Transcript

Thank you so much, sorry if that's like technical difficulties which have been resolved. So I'm Councillor Emma Marshall, I am the new chair so I'm really excited today and just to let you know a little bit about me for those who haven't worked with me before, my mum of four, two of my children have got SCMD so I think I've got a fair amount of experience, I actually homeschooled my children too. So I've got a lot of experience with that end of it and I'm also a governor of the Prude School board. So I'm hoping I can do this kind of justice. So bear with me today, it's the first time I've seen the chair in this meeting and I'll try and do the best I can. I also want to welcome Councillor Desmond as my vice-chair, I'm really pleased to have you next to me, so we'll talk about the good team. We also have Councillor Clayton who has joined the committee, thank you very much. Councillor Tissot also has been fortunate, he hasn't played it yet. I also want to give thanks to Councillor Chambers who is the previous chairman who has handed it to me in a very good shape, thank you very much. Councillor Ross, who is vice-chairman and Councillor Daisy for their contributions to this panel. I'd also like to welcome the CMR for education and the CMR for children and families and congratulations both of you on your appointments. We're not going to go easy on you, don't think that. And also congratulations, sorry, and welcome to INHAL. We have got some, first of all to say meeting is being recorded and it will be up online at the beginning of the speech, make you more aware. We have got some apologies, we've got Councillor Carroll to turn your mic. Thank you. We could go on to agenda item 2 which is the declaration of interest in part 3. I don't see any of that. And agenda item 3 is public participation which there is none. So agenda item 4, we'll go on to confirmation of the minutes of the previous meeting. I have read this, I won't say that personally. Has just made it. It's accurate. Is everyone happy now? So this means we go on to our substantive item 3 today. This is going to be your last meeting this evening. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So the work that we're just going to commence now hasn't started yet. So this is the very early presentation of what we are going to do, what we have presented before, what is the context to this which is, I'm sure all members will know, is the challenge that we have with sufficient opportunity and placements. Our challenge is seated in, we want all children who need to be in care to have a family care experience. That's what are primarily challenges and we haven't got enough families to care for the children that are coming into the care system. We recognise that many of those children have got some very very challenging difficulties because of the abuse, the trauma, the separation that they've experienced and so we recognise that but what we still want is for those children to have a family care experience. Over the last two years we've seen a rise in the number of children under 12 who were only physically facing residential care because we haven't been able to find a family carer and when we look at family care there are three options that we look at. One is that we always first look at a connected person to that child and that's in a duty, that can't be ignored, we have to do that. So it's not that we just want to find anybody in the family, we have a duty to go and see if there's anybody that's already known as that child that could look after that child. If they can't be safe you can't provide them with a family. If there isn't anybody in the family who would have been able and assessed as suitable, then we look at mainstream, our own mainstream off to care. If we're not able to find anybody in our own mainstream foster care cohort families, we have to look at independent, external, off to care families and we have seen a rise in the number of family members. We've been able to support the children in their families which is great and we have a very good kinship, connected persons offer of support and financial and payment that is equal to that of foster carers in Worcestershire. So we promote that and that's working very well but we don't have enough of our own foster carers and our recruitment of foster carers has been lower than our loss of foster carers. The majority of foster carers that we're losing from the system are people who are in retirement, they haven't been working, been foster carers for many, many years and I think that's the primary reason that we're losing foster carers. There are other reasons, a range of reasons that we like. Some of them are de-registered and that's initiated because of the issues or concerns with regards to their level of care they're able to offer. So de-registration care is a process that each year some care might be off to that and each year some may just be fine. They don't want to do foster care anymore, they're not retiring but they're just leaving foster care and some are moved out of the foster carers in a more local area or moved to an alternative employer rather than being forced to share children first. But that's not the primary reason that we lose foster carers. So the reduction in foster carers overall is about the fact that we are losing more this size than are new coming into the system and it's also true that the children that are coming into the care of the local community is changing. So we have less babies, we have less young easy children to care for and some of that is about the fact that we focus very strongly and have very good support in place for families when they're experiencing difficulties. So whenever we can we will prevent the care, the need for children to come into the care system. So we've got a lot of support there and that works and that works well. But when a child does each group care then we will receive care for their protection and their welfare and as I said we then automatically look to see where we find family. The secondary issue that comes with that is of course when you've got a very limited availability of a resource it becomes more and more and more expensive. So children's placements as a cost and that's not just foster care it's residential foster care placement in their entirety has been a big financial cost to children's services within Worcestershire and internationally. So for us to look at how we can both address some of those driving costs but also meet our aim and our value to value family care and our children's family we needed to look at what can we do differently, what can we do to increase the number of foster carers that are coming into Worcestershire and support those that are here as well to care for some of our most complex children. And we've got a range of projects that we're doing and one of them was the introduction of the specialist foster carer. So specialist foster carers now can earn a thousand pounds a week for caring for a child who has some of these very additional challenging behaviours which are limited or displayed sorry by the child through either through self-harm or violence of the primary reasons. So we've been doing some recruitment and some conversions actually some of our foster carers to specialist foster carers and we're going to continue with that and empower how a value care approach that we are applying to foster care where it's really looking at how can we maximise the skills of the foster carers that we've currently got with the needs of the children that we've got but also make sure that those works coming in again we identify those skills that they need and that's kind of this specific piece of work. So that's what the presentation will be about it is a short piece of work that doesn't make it not in depth so Maria and the team are also going to go through just to give you an overview of what we're going to be doing over that next four months before we come back and report back in September. So it's quite an in-depth piece of work for a period of a few months and then we'll be able to come back in November and report back on how successful it's been and whether or not there is more then for us to do to have a rather firm rollout or not. Before we move on to the presentations is there anything you want to say as it comes to us? No only that I think Tim has given a very very comprehensive analysis of the problems but those problems which are obviously financial are in almost in abeyance to the fact that we still look for what is in the best interests of the child before we do anything else and that is that's paramount. And so the valuing family care takes takes the precedent but of course also if it works out if we find all those foster carers that we're looking for then our own problems can be resolved in part of these. I'll pass it on for the presentation. Thanks for that, that's a great thank you and good morning to you all and just to introduce ourselves I'm Dominic Laskin and as everyone said I lead our work on children's social care nationally. I need a number of projects and I'll focus specifically on ... and just to weigh on Empower as a company so we are the largest consulting firm that's solely focused on local government. We work across local government, health and NHS, adult social care and I would say in sort of our work there is a focus on finding ways of improving outcomes for children and young people and individuals that can also reduce cost and this work really fits with that very well. If you can move on to the next slide Maria. So just to touch on the focus of this of this work so we are supporting a phase of activity that runs until October and the Empower team, myself the other and the rest of the Empower team will be working very closely with Maria and colleagues in support of the aim and objectives that Tina outlined. In terms of the scope of this activity we're focusing on two key areas. So the first one is working with Maria's team to identify opportunities for more children in residential settings to transition to family and patients, foster care as Tina described and maintenance a particular focus on the better understanding and profiling the needs of children and young people and but also the confidence and capability of foster carers to meet those needs and that's using our value and care approach which is a proprietary methodology but also using strength-based approaches and practice and thinking to support that matching and that support. And the second strand of work again is working with Maria and her team around building on the existing strengths to really further develop and strengthen and support your existing approach to foster care recruitment and retention and within that, that draws on, we've worked for over 20 years to support activity around foster care recruitment and retention and it draws on our what we call our family values approach which really focuses on the values of the prospective carers that we're targeting in terms of the messaging and in terms of how we reach the carers but also focuses on utilizing existing foster carer networks and local targeted working out campaigns alongside some of the media and digital approaches that you'd be familiar with and the approach also uses a campaigning methodology so really focusing on capturing the impact of activity and equipping foster carers with the right tools and materials to actually get out and improve within their networks. Can you tell us the next slide Maria? So as I mentioned the approach to matching foster carers and children and young people draws on our value and care approach and just to describe this in a bit more detail. So this is an approach to capturing the needs of children and young people which we've developed with a number of local authorities in recent years and at the child level it captures the holistic needs of a child or young person and then allows us to track how those changes over time and then that information can be used to inform practice and commissioning for example it can be part of pain finding, it can be part of reviewing care and support for children and young people and in this instance it can be used to actually look at the needs of children and young people versus the confidence and skills of foster carers but at a cohort level and it also allows local authorities and partners to better understand and respond to the needs of children and young people