting and retention part, no we – you say you don't get an awful lot of feedback from ex-employees, same goes with agency staff. I don't know whether you get feedback from any agency staff after they leave. But it might be worthwhile targeting maybe a month after people have left to ask them those questions, they might be more favourable to answer honestly than, you know, if someone has just left or finished that job, I don't have anything to do with it, and you might not get anything. Whereas if you leave in a few weeks, it might be a viable opportunity. That's it, thanks. Thank you. And Councillor Powell, did you want to come back? Probably on the fostering I imagine. So I just want to clarify something if I could first. So Councillor Harvey made the point about early help, and I don't think it was a question that required me to answer that. But I will happily do a Councillor version of early help universal services and the threshold guidance, which I'll check out with officers so that it's not factually or lawfully inaccurate. But I'll write it from a Councillor perspective to share around and see if that works first, and then I do that. So I don't think it was a question, but would that be helpful? Yeah, I wasn't necessarily thinking of Councillors as being the audience for for that. It's really just how we have that broader conversation and that we're consistent in the language that we use so that the social carer early help that forms part of it. So what I said when people are talking about it, it's that stuff before, you know, it kind of stops families ever reaching the point where they start needing to have supporting engagement with social workers. And then, Councillor Dennis on your specific part, I did reference this. I recently met with the independent rearing officers within the community. So there is real in terms of workforce, you will notice there is real value in the workforce as well as in conversations, I don't know if any of you can hardly deny it, about how we might give elected members opportunities to have conversations with the workforce so that we can understand what's going on there. That's really important because consistently every time I sit with workforce, they will say to me that we want to share what you're doing, we feel we're being often criticized. Sometimes, you know, we're not what we are doing and how hard we're working is not all being recognised. And within that, they do acknowledge we're on an improvement journey and we need to improve the quality and timeliness of some of what we do. So if you get opportunities to talk to workforce, I would implore that you get to understand that. Specific, so talking to the independent reviewing officer team, one of the things that came out specifically there was foster carers, kinship care, special guardianship orders and it came out in the conversation and said yesterday and before with leads that the expression that is used with regard to that isn't so-called non-detriment policy and that is actively being worked on now. There will be pretty well a final version of that by the end of next week, I'm led to believe, so it is a piece of work that was already in train, actually. I take no credit for it. That was officers already doing good work in that area. Right. Thank you. So just looking at the time and obviously we've got some recommendations that we'd like to just go through. The very final thing that I wanted to raise was the impact of restorative practice. So I know that there's been a real focus on restorative practice. When we did speak to, we had the focus group and there was quite a lot of mention about the training courses. Some of them while doing their lunch break and they were trying to eat their lunch and there seemed to be some issues around getting all the courses in within this sort of working day and sort of finding a balance between that. But what I really want to know is how the new approach to restorative practice is influencing workforce demands and have the changes in staffing requirements around that been built into this workforce strategy. So if I go to the first part, the impact of restorative practice. We looked at all the different ways of training. So some training is full days in person. Some training is half days. What they're talking about is the build on training, which looks at specific aspects of restorative practice and how you put it into place. We've got a huge amount of staff, so we've put them on at different times through their suggestions, so you never make everybody happy. But we've put them on at different times and in different ways and they're also recorded. So if people can't see them then, they can go back and watch them later. The impact is a really interesting conversation in that the review, and it's finally just hot off the press, of a number of children within our Court and Child Protection Service has found from these, that actually some of the work is beginning to show with families. You can also see that in how many families, and we're trying not to use an acronym now, are in pre-precedings. And the work that we do much earlier on with family group conferencing and trying to support families and holding the risk, that is always a challenge. And the next step is to work with partners so that they recognise what we're trying to do and that we can do it all together. But the recent review showed some significant changes in work practice. I think you can also see it, not only just by the data about what's happening at the front door, but how many children are not on child protection plans and are being supported at a much earlier point. I'll keep on using this term. The system is calming. I think the impact will be seen both in data and in feedback and then what families say to