so for example we've got the number of authorities to apply this to US cohorts sorry unaccompanied, solemn seeking children and different age groups children in certain forms of provisions for example children in residential provision and in some authorities it's been applied across the whole care population so for a number of authorities it's been rolled out for all of those children who are looked after. And we've worked with around 15 local authorities to use and apply volume care in different ways in the last couple of years more focus has been on fostering and the application that we've described and which Pemen touched on and I'm going to pass it over to Fiona just to talk a little bit more about actually how we're applying this to fostering. Thanks Tom. So it brings to light how family care can be applied within fostering and key focus of our support over the coming months. So family care can be applying to better support care and matching utilisation and placement stability by identifying the strengths and capabilities of foster carers. So it focuses on applying a strengths-based approach thinking about actually a lot of the skills and capabilities across 13 key domains and I'll go on to show you a view of what the tool looks like but matching that to the needs of the children and young people. It is developed through consultation with foster carers and their social worker and that's a really core part of it so it's an approach and a tool but a tool that can be aligned and can be used regularly to support the development of foster carers. So it informs and supports matching, it informs and supports individual development areas and development programmes and at a cohort level so within this first phase of support we're looking at 40 to 50 foster carer profiles and that's our aim. We can start to think about actually where are the areas for development across that cohort so it can inform ongoing learning and development. You can move on to the next slide. So just to briefly explain what that looks like so here you've got a copy of a family care profile. It has two lines on it so the pink line is the foster carers skills and capabilities and the purple line, the inner line, is the child and young person's needs. So what you need yourself to do is create a picture of those needs and those strengths and understand how that foster carer can best support the young person. As I said there are 13 domains within that. Sitting behind this is the tool, the family care tool. It has a number of questions that a social worker would work through and in conversation with their foster carer in focusing on strengths and capabilities and to be able to create a visual representation and picture of those needs. Now it may be a case where there isn't a match between those two but it enables us to then identify where there might be areas for development and you can see this change over time as John talked about. The feedback that we've had where we've applied this in other areas and working with fostering teams and foster carers has highlighted how it's enabled the conversation between the foster carer and the social worker to focus on their strengths and capabilities and get to know one another and to think about those individual development patterns. It also enables the foster carer to have that record and to focus on their strengths to celebrate their strengths as well and to think about their own development needs. So again just bringing that to life in more detail. So this is an example of impact from another area that we've been working with and so you can see here again the value of my profile that looks at the needs of the child and young person, the value of their domains and the strengths of that foster carer. So this was a young person who was in a residential placement. Through the completion of their family care tool with their social child social worker they were able to identify the opportunity for a step down from residential to fostering and then through the completion of family care tools for foster carers to be able to match the needs of the child and young person to the strengths and capabilities of the foster carer. So this did result in a step down and a match which has resulted in a financial saving of around 200k for their lives. So hopefully that brings to life what the family care tool looks and feels like but also the impact that can be achieved. Thank you Fiona and so we're very happy to take any questions. There are also some reports and public domain that we can circulate which give a bit more information and background to some of this work if that's of interest. Yeah, really interesting, I think we've got more questions. Thank you, it's interesting you talk about one of the areas that you're in where you get the local government to do something like that. Could you tell us the last one of those that you read? How many extra families did you recruit foster parents? Because that's one of the key things I'll be talking about. You signed about your phone, I just really want the background for you all. So I think if it's helpful I need to take that away but in terms of the numbers and stats in relation to different approaches we've worked with I'd be very happy to come back on that and share that. It's interesting because as I said, I was looking for some background information about the way you work. Yeah, I can say we're working with Telford and Regan at the moment but also in the region we're also working with Walsall in terms of this sort of work place on Fostery and we've worked extensively with the likes of Norfolk and Hertfordshire and quite a broad kind of local authorities but in terms of the specific information around impact and number of foster carers recruited etc I would need to come back even to do that separately. Thank you, Emma. Yeah, thanks, that's really interesting. I suppose my concern is one of the teen ways that we are lacking foster carers so matching foster carers to children makes perfect sense but eventually we're going to run out of foster carers so it's like this is great but then you could be left with lots of foster carers or lots of children with no foster carer and go to so I suppose it's coming back to how do we solve that problem of just getting more foster carers. So one part of the the work and support is around the matching, the second part is absolutely focused on that recruitment of foster carers and within that recruitment piece about the whole fostering journey so from the attracting new prospective foster carers through the assessment process and then through to the matching and support ongoing. I think just to share with one local authority that we recently worked with through that support looking at the recruitment but also through supporting the assessment process they saw a 73% increase in the number of foster carers recruited compared to the previous year. Tom, I don't know if you want to talk about the family values in a bit more detail but is around speaking about creatively how you attract and recruit new foster carers and some of that is around actually thinking about your foster carer network as an opportunity to bring others in through words of mouth and pains for example. Yeah I think just to echo that I touched on it previously I think building on the work that we're already doing and team are already doing in terms of that we have seen opportunities to really strengthen recruitment and also the conversion of inquiries through to approved foster carers and that is really that focus on values, through focus on utilising existing foster carers and their networks through using a really targeted and focused campaigns locally which target the sort of prospective foster carers that we're looking to reach and we have seen some significant impact in other priorities as Fiona mentioned but as a clinic said we can share a bit more information on that as well. I'd like to ask a question if I've made it. So as I was saying you know what we want the impact to do is to bring this the independence sweetening challenge added value to what we're already doing so when we introduced the specialist foster carers last year we've already without using the tool and matched seven of our own foster carers to children who have either stepped down from residential or we have prevented those new children from going into residential well you know they would have gone to residential before and I'll let Christi believe and realise that they need to have the change so that I make sure yes so so it's a comment from where I'm at so um yes so the the three children that we've been based on have actually stepped down residential basically into foster carers and it's saving up just a range of thousands just pre-children and before patients have been made that's actually alluding to our an alternative to new entrances into residential care our average rest costs at the moment that would save around 700,000 so just from seven children really the cheap slower what would have been our spend in this now financially we're in 1.5 million and what we've done is we've focused first on growth of children under 20 but we're going into the adventure or our own adventure we've still got more children in our cohort who would like to move and get back into about set down into family care and we've then identified children who are between 12 and 15 and because we want them in family care as well just because they're 12, 13, 14, 15 they're still too old to be uh too young sorry to be in a residential setting but on a long-term permanent basis so we're trying to look at that cohort and that's the cohort we're particularly going to focus on within power because as Dominique said what we know is that sometimes you see the confidence of the care workers who care for for the children when they're exhibiting very self-harm behaviors and as well as violent behaviors and that's a frightening prospect to have a child that's got that level of meaning in your home and so it is about really emphasizing to those carers what skills they've got and giving them more confidence as well as then matching them to the children and the children don't become labeled as you know violent child or self-harm child but actually we understand what the behaviors are what the triggers are and really called to be how we manage those children's behaviors and if you match those two things the skill of the carer and the comedies to understand that these behaviors although they're very frightening to see on paper actually they can be managed that's when you've got the sweet spot in terms of being able to move children so we've already started this work ourselves and saying we carers seven care and maybe those children will be sent but we want to do more and that's when we've got in power there are two other pieces of work that we're doing of which we've got to do a short overview in a second um with where we've been able to move and we've been marketing so we're going to do a little bit of an overview of what that's done and then the plan is that when we come back in uh September I think it's it's free today if we can get an update on a bit of both of these pieces of work together thank you my name chairman and good morning everyone um I want to comment first then a question if I can um I think it's a really really important and valuable exercise by um in power um absolutely get to understand the strategy and I think having that independent view will certainly add value to the current fosterers already in the system you know having sort of that skills matrix to you know identify and understand the skills of the foster and then identifying any weaknesses or areas where they need additional support um understanding you know and uplifting their skills I think will certainly um add value um my question is on about recruitment because absolutely get the way we need to go to getting more fosterers in the system and retention is everything but it's just a bit of context really is how how do we compare in Worcester vis-a-vis our neighbours and and say the national trend as well in terms of I don't know what the scoring system is whether it's fosterers per 100 000 or what have you but there's got to be some some way of understanding the context of Worcester because I probably guess we're no different to our neighbours and then my follow-up question to that is how does that financial package compare to other neighbours and maybe the national level and as Chris absolutely spot-on says getting the children out of the residential and into foster care a their own betterment but also the financial savings are huge is there any scope do we have scope flexibility whatever our financial packages and I don't know I'm not sure you'll do tell us how that could play anything if there's any scope to uplift that to make it more attractive because obviously the benefit of uplifting the savings will obviously outweigh those going to residential so if you have any scope then to uplift and make Worcestershire more attractive for foster okay so in terms of um the the comparative data we can get data on the numbers of inquiries that people made to become a foster carer the number of inquiries then that convert to those people that then you want to take the assessment and then at the end of the assessment those that then get approved as foster carers so they're the key statistical um APIs that we will be able to and previously we have done well over on par we have seen a change in that this year and that I think adds to your second point which is the financial package so we measure ourselves against um uh the uh national uh recommended payment of charity that we're always in line with that last year I think it was time for something that could have been 18 months ago certainly last year um we increased our uh foster care payments for those carers who were caring for children who were entity 11 plus because we recognize that they were a particularly difficult group of children to place and and careful so all of our carers got a two percent uplift and those particular carers got an additional two percent uplift so they got a four percent uplift and so the last time we compared across the region and with our statistical neighbours and we were sort of on par and we have done that recently and you can see that actually it looks like in this financial year our statistical neighbours have risen even more so we're now not on par so whilst we are seeing um some good response from inquiry through inquiries it's going up we can see we've done you know whole recruitment drive and our conversions to those wanting to be carers um has dropped slightly which is a concern it is important though that we understand why they haven't gone into the assessment and whether they and not assume that they have gone to an assessment because they have gone into the assessment with somebody else or they haven't gone into an assessment because once they understand the challenges and what they need to do actually they've said no we're not interested which is why the three KPIs are really important to understand together and Maria is doing some work now on our statistical neighbours and our regional statistical neighbours because they're the ones to compare them who are our geographical neighbours so we've got uh we compete with Gustshire and Herefordshire there are Geograph and Warwickshire there are statistical there are geographical neighbours Warwickshire are also our statistical neighbours so Maria's doing that work to just see where we compare on price but also where we compare on those three KPIs and that will bring back in September but we do know that this year we have seen a bit of a decrease in that now the conversion rate just an opportunity that I know didn't follow this brilliantly because our requires have gone up at the version release they have come down because a lot of people are interested but once they understand what the assessment process entails and I have to remind people that this is not a Worcestershire assessment project it is legislation and it is true to say it can feel like extremely intrusive legislation requirements to assess you but as you can understand we are giving these people very vulnerable children and um and I think I said before but you know it's it's it's a frightening thing to think about but I've worked in safeguarding for 35 years and I so it's always in my mind but you know it will attract people who are not coming into the severe foster care for the best intentions so we absolutely have to make sure we're doing proper assessments and equally if we're not honest about the children and the needs of these children all that happens is that we approve foster carers who then don't care for the children or it breaks down yeah so it's an intense process it is intrusive um but it's important that we get it right so we're monitoring all the time and comparing you know we've done a regular effort we've seen rises that go from radio adverts that's great but we need to then compare that to inquiries to conversion it's no the whole of Worcestershire going and then once they find out what can go to those things so we're very clear on those cases but you're right on those questions and we keep monitoring that we know that we are not financially competitive following this year and the rise of other people have named so it will be a recommended effort that we'll be looking to combat it um in some ways the part of the question is already been answered from notes into point of view but um just wondering how how different are we in our uh methods of recruitment and particularly retention from the independent uh fostering agencies that uh that are going on and um basically competing i suppose is the best word and i suppose and i mean i think we can give it i mean some of the work that the DFB did that was their focus reviewing what what's our approach and what have they seen in across all the other proposals and actually we came out very favorably in that we haven't had the report yet but maria if we go through the presentations and give you some headlines at that we are waiting to report but it was a very positive feedback in terms of the processes we do that said we are a local authority and we're not a private business and for private businesses they were profit makers of course they're going to invest a lot of money in their marketing a lot of money and um we have a finite budget yeah um and so but looking at how we use that budget it is it's something that we are absolutely doing but in terms of our strategy our marketing um we have positive feedback in terms of things that we do i just think it's point there worth bearing in mind bearing in mind what in power trying to do for us as a local authority yeah thank you i mean we are and it has been very good because we've been very clear and you know in terms of um we're not we're not working with impact for this short period of time to repeat what the DFA has just done you know we've got these two pieces of work um and we will be focusing on absolutely competence skills matching identifying children matching them moving with that that's the ultimate outcome and the second job is increasing the number of parents that we can um recruit and so that that will come after the work that we've all been thinking about most of the time um people ask for this first but the next that's okay we'll have the next presentation then okay just look at the the audience we're talking in the screen just that's i have got one quick question which was at the medical you're looking to try and get children as presidential what would you would you look at say for example a child got into a foster situation child's needs no longer match so we've got foster foster parents who in that map would be right out there because they've got all of these skills but now the child doesn't need all those skills would you then consider moving that child free of that that high needs place well that's a really good question and because um the simple answer is no because we have to be child first and so it is really important that when we've got children that are in family arrangements and they are settled and they are progressing really really well we can't go oh you're doing all right i think i can get to another family we don't do that it's different when we're looking at residential because if they're progressing well in residential we know it is absolutely not in their interest to stay long-term in residential however good that residential is it's unless you've got a child with um disability then it is particularly extreme disabilities and that residential setting cannot be met within a home environment and we would make what we would want to move those children into families so um but for children in residential uh we know that the outcomes for those children it's institutionalized within however good it is and so we want them back in family um but what that comes with is lots of anxiety around people particularly when those children are settled so we've got a 12 year old at the moment for example who is being residential care for two years and um he seemingly is very settled but he's 12 now you ask me do i want a 12 year old when he's 13 14 15 in residential no i don't because he might be settled now but the chances are he is going to be unsettled and certainly open to way more changes in his life that may have a negative impact when he gets to 13 14 50 because we can't control the other children that are going to be residing with him so we want him in a family his family are obviously anxious about that because they seem there's very settled and wanted to stay in residential but they see that as the status quo so they're having to work with that um to try and engage and obviously that includes the in-person view and 12 so you don't want to move to a family because his family don't want him to move to a family and though it's a very complex business but we would only move children primarily if we absolutely believe it's in their best interest so you're right for our specialist care as we've been clear that and we're not going to even reduce your money because the child do away with care once they start doing well or moving from real care we're committing to that permanency for as long as that child remains in that care. I'll do a video of that thank you but we have a quick question on this one. I know we do and it's when we're talking about it it's kind of on the finance bit but it talks about we've seen the last paragraph there and it talks about the cost of residential placement compared to posturing and Chris mentioned it too as well what I just wanted to to be clear here the money that that's dying from residential and posturing is that reinvesting their medical concern too? It's not reinvested um because it because we've got uh a significant own thing so it goes into bringing down the own thing. So the outcome of that as what Chris mentioned at the end of this year we have. But I'm looking forward to hearing all about the BFE project here so let's we're going to go slightly over on the side but it's quite a small subject so they've not fallen on that. I was about to say you haven't been to all of it have you? Okay so just following up from we had our initial new page. What we've done now is we arranged the in power funding care workshop so our posturing social workers, our posturing managers and our children's social workers all coming together and to meet with empower so they can go talk to them about the money we've had and to how it's completing their profiles at their proper carers and dogs and children too. It involves those sets of football or online blocking sessions with empower that involve social workers that are completing their profiles and children that have had those opportunities to attend those sessions any questions that they might have about the profile that they're increasing. We aim to have all of the profiles completed by the end of June and empower them to do their profiles and the analysis of that and that will take place on the 1st and 14th of July and then we'll start to progress identify matches and what support our carers and grandchildren are going to need and that will take place between 16th of July and throughout August. Matching children during August and then moving children to new identifying placements from August through to December so that's the timeline that we're working to uh in terms of the project. Next slide. So as Tina has said we we did in we did engage with the hospital program so the hospital program is a new diagnostic service we support local communities and particularly in relation to improvement and approval uh and it's funded by the DMV so uh we made contact with them would not be enough to get based on on that project and the aim is to provide that additional support to local authorities to help us boost cost care improvement and approvals and to facilitate sharing of practice nationally so the uh possibly going into lots of different local authorities so they're very well when they came to us to share best practices and ideas that was working in in other local authorities. So they undertook a diagnostic and I was actually supposed to put a knife in the end of April that would be for two days and that was social workers managers and that was our ADM so right through the the the hospital care journey and the program itself we we get a cost of the advisor they work with us to examine our current processes we provide you our data and to identify those areas that we can improve on and that that support will last for 12 months and then in year two they will also continue to support us and including sharing the best practices. So we had some initial feedback they're still waiting for the final report and what they will do is they'll share an initial report with us and then we can look at that and review review it and make any changes in terms of that. So the initial feedback was really positive we had a good feedback about our recruitment uh I think it was in relation to our recruitment club that we have a recruitment manager we also had a dedicated VSO a social worker within that club and she saw real positives in that approach and was it consistency and she kind of compared that to the local authorities she's been to it's been a positive for us and she had she read through a number of our costing assessments she found those to be thorough and of good quality and gave some really good feedback from the assessments that she she read. What she was saying is that she she spoke to a number of our cost caregivers and also cost carers who were new to to our fostering service and we're just going through that a second process or just being approved and what they were telling her is in fact they had a really good recruitment journey and they liked the fact that we are a fostering community they they feed us and so I think one of the foster carers said you do part of the family and certainly call a community and possibly that that that was really well embedded into our recruitment approach foster carers so they were concentrating about their relationships with their social workers and that was a real strength in terms of that relationship-based practice and got that social workers regularly kept in touch and as a service they knew what was going on in in the fostering service and and they had a good experience. Possibly really positive about our fostering panel good area of practice particularly our policy assurance in relation to panel and the role of our panel advisor and again said that the practice that she saw here was some of the best that she'd seen and felt that would be a strength to share with other local authorities and they did she did talk about and noticed that was to show ourselves we were experiencing similar challenges with the local authority in terms of recruiting and so what we were facing wasn't something that really did look to what she was seeing in other local authorities and the vulnerability that she she shared with us thirdly was one around the size of our county and we found that it relates to our marks in activity and how we can get our message out there to the different communities and how we can get different communities to engage with us and also recently our recruitment manager has gone on maternity and we have a vacancy there so at that point she felt that was accountability for us but we have recently recruited for that post and positively the first week of recruiting it was a x plastic care of all the stitches and she was going to bring a lot of knowledge to that place so some really good feedback initially so we just waited for the final report and any recommendations we we were happy to say i'm going to just give you kind of a little bit of time for you in terms of especially plastic care she was already mentioned this i think actually it's focusing on valuing family life and the importance of providing our children with family care and family care placements and and with especially the cost of care we kind of recognize that there are some children who are stepping out from residential and will need that extra special care and that's where the special response comes from so we launched in november and last year uh the criteria is we're focusing on those children give our age five to eighteen that's been uh talked about we have and two cohorts of children that we're looking at those under 12 who are in residential care and those and 12 to 15 age group and again obviously within our in relation to so just to give you some achievements in terms of the session is hospital care so since our launch in november we've had 15 inquiries and eight of those were from internal hospital seven from external inquiries we now have seven of our internal hospital carers who have been approved with special carers uh six of those carers had children placed with them and living very imminent during june and early july as trace mentioned earlier on we've got three children who are 12 who have stepped out of care and four children who are faced with special response carers who are following residential care and in addition we have one different assessment one live inquiry as we speak we kind of before we have the floor and the reasons for those reports are one of them was and the other one was the one of the carers have recently changed jobs and they wanted that to kind of check it down before they they moved on but uh we we will we've got agreement from them to retain their information and we will go back to them at night today so that's the kind of summary of where of where we are in terms of the special stuff okay if things like this be i'll get some combat on that result of those positive news stories having that pro actually it's partly it feels like part of the family is really showing you want to know that you're not going to feel yeah and we obviously use all of that kind of thing part of our campaign as well so yeah and the other thing was is there ever a creative reward for them so say if a yeah there's a financial reward yes there there is uh up to about thousand pounds so if they if you like a fair friend uh you will get a payment or 250 and if that person then goes on to the assess and the crew you will get a further but your first question a couple of hopefully many questions and the person that didn't be one mentioned the size of the county there's an issue which is one thing what is the size of the county's too big too small big just geographically just geographically big and what we're talking about with when she was here is uh we we are looking enough to have access to the bus uh uh so that double dagger bus where we can and we've been using that to to get further afield so within Worcestershire so we'll kind of drive the bus will drive out we'll have our staff on there we've got a couple of foster carers who will go on the bus as well we've got all of our banners and and try to interact with me and the other just found the whole kind of big power time scale so you said you can do these and kind of find the same book that we've matched and then i'll take it and in that you'll be of someone else in the account how does it work in the future did we let me just now we've learned how to do this matching we can then just carry on ourselves in power mind is that how it works yeah okay fine yeah good thank you yeah thank you i'm talking about the initial doing back that the uh we saw today which are the children that you will honor is what you needed the feedback to say we need an extra manager as well didn't we know that before before we we had those posts uh i think the challenge was when when cara came from from postulate to do to do the diagnostic we had just lost the manager so absolutely we we got alternative traditions in place and but it was early days and you could see there was it was different when alison ainsworth was here she was she was very much uh the recruitment manager and kind of managed that equipment without pointing to that time so it's kind of a different uh we're in a different stage now because we're now pointing to that gap so when the uh when she comes back the opposite should come back into post it yeah two months no no because we've got temporary but the only the feedback immediately was just to say this post has worked really well so make sure you do cover it while you go it's okay thank you yes can i just make a quick comment there madam jen this is this of course is such a truly challenging year dealing with some of that but this morning i think has been such a positive morning um such a proactive approach and i i just congratulate our own team and the work they're doing we then uh and i for one i'm certainly looking forward to september um and to hear the feedback that was you know it was so thank you all very much indeed some of the words out in our mouth about your insight thank you there's no more questions i wish you did agree with part of this weekly program to come back in september um we did that when we've been slightly delayed on starting the empowering work haven't we for the reason that we don't need to go into now um and i just wonder whether september might be a little bit early given the timetable that we've just shown them that would you be going to come back in the september and november meeting i think would be better because we're not going to quite completed the work but it's going to be an injured bit whereas if in november we'll be able to give you the full outcome yeah exactly as extremely important we are we have got children in this that's fine that's another important but only in some matches with you make sure it's a sustainable service um um so as the next thing well yes talking about there's the advice in the place to get in the side uh good so great yeah so having a great how about a keeper you may sit on my side good okay oh it okay so okay so that okay okay yeah so so okay thank you so much just to uh let the newcomers know we are calling uh this meeting it will be up online after something like that you'll be getting them up um i am partial so and we've also got new on the panel so um a new confusing face but we're all very eager to get stuck right in um and this so in the sentence of this item you just create a nice high school gifts that's being it okay let's feel the investments apparently it's just that it's new things yeah um that type inspiring this year program is easy and then you're wearing the street manager if i was sure normal stops back or um who are you straight to julie over to you thank you okay so um as i said i'm jude ditz and i work in people directorate and and i lead on skills and investment um and our inspiring to shoot program or our careers and energy forest team program is one of the strands that matt leads on within my team so it's worth saying that when this first came about this agenda for the local authorities this is actually a local enterprise partnership agenda so this is something that's contracted into the local enterprise partnership but as matt and i have always sat in the local authority since day one of being near and delivered this agenda for the local enterprise partnership i had a wide role in the local enterprise partnership and that i'm the director of skills so i don't have the needs of employers now and moving forward and of course future workforce and then what we're created by something by young people in high schools and quite clearly to that so um our role essentially we are not here and our role is not to give individuals within high schools careers advice that's what our role is that is very much defined by the department of education as the school's responsibility our role is to provide advice to guide them around a structured framework that they implement and to resource that for them to add resources into the next to put on events to bring employers forward and to to some extent quality assured work although as i say we don't do it we advise them we guide them they have a responsibility through offset and that is of more recent times and there also is a legislative which let me say that word element which is called being uh by the access data station that came in next this year that i'll explain in a bit so i'm not going to go through all the history but uh just to kind of say we've been doing this work since 2015 under its current format they're working with the careers and enterprise company careers enterprise company is a um it's a separate organization that has a contract with the department of education that has embedded this agenda into the 38 years over the years eventually so um what this looks like is um so there's a framework and the framework is called the Gatsby benchmarks and there are eight strategy benchmarks and they focus on different elements so they look at things like does the school have a plan for careers education but then they also go right down to are they ensuring that the area where the majority of young people will see individualized advice and guidance as well as are they getting the number of employer encounters we would like them to have there is a direct correlation between the number of employee encounters that young person receives and their likelihood of becoming not an education employee training at the point in time so what we do is and we essentially when we started this work our kind of um way of ahead in this was that the what the government wanted to do they wanted to have an employer advisor that worked with schools called an enterprise advisor and that individual would open up their network to that school in order to get more important characters that's how it started and that's what our reading it was it was about how do we bring employees into this mix how do we um get employees to be able to offer the kind of things that actually will be really useful so not the typical work experience that we will all remember along let's go into a business environment let's make the team let's do both of it actually things that really make a difference in terms of um influence to be having any person to enter those industries but that's where we started um and for the first few years that was pretty much what we had to do school didn't have to participate it was on a voluntary basis um but that's where we were and then things changed in 2017 because the department of education published its careers strategy hasn't been requested then but it's worth saying it's going to be refreshed this summer um and in that what it says is it defined the role of a school and said to a school you must um and therefore that's when the officer he started coming in as well and so in 2017 we took a decision so what they wanted to do at that point is they wanted to implement a hub model and they wanted to implement that in a number of geographies across across the country we applied to be one of those geographies in all intents and purposes we have no right to get that work because actually what they were looking for is those areas that were mostly pride that really needed extra support to move this forward which this year couldn't really collect that case because although we have lots of areas of social mobility within the county we put that in a comparison to another geography the argument just wasn't there so what we decided to do is to do something completely different they were asking for 20 schools to join the hub to really like proactively do this work we thought okay what we're going to do and our model was we would put every school in it from day one so our model was we would go to special educational needs schools we would use our AP schools our people with failure units under further education colleges and we would put every single one into hub from day one they only wanted 20 schools so we were going in with 42 so something quite different and we were successful and i think at the time that thinking was okay we'll try all this because actually this is where we want to go we want full country coverage so actually if we see this across an area we really would just interest so that's where we went and when we started as well as we're saying in 2018 and 2018 where they did kind of all the data piece on this was to choose in the bottom three four areas in terms of where it was it seemed as a real cold spot our work experience levels were really low and our county levels were really low and was in the multiple three and 38 areas and we then took a step further so actually because we had that two-tier three-tier system in some of our districts actually what we knew is that young people were there in woodchapen and they were in middle school weren't getting the same experience and same careers journey that a young person in secondary school in Waltham was getting so we applied for some further money to test the middle school piece further money to test the middle school piece and we were given a third hub so we then moved 21 further schools into our hub actually what that looks like now is it'll work in 62 educational establishments so we have full county coverage all 62 schools post-year seven all the way up to year 13 who we might think are enrolled in this and they work with them on a regular basis our kill checks were about 250,000 and the county council match funds some of the fact and we have to do that so that they're passed a match from that and that's done through the county council that we use in the gold base budget to match fund that um today where we are is that we still have enterprise advisors working our schools we have about 85 enterprise advisors and we have about 200 employees that we work with at any one time we do an annual exercise to look through our employees check the signatures and check they're still keen to work with us and we all the time the work that there was just a great part to bring on new employees and so in terms of that mainstream role so the supporting role for helping the schools to kind of implement that framework we also have a number of things that sit alongside that that we've done over and above that so we could have just done that that we've been more than happy just to do that but obviously we've done some additional pieces of work there are a number of those actually support uh Tina's area to support the children's piece we've been really keen to ensure that you support those young people with most disadvantage so one of those uh last year was that we looked at kind of the system around how we identify young people who are most at risk of becoming not in education employment and training the um framework that we use actually called the risk of the innovator haven't been updated English share this is not abnormal it's kind of how it is everywhere haven't been updated for about 15 years so the determinants that it was using were perhaps a little bit out of today and actually we were able to use not only have a fresh look at those determinants but working with schools working with Tina's teams able to really think about what are the different factors that ensure ensure that are likely to cause a young person to become needs and therefore how do we ensure that our schools target those young people to ensure they're giving them the most support that they can to know our adults and that that's been really successful schools have really welcomed that piece of work it is an amendment to focus their limited resources um but also what's interesting about that is that's been rolled out nationally based on where we support the work that was to share with them and other entities that are benefiting from that and also done lots of other pieces of work um things like for instance working with a virtual school around their personal experience plans and sitting in the same team as well we're looking at how careers of education our careers is talked about as part of those processes they're not just education because education doesn't always lead to careers in a nice very possible way you don't pick the right education choices it can directly go so we want to make sure these conversations are had and that they're added at an earlier point um we've also done a lot of work with those individuals within the schools who represent and young people in social care who represent young people with some needs to ensure that they understand the support they should be having from their school for those young people around careers education again it's also huge places they have hundreds of stuff and actually you're assuming that the two talk that that's not necessarily the case and we have a number of best practice forums that we have in place to support those individuals and then we have an events program so we run lots of different events but our I suppose our biggest event is our Worcestershire skills show so it was just a skill show this year it was the first time we ran since 2020 um second one sorry that we ran since 2020 and it was a two-day event and over the two days we had 3,000 young people attend from 28 schools um and then um alongside that we worked with the NEAP team to kind of in post-16 NEAP team to look at those young people who don't have destination in year 11 and those young people who are likely to fall off our kind of NEAP radar in year 13 to look at how we support them as well and how we work with the schools to ensure films have a challenge role that we're saying what do you do to support these young people um I think this is probably the point to talk about the data so where are we now I said we were in the bottom three but the great news is that we are in the top three and we consistently have been for um probably the last four years um we are recognized as the area that has traveled the most distance on this agenda um yeah no one's probably going to change that for a significant amount of time and I think more permanently for me one of the most important factors is the work experience element um not going to say it's all perfect but essentially in years 10 and 12 last academic year 92 percent of all young people received an employer encounter so it's not just work experience it's an employer encounter it could be a number of different things from an employer going into a school from when we visit to an employer services events which equates to seven thousand and seventy young people receiving that support um and benchmarks were at 6.53 that's not going to mean a lot to you at 6.53 and today nationally the average of 5.3 so we're rising over and above that alongside that piece of work we have a number of I call the jigsaw pieces of the puzzle really that we um kind of put together to make this piece of work work um so we have primary schools careers program we've taken that a little bit further this year so we've been doing primary school stem competition for about i'd say about seven years um and alongside that we now have a number of other pieces of work to want to ensure that actually careers isn't something that's new to these young people when they transition into middle school but also if we can get quite a lot of data from understanding young people's aspirations in primary school in how we then put together our innovative resources and what we've entered when we move into that middle second viewpoint as well uh we're also doing a lot of work to influence assistance so teacher encounters you know the journey of teachers typically that they um you know obviously the excitement of a teacher going to university and then go back to school they've never worked in the industry they don't understand that make the relationships completely foreign to them so actually we're doing a lot of work to get teachers back into those environments to talk to teachers about different pathways they can take moving forward and then um we do a lot of work with employers so you move down to a really great example of that uh children expect that holly embraced and wanting to do more to look at their future workforce wanting to work with schools uh so we work with employers that look at how that could look how they would make the best of the interventions that they're trying to embed and then we support them to get those into schools to work with their school and as i said within it's good and that's what we also haven't done to other programs and then kind of complement this program that i talked about in the paper so i don't have to go over those um for us moving forward over the next 12 months where we are now i think it's a it's a funny period of time obviously with potential election meaning um where we are at the moment is we have a new contract that comes in in um september or september and that's an 18-month contract