us. As you know, I'm working with families about how we get that feedback from them, which should go live in touch with approximately about three weeks time and then we'll get quite a lot of feedback from families and then we'll be able to incorporate that into the wake-up call. So that's really important. We are really, really trying the best to be able to show the impact, but it's always the hardest bit to show, so we've put the structures in. We've put a lot of the training in. We've still got a lot of training to go and at the same time trying to be able to test out, have we done what we said and what difference has it made. Okay, thank you. The two points on that, the impact, I'll deal with that last, but just in terms of restorative practice, has that had an impact on the culture within the workforce, within the council? So it's not just about the interaction with families and children, but actually within the workforce itself. Does it have a knock on effect on how that workforce culture is developing? Culture is the hardest thing to change, isn't it? We are definitely seeing that. You can definitely see restorative circles. You can see you want to have a check-in, so check-ins at meetings is about building relationships and saying something about yourself until you start to build it. We haven't quite seen the circles as in the format of Leeds, but we are seeing group supervision and the way that managers are talking to others. It's going to take time and it's going to take time for us to retrain some of the other managers and some of the other staff, but you can see the difference. And what's also different is the amount of complaints and grievances and things that used to happen when I first heard about them and now they're few and far between. So that's some evidence that things are changing. The big change will be what comes through in the survey. Yeah, and it would be good to have that survey. We could sort of bring it back to committee. The health check showed that it was changing. Okay. So that is really, really good news. Obviously a happy workforce is going to be a more productive workforce, and hopefully that change will sort of accelerate the more it becomes embedded. So just finally coming right back to that thing of impact, and I was looking again at the improvement plan and that sort of red rating with impact. And so what we've heard has been really, really positive. I think everybody's in agreement with that, that actually there were so many changes within the workforce that feel really positive. The staff survey will tell us more. How will we know that this is having an impact on the service? What will show us and when will we be likely to see that? I know that's the million-dollar question, but that is also about the pace of change. So will we have any indication fairly soon and what will it look like? I think it will depend upon the indicators. We've turned the curve, is where we're at, and we are definitely seeing better recruitment. And we've still got a long way to go and our leaders partners are with us until March next year and then there will be ongoing movement. We'll begin to see, I think I've already said, as we should see the curve continue to go up with our change of agency and permanence. That will be a key indicator. It will also be the feedback from staff, but also the feedback from families that they are seeing and experiencing a restorative framework and practice that makes a difference. Our data will also show it. It will show how many children are being worked with restoratively and how many children are being served by medical professionals. And particularly how many people are being served by medical professionals. I think we have a lot of discussion around that, but I do not know what the specific scope of that would be in a different part of the service. I'm not certain what else we'd be able to bring, but we can have a conversation about the indicators, can't we, for the action plan. If I could just suggest, for me from a workforce perspective, there are only three indicators that I need to report to Improvement Board and they're the only three that matter from this specific piece of work. That is the proportion of agency workers, the proportion of team managers that are permanent and caseloads. And those are the three things that I've got to nail. And once you have that and that is looking healthier, we would see that under Improvement II, we would see that in the impact rating, yes. OK. So it does sound like we are definitely moving in the right direction. Councillor Proctor. Just briefly, because I can't let people talk about part of my day job is impact measurement. So what would help me get my head around, so all the things you've talked about seem like they're part of measuring impact. What I would usually look for is a theory of change or a logic model that says, we do these things and we expect them to lead to these immediate changes and then down the line we expect them to lead to these longer term changes and right down the line they'll lead to these very long term things. The further down the line you get, the less directly connected to your actions it's going to be. But it just, everything you've talked about would probably be dropped into that logic model, but for me personally, being able to see it lined out like that, like we make these changes to workforce, we train them, we have more stable workforce and we would expect that to improve practice and we would see improved practice in this way and if we have improved practice, then we'll have better actions for children, we'll see that in that way. I don't know if we... just laying it out in that logic model way I think would help communicate why we're doing this, what we're expected to see now and how we will see that impact and what sort of scale we'll see that impact. So should we put that down as a recommendation, that potentially we have a logic, did you call it a logic impact? So voluntary sector tend to call it theory of change, health service tends to call it logic model, it's the same thing. So if we can actually sort of be able to see that in a theory of change model, logic model, is that what the council would be working with or is there a different, you know, would you be using a different structure? I think it's fair to say we use a different structure, we do have that information but not in that format and I don't think it would be for me to say yes to that, I think that's a bigger question from a project management perspective. So if the committee wants to make that recommendation I think that's up to the committee but I don't think that's something that I could commit to right now. How does the committee feel about that as a recommendation to be looked at? I would love for us to make that recommendation, I mean having come from a science and engineering background, I've been banging my head against how we actually identify what the early indicators are going to be that our actions are delivering positive change for a long time and I was just about to challenge Councillor Proctor as to whether the areas of business that he works in are part of the social sciences but talking about health and charity makes me have some confidence that if others can do it, it is doable. I'm used to doing it in science and engineering where it seems to be more natural to the way that people think but it isn't necessarily natural here but I would love to see us dip a toe in the water and at least for us to recommend that this is something that is thought about and we get a formal response on back to scrutiny. Yeah can I just add to that, earlier on Liz did say that this is a strategy and not deliverables but there's been a theme amongst the questions, we do want to see how we can see whether this strategy is working, we need a way of, and this is one of the more scientific ways that's been offered that we can actually have some method of being able to see about whether or not this strategy is on track. Yeah just to be clear about this, I wouldn't want to see it in the strategy but seeing as we've been told that there are going to be an implementation board and action plans and so forth, some way of giving confidence that those actions are delivering effects I think is a logical extrapolation of what we've heard here as the implementation plans that are proposed for this anyway. And just to tap it off there's an excellent LGA guide to using theory of change so it is something the LGA have got guidance about. Okay great, so does anybody object to that recommendation then at least that can go to the executive to look at? Good so let's put that down as the recommendation. I think unless anybody's got anything else that they want to ask, I can't see any hands, I think let's wrap it up, we'll look at the recommendations. Is everybody happy just to carry on and get over and done with, nobody needs a rescue break? Okay so thank you very much, I really really appreciate the very frank discussion around that and also the work that's gotten into this and certainly the changes that we're certainly seeing and look forward to that RAG rating changing colour, that will be fantastic. But yeah thank you. Can we run through the recommendations, are we? Come up with a couple of minutes where obviously a late entry. Okay, yeah. [Inaudible] Alright if, while, yeah let me just talk about the work programme, is that alright while while you come up with recommendations? Ah okay, alright recommendations, the scrutiny committee recommendations, I must stress, 13th June 2025. The committee recommends that Herefordshire Council identifies measures of success for each of the strands in the draft workforce children and young people strategy, makes clear the links between the council's corporate workforce strategy and its draft children and young people workforce strategy, builds links with local schools and voluntary organisations to encourage young people to consider children's services as a career, encourages people to consider switching careers to Herefordshire Council's children and young people directorate, ensures that the voice of children informs the final children and young people workforce strategy and finally describes the link between activity, output, outcomes and impact of the workforce strategy in terms of a theory of change. Thank you. Is everybody satisfied with those recommendations or? Well Daniel I think you've got it right first time mate, well done. In fairness actually I think sort of obviously a lot of this came from Councillor Prozzer who's been very diligent in drafting these with me whilst the meeting's been taking place, so thank you for all of you actually that have helped with that. Sam you've got. Yeah if I were suggesting an edit, if we were working with voluntary organisations it wouldn't just be young people, so I don't know whether you want to put that in brackets and I wonder whether building links and exploring investing in, because I do think there's a degree to which local authority could invest in those organisations and their workforces which then could benefit, so I don't know whether you'd be willing for that suggestion but somewhere the investment in and removing that it's just young people. Okay so is everybody happy, I'm just I'm just trying to see, sorry on what bullet point... I'm on number three, three yeah. Builds links and considers investing in local schools and voluntary organisations to encourage all people including young people to consider. Okay is everybody satisfied to