that's quite a new thing because we normally have 12-month contracts we're quite sure why it's 19 months and but it is um and our focus is very much about it's beyond the benchmark so we will continue to do what we do we will do all the things we've just talked about but we're also going to take a real focus this year on looking at equality of interventions and ensuring that those interventions are getting the most out of them so we'll do things that we will support our employees to really understand the interactions that they're having how to make them have the greatest impact and from what we know for what the country wants and again we will look at our own uh quality within our careers but also we're going to push our schools who've been doing this for quite a time now to actually look at are they are they implementing a similar program or actually are they taking it to the next step so there's a quality piece there and challenges in this agenda i mean you know i've said it a couple of times it's limited we have limited results so actually what we can do what schools can do is really really um limited and you know they're very busy agenda in schools how much time this is given is often due to the question of that particular teacher we have some schools who talk to us who are really passionate about it and other schools who and a lot of that obviously comes down to all the factors to recognize time and money and policy and there is also a real lack of careers advisors within the uk generally so actually it's quite challenging to hold on to a good careers advisor and so that does mean that they know that that will obviously impact on the program and and then you know talk about the financial constraints we we talk about skills management looking out often parts from a lot of sand and this is definitely one of the programs that is um in terms of what we are able to do with what we have and planning forward um but you know thank you that's a really positive um story i'm going to bring them and say i just want to uh before the meeting we was all reminiscing about how easy it was when you were 13 to get a job some people didn't like the jobs but i i often get in and manage to see it on swath radiation online quite a little part-time job for my child um my job you know in 14 years old it's it's about is there any any space there to help young people gain that kind of experience in a safe environment the problem is nowadays if you can't get a job in a shop you end up going to a store asking can we couldn't be long which perhaps isn't a safe environment so it's it's is there anything there to help out if you want to have some actual experience get out for those of it's all part-time jobs that they can do that's not something that we do and i would say that probably a whole other rectangle is the way and it couldn't happen um you know it's a real it's a real issue and a lot of young people that we see will have had we ran a program for Christmas to churches and 16 to 24 year olds and we've got a new public team in church and open but officially you see um and a lot of the young people that we see who are coming in your benefit payments have never worked because actually it's really hard to get a part-time job and you know you can get them in things like hospitality but even that now that's a real and a lot of challenges in terms of um availability of opportunities uh i think a lot of you you mentioned sort of retail a lot of the difficult places where people have gone in and passed the jobs really hard to get through their recruitment process for young people and because of the way they've structured their recruitment processes and so yeah unfortunately not something we do so nearly we work with the education business partnership to ensure that we support as much as possible to get work experience opportunities and i think that's something that's going to be on the agenda potentially moving forwards it has been talked about something that might come down our way um but at the moment we don't have a role in that thank you thank you but the um i was well i'm sure it's important what i've gotten actually but because i'm working for an employee for the 10 critical videos and then she used to go into schools and it's so frustrating not being able to speak to some of the teachers like and you're right that didn't get the teacher and it pushed the uh children in a certain direction another subject but did the school will not and that was always the case and it came some sort of striking because nobody uh they were once or these awareness if you want when you come to university you see because there are other things in there but then in 2018 there was a chairman of the university i actually went to one of these uh skilled ones and my art was uh um i'll be my man because it was so hard for me to change what should happen in in in the ideas which have been my first very involved in it and because they're from this and you've mentioned it it's such a little rhythm it's about where do we go from there because how do we approach those schools the surgery is not so engaging with girls i do what we're doing to to to leave us some of those youngsters will end up in this it's and which is a shine you know because it just want a different opportunity or a different pathway something's a good change yeah i think we did i think there's two things there do you want to just talk about by the electric legislation yeah so in january 2020 the government introduced the new provider access legislation and it is basically the main mandatory now that schools must open their doors to trained providers university politics etc to ensure that young people are made aware of all of the career choices and transition choices available to them whereas in the past what we have been doing in particular but in the past there's elements of we were learning from our 64 because that's the group we'd like to take the opportunity to go to so we're in a position now where this legislation is supporting the fact that young people are in a better position to make a more informed choice of the relevant pathways that are available to them it's only one element of the change that's come in it will support schools uh to make sure because it's a mandated element they'll be assessed on the bios they're during inspections but what will also happen is there's a big worthy phrase that's changed and it has gone from all overwhelming majority to all so now it's a mandatory requirement that every young person gets those encounters and meets those people whereas before it was overwhelming majority and that's a massive shift in language and change within the system as well so that will see a massive influence moving forward we're still very much in the first academic year of that being delivered and some schools are finding it challenging you know some schools are still at the point where they're all overwhelming majority rather than all but they're certainly working towards that and one of the interesting things with that is that books in legislation and provider can essentially put in a formal complaint to the degree that school won't let them in so um what then happens is we would have to investigate that to rationalize why that might be there are some reasons that that we can justify but if there is no reason and rationale then essentially the government will suppose take that school to some through some form of a legal process and we don't know the outcome so everyone's kind of waiting on the tension for that to happen because it will happen at some point um and i think it will be really interesting to see what the government does um in terms of any measures that it takes against that school thank you just tell me just an addition to that is that this this is it it's never done so you've got people who's got a place for children who've got a place for teachers so i think it demonstrates the need for the longevity of the program and the work and so far because there is always that churn and and the the this you know the school show has been hearing apart a number of years but it's always needed people to understand those experiences and that longevity and to take this second one that you made um we do within our funding stream so again things have changed so um prior to Brexit and the when we had European social funds which we've had up until December last year in this county we've had funds that would enable us to do specific programs that targeted young people who would likely be needs with extra interventions in schools unfortunately the new UK show prosperity doesn't allow that because it's not about it it's a vital for my final difference which is the open of a 50-year-old plus is a 16-year-old plus therefore you can't intervene in year 11 what we what they're trying to do is kind of put some money through the agreement to create something to support that and we have a program where we tell them 67 young people from the 38 schools in the year and ever where we do some specific targeting work for those but the reality is that you know we used to get a hundred thousand pounds to do some of this work and it's now about fifteen thousand so it's no amount what we're able to do within the back of our mechanism than the actual thing that's within the contract of doing we won't be able to do it so what you're saying we've got a lobby down at about individually thank you and i think it they weren't aware of it it's what i would say um but something that um i'm looking to you i'm going to say that because you made there was so many other children for mindful conversations and bad careers in classrooms because when when you're learning a subject knowing why it's important to learn because often quite good for a young person maybe that mass i don't like mass i don't really like it but when they say actually well we think we'll need mass when it used to be donated we've never got to have a calculator like it on time well show them first it's there um but knowing why you should learn it because actually it's going to help you in these kind of careers so all that conversation you're having with teachers to help that training of how can you inspire people to really go beyond just the conversation yes this is one of the benchmarks one of the benchmarks is about how do you embed careers into curriculum and it focuses on some specific areas mass is one of them it's national university day today so um so that does happen and that is one of the benchmarks it is one of the harder ones to implement it's worth saying and we are doing a lot we really recognize the role of the teacher as a trusted adult particularly in some of our young people that are most often talented they will really see that teacher as always their parent figure and their guide and their advisor and you know the ultimate the issue is that or make the expression that when you go to that in person then i say oh mrs i'm sure i'd really like to do an apprenticeship and mrs martial goes because she doesn't know anything about apprenticeships then actually i like that one or i don't have to do it because that's what i've read from that but actually it's just a lack of understanding but that's why the teaching encounter program is so important we're piloting that this um this term um we're going to cover so we're covering uh we give a small pot money from the careers and enterprise company to pilot a teacher encounter program it's covering two streams effectively which is uh slt members or curriculum leads from seven schools offering two teachers from each school so we'll have 14 teachers in total that will participate in that teacher encounter program the basis behind that is that they will come out of school for the day and they will go and visit a local employer we have worked with to set up almost a almost a work experience with the teachers during that work experience model they will learn about the industry sector that don't let any links to the curriculum subject they're shaping and so for example if it was a mass teacher we're going to look at engineering companies if it was a key teacher we've got an administrative class we're going to do you know there's a direct synergy between their curriculum subject and what they're leading on and the employer but throughout that day they'll learn more about the organization they'll learn more about the HR recruitment groups they'll look at the entry groups as well so whether it's apprenticeships internships what skills and qualifications they're looking for young people to hold at those entry level roles they'll get hands-on practical uh experience so it may well be actually getting out into the check door and handling the machine and showing where those math skills are used when they're setting up and so what our hope is that we really inspire this bank of teachers to go back into school to actually let's invent careers more within the curriculum it will give us that opportunity for a teacher to be standing up in front of the class and actually talk about their own experience of the workplace while they're supporting their young people to actually use that knowledge and understanding exactly what you said about the fact that why am I near to use maths in the workplace well here's a prime example of why you should the second stream is a piece of work that we've been doing now for this academic year which is focusing on training features so we've created a link with Worcester Uni and what will happen is we've actually created a voluntary module with them that's all about careers and surprisingly 26 of these training teachers are taking it up it's the second highest take up on their voluntary models modules that they've got and what it's done is it's given them an early understanding of the entire careers landscape it's given them all of the knowledge they need to know as early as possible on why they should be embedding careers within the curriculum our thoughts around that is let's not allow a teacher to become institutionalized and get in the habit of not including careers in their curriculum whereas if we're targeting training teachers it means it becomes second nature to them so every new cohort year and year that enters our schools now will have that knowledge have that understanding and realize the importance of delivering careers in the curriculum and and it's been very very successful we've had our own count today where one of our local employers and Zach posted the 26 teachers and they had tours they've had talks from specialists other employers and some of the feedback we've had has been brilliant but they'll also now be undertaking that teacher encounter themselves as part of this teacher encounter program those 26 will have an individualized work placement of their own now that they will go out into the workplace and gain that practical knowledge based on the curriculum subjects they will be teaching. University also embedded that into the wider program so those people are also doing a piece reflecting that to the rest of the cohort as well so again we're hoping that you know we might be taking 26 of the cohort but actually by doing this it will reflect in my career form and I think the real positive of this is that if a young person understands why it's doing that why why they're doing that why they're you know if that's part of their end goal because they need to get in the GCSEs because they want to go into the friendship and math is a huge part of that actually what the school sees a link to attendance improvements but also linked to results improvements it's quite clear that when a young person videos and if you don't trace it's going to do the things that are not comfortable. Yeah you're following kind of the bottom that's obviously it's going to be training on teachers to do a lot of career side of things but one of the challenges got a couple questions in your challenges so one that we mentioned is obviously lack of careers applying this I think look up a about certainly 21 to 35 pounds for someone with a probably a postgraduate qualification is it pretty low so I mean maybe by teaching a lot of teachers to do a lot of careers in a way you can have maybe negated their needs of um how first how do we help get more with appliances and how many schools just don't have a good advice or do some schools share them how that works. It's a mixed model isn't it some someone have their own and some will buy it in as a service and some will maths will share across across the trust um there are some gaps in the county um where you know either we need to need or the coalition will support them willing to leave because again it might be in their interest to support schools that creates advice that might advise about going to a fee route um so yeah it is an issue um we have career advisors that we employ ourselves and we work on our 16 to 24 fees and we have them within our CDS teams as well so um if we need to then we can kind of move those into into the schools it's not really a solution um I you know at this point we can always talk about what went by and whether that that would be a good solution to have a bank career advisor within the local authority I'm not sure that that's necessarily the right solution because I do think there's a lot about the locality of the school and what's around that school and what that individual have as intelligence it's really helpful to move those young people forward um but yes it's an issue the other thing that we are doing is that we the local enterprise partnership has a program called boot camps which is about accelerating people into careers and we are exploring whether we can offer a boot camp in the information advice and guidance and in order to build some of this um I think there's a mismatch because the government expects uh information advice and guidance officers to have a degree in IEG but actually because it's a level six qualification it's talking about the management they're not doing a management job so it's a bit of a mismatch you can find that people do that it's meant transition quite quickly into careers leader roles or into other roles the other issue is that the careers leader role in the school so every school has to have a careers leader as part of their senior leadership team it's not a it's not the same as deputy headship so a lot of people will use it as a stepping stone into deputy headship when we use a careers leader has a signal if you're going to impact you have someone new you've got to set up to train them all over again quite often um and this will be a 20 okay so in the last two years we've had 20 this september alone we had nine careers leaders change quite a bit so the careers in the church is definitely just looked at my cv to do this but i'm actually not but there's also this difference in certain schools and how they implement the careers leader role yeah some schools like judy's mentioned that we do has a head that perhaps really embraces the whole agenda or have it as a standalone role so the careers leader then can work full-time on the careers agenda and you'll see their programs brilliant you've got others that will have it as part of a deputy headship role when they're also the leaders safeguarding transitions heads of city it's it's like acting out on to an existing role and that's when you find like judy's mentioned that you get that the procedures then just respect me standing so you're all better well there is a push nationally to try to kind of you know make this more of a specific profession and a role so great leaders have a trade they have to go through specific training to be a career leader and they would like that to be recognized by the dnd as a sort of you know similar to a headship in a school as a position um but as yet don't know when the news actually comes out we know a little bit about what it's going to say but it might be something that's within that which is a financial constraints if you've got about 400 about half see that's a challenge again is is it just the risk of before the cost generally there's a risk of that money that we put in the 200,000 starts to disappear and i suppose my question then is how do we cope because i think you could probably share about return on that investment but not going to pay for council going around is not loads of money yet it seems to be doing really well if you haven't you said it to someone senior and say no don't count this because look out can you give them evidence to show yes yeah i think the first element is continued to show that the work that we're doing and the fact that we are punching over our way for the improvements demonstrating that and then all the quality so there is that you know the kind of constantly sharing that we're demonstrating the difference i think there is a there is a challenge in terms of impact because the impact and the work that magnets are doing to track that impact through in terms of long no employment takes takes time um so it is quite hard to do that but if we are genius in kind of demonstrating that they are doing what you can do so it's kind of constantly doing and i think we are creative in the use of funding as well and in terms of other programs that we get through and the fact that we run from an academic gig rather than a financial year we're just completing our budgets and our finances as creatively as possible to keep the programme going but ultimately at some point we will ask for resource and then that is a critical council decision in terms of critical so at some point we will need your support if this is something that we want to do and i think because this reports into the local enterprise partnership obviously reports and be there more as well the timing guarantee is part of that board and he's very supportive and he always talks about his desire to continue his program i feel like we are in currently and really doing things um but yeah it is an issue for sure i think i asked you that sorry stop him in there yeah finance is really instead you say it's about that political decision mostly i think like the yeah i mean i'm really conscious i'm welcome to start coming into schools and be informed of the importance of careers i find it very almost impossible to believe that some schools um i understand the pressures that schools are under but i think more medical hospitals understand that some schools perhaps don't take careers advice um as as importantly as perhaps they should because the advice the quality of the advice that they get or don't get is going to have an impact on that child for the next 50 years or so um so i i i think it's hugely important and the other thing which easy for me to say and i know it's not possible if you like perhaps in every family is the role that parents have to take as well in terms of careers advice and if i dare say grandparents you and i had a conversation very recently and i've got a granddaughter who's doing a gcc now she adores me i do assure you but we have conversations every week about careers but we have conversations we talk about all kinds of complexities and challenges things that i never knew about when i was 16 the opportunities out there i genuinely didn't know so i think the work that the team are doing here and the work that should take place in schools um every january i go into my local high school in ten brings and i conduct mock mock interviews i've done it for about eight years now and i'm always amazed that um some of the children that i interview then they have no idea what so ever as to what career choice these are 15 years old as to what career path they want to take others are absolutely spot on the clarity there so it doesn't matter i don't think even age 15 you don't know what career path you want to take it's a journey you know and if you're going to go on to further education then then so be it but the other thing i can just raise which i think is hugely important and where many changes take place in recent years and that's to do with apprenticeships and i can remember a time very well when you know apprenticeships were for those young people who weren't able didn't have the ability to follow an academic career and successive governments at that time would put a figure of the number of children that they want them to go to university which i think that's very different today apprenticeships are being viewed in an entirely different way and i know from my time uh in mormon on mormon district council a lot of the high tech companies there for example who employed the majority of their staff were employed with phds and now i see someone's nodding there and now of course they are looking at apprenticeships but they're tailor-made apprenticeships for young children who are shown the natural aptitude in a particular area and then they are putting programs together for them