include that? I can't see a reason why not, so if we if we put that. So that's build links with local schools and voluntary organisations to encourage people to consider children's services as a career. Yeah we want young people but there would be employees of a voluntary organisation who we would want to encourage to consider their career as a social worker perhaps, but I also am reiterating the point about investing in those voluntary organisations as well, not just links. Financial investing. That's one way certainly. Although I don't think we need to actually sort of specify because investing is has many different different forms so I think you know whether that is you know there are all sorts of options. So we've okay have we got that in did the investing have you got like that yeah okay for the purposes then I've just made a couple of minor drafting changes as well corrected an error a couple of errors so I'm going to read these out again finally a second time at which point are you happy to proceed to a vote on these for those of you who are able to vote that is elected members of the council okay the committee recommends that her literature council identifies measures of success for each of the strands in the draft children and young people workforce strategy makes clear the links between the council's corporate workforce strategy and its draft children and young people workforce strategy it doesn't need to be I think we can take draft out basically the children and young people workforce strategy is fine so I take it out the also in the last one shall I check out the final there in that case yeah okay once again I'm gonna read them all obviously it's just it's again it's for the purposes of the people watching so just to be clear that they understand what it is you're voting on so so for clarity the committee recommends that her future council identifies measures of success for each of the strands in the children and young people workforce strategy makes clear the links between the council's corporate workforce strategy and its children and young people workforce strategy builds links with and invests in schools and voluntary organizations to encourage people to consider children services as a career encourages people to consider switching careers to her future council's children and young people directorate ensures that the voice of children informs the children and young people workforce strategy and finally describes the links between activity outputs outcomes and impact of the workforce strategy in terms of a theory of change right thank you very much so should we just take a vote on those on on block yep is everybody happy to recommend those thank you and great thank you I think that was a really useful discussion and if the final item on the agenda is the work program so I'm gonna ask the scrutiny officer just to talk us through the progress on that thank you Daniel thank you chair progress on delivering the work program continues as per the previous meeting with the objective of providing the final work program with you at your next meeting in July we've started to draft that with the chair and with senior officers of the council in terms of very high level ideas of the sorts of topics that you might want to look at these have come from your meeting back in March when you produced a long list for for for the committee for the year ahead so we've just started to get a sense of when it would be useful to bring some of these topics in with the director so we make sure that we maximize our impact and we look at things at the right time you'll note in your diaries we have a meeting on the 26th of June with the directors of the council with the lead and with the chief executive and with Ivan to to look at those ideas for the work program for July well from September onwards and the objective of that meeting really will be to get a sense of what you want out of those meetings and those topics the objectives you want to to agree upon the people that you want to speak to the the information that you want to receive the discussions that you want to have I think you'll all agree that this meeting has been tremendously successful and it's to your credit that from the outset the chair and you have put a considerable amount of work into what you want out of this meeting who you want to speak to so I think having that meeting on the 26th will be a golden opportunity to build on the work of this meeting today and and to get the right people in the room to agree to the work that you need to make sure that you make best use of your time so so the intention is still that will produce final work program for the meeting in July based on your initial meeting in March and building and we'll be building on that in your meeting on the 26th of June. Thank you and I think if anybody's got questions about about that or sort of wants to sort of raise you know other issues around the work program prior to that meeting you know let's just keep that discussion going so I think that just brings us to the date of the next meeting so we've got Tuesday the 30th of July at 2 p.m. we'll be having more discussions around the topic of that meeting but at this point it looks like it will be the complaints system and also an update on the work with families and the the Families Commission so thank you all for attending thank you also to our new members and for your participation is appreciated can I ask that unless you have any formal business can all attendees other than council members and officers please exit the Plough Lane site and finally before I formally close the meeting can I check with Democratic Services Team that the live stream has been switched off and we're no longer broadcast you you you you you you you [BLANK_AUDIO]