and they're progressing right through so apprenticeships are not just for bricklayers anymore you know apprenticeships are across the board and i i like i'm delighted that we are seeing much more apprenticeships growth if you like and what have you so funding um thank you for the the good lead there i can take that away with me um i might want to daniel he's back into that how do we and try to encourage children into those those key positions we need but name's got question before we give a comment and a question if i may um really fascinating uh areas that obviously delighted to see that was this year is putting this issue really high upon our agenda and how far it it's coming um i don't remember anything like this when i was 15 16 or so 30 years ago now um i'm just trying to think back to it was quite non-district really the careers advisor um so it's important that you aren't facilitating a conversation between the employee and obviously the pupil you enablers and you're helping to break down that barrier between employment because at the age of 13 14 15 16 or so it's very daunting for those ages then to think i'm going to employment you know there's a great barrier there and i think that it was absolutely right i've got a 15 year old daughter who really switched on really clever top sense for everything um but she doesn't know what she wants to do at the moment now privately you know i'm slightly worried and concerned but maybe i shouldn't pity um but grace doesn't know what she wants to do and i suppose the whole of this agenda is shining in her eyes on well these are the options for you um and i think that's really really important so therefore my question then comes onto the Worcestershire skills show which i think that that to me sounds really really important and i guess you've got some good numbers there you know you've got four just under four thousand young people uh 28 schools across Worcestershire attended over two days hey where is it held please um and did you get a good buy-in from local employers you know that was you know demonstrated many many different areas and i'm assuming they have like a school or uh you know that they demonstrated well if we're going to try our sector whether that's engineering or teaching or what do you do you know or have you that they then explained that this is the pathway so so i think the school show like that is really really important and will that be an annual event now um so this is it sorry and i thought it would be yeah so unfortunately we used to do it at Chateau with me um and actually we used to have a lot more young people but capacity that it does yes so that's why it's only 28 schools there are other reasons as well you know the cost of transport we've got do for some bursaries and we the district council often support us but for more money into that however transport costs are permanent when it comes to schools buying into that um yes actually we're doing it and it is normal that we can afford to keep doing it it's on a cheap exercise um we've done this this is our ninth skill show so we did them pre-covid yes are they growing every year are you getting more employers uh yeah reflectively this year we did grow yeah it's a capacity issue and that we can yes absolutely we did grow we grew this year because we did a two-day event with evidence to the importance of one day yeah we made that change because actually a lot of the feedback that we had i think it's quite it was quite noticeable it was too busy and some of the quality of conversations wasn't really there we were trying to squeeze three thousand into a day so it'll just um expanding over two days change that it's a big ask from an employer and actually you know Jams up in would be really um interesting in this because he attends um the point is that we advise our employers about what they need to do we give them a bit of a you know just come to the table and something that you need to bring to have a go so you need to bring something that you can actually interact with what's really interesting and what was really interesting for me this year is those employees have been doing very well you can see how their standards have transitioned and progressed and you know you've got robot arms and all kinds of different things going on and then you've got some where you're just like just a bit boring and you can see again people just don't really go and do it to them um but yet dan intended uh this year you were very busy we were so again we attended the first time last year we were unsure from a social care social work careers perspective how that event would go but we thought it's part of the work we've been doing around future workforce we we felt it was an opportunity we needed to do so we did it for the first time last march and we were really um pleased with it with the event it was really engaging and we did speak to well we spoke to a significant amount of people but more meaningfully conversations there were still hundreds of conversations which took place um and yeah from my perspective having done it for the first time a really um successful event i wasn't we were in short because it was younger young people sort of about 11 to 15 age group how engaged would young people really be actually we were really surprised and pleased with how engaging it was um so part of our commitment of this piece of work is that we wanted to continue to do it so we then did the next um career show which was for older young people and young adults and that was in the autumn and then we signed up and did it again um this um this seven spring as well and then obviously again we did sit there and think gosh that's a huge commitment to go for two days um but again it was it was very amazing and it was really successful and obviously one of the things needed was it was parents bringing young people along and so we were able to have some really great conversations with them um as well about this type of career so from our perspective we found it was really successful and are committed to continue to do it i think it's worth mentioning that skill show is part of a series of four annual events that take place you have a skill show which is targeted in year seven to ten we then have as dan's mentioned in the autumn term we have two careers and apprenticeship learning shows which are focused on the old bmp so it is 10 through 13 and that is a different conversation so rather than the skill show which is there to sort of kind of arouse interest and get them really interested in careers and start exploring their opportunities and their options the career and apprenticeship program shows you a bit more of that specific in what do you need to be next what does the employer pathway look like etc and then the third in our series uh of events is rsc and b event so we now have a specific like beyond school event that is targeted at young people from our special education schools or any people in mainstream that has in the xd field so again it's very very different conversations in terms of you couldn't have a young person with a skill show with an educational or help me not necessarily at the same level of quality of conversation that they would do our life beyond school so the cover all of the age groups the demographics through part four and i think that segues quite nicely into your your piece of you yeah thank you very much so yeah as i said earlier my name is daniel gray and and i'm a group manager in social care and safeguarding in worcestershire um and every year we have a business plan the key priority of that business plan every year it's workforce it's one of our key assets and we we absolutely know that to run good successful services we need a strong and capable workforce and over the last year um we had a focus of saying actually wanted to begin to engage in our potential future workforce and different kind of opportunities that we wanted to create um to support that so um we engage with a number of different partners across our local universities and colleges with judith and her services and teams to really understand what would we be able to do um and i won't go through this judith's gone through it and i love to detail the types of opportunities which are there um and as an employer as a social care service we've committed to and begun to engage with and to be part of the last year we've been involved in that annual program and as i said before from our perspective we found that to be really um successful and some really meaningful conversations have taken place one of the things we really reflected on as an employer was around social work and social care careers and often this is a career choice which can be um a little bit hidden it's a career which is often presented in the media very negatively when something has gone wrong which sadly sometimes that does happen but that is a very very small percentage across the many many children and families that we work with and support and have really successful outcomes but people don't often see that side of it or social work is often portrayed in possibly not the most accurate way in the media and so social workers will often say that that's not wrong but this is the impression which is being given and we wanted to create a space to engage with people to actually put social work on the map and to create space for people to think about this um we're also very conscious we're working in a very sensitive safeguarding environment where we can't say we're going to bring lots of young people directly into the workplace we need to balance that in the right way so we wanted to create an engagement opportunity and to bring young people in with the health and social care um who aren't taking that course and wanting to come into this type of work in the future so we worked in partnership with Worcestershire's Worcester sixth form college just across the road to develop and run some pilot engagement events and we've run three of those across the last year and we've engaged with 70 young people on health and social care courses and they've been really successful and we've run them with our staff internally so staff have taken time out of their busy days to come and do that and to give them a window into our world and into the experiences you can have as a social worker and the great and amazing things that social work can achieve with families um and the feedback we've had directly from the college and from young people has been really successful we've taken that to develop it so when we've run that course again we've built that in and the feedback again um was very positive in terms of the opportunities that we've shown young people um and it's creating a window to see what it was really like a lot of the feedback we've had is that often I think people saw that as health was big and social care was quite small in that health and social care space but the feedback that we've had is that actually people have become really interested in social care and social work careers so we're not necessarily going to see an impact of that right here right now but we're starting to put it on the map and actually giving people the information saying well actually if you did want to come into social work and it's not just social work itself but all those support roles around it how you can take those steps into it and what if you needed to go and do your degree to become a social worker the steps to achieve that as well and there are lots of different ways that people can do that now so giving that information and actually the feedback from new people not all but something's actually yeah this is a career choice now that we're really interested in so it's it's what we've really tried to do is create the space to put it on the map and to get people interested in social work where it's been quite hidden in the past so that's what we've done over the last year and moving forward we're looking at actually how we can roll that out wider as I said we've only done that in partnerships so far with Worcester Sixth Form College so now it's about saying actually how can we roll that opportunity and do these events with other sixth forms and colleges across Worcestershire to really grow this piece of work and that's what we wanted to come and share with you as an addition to the work that you've been doing and sort of actually how it can work a little bit in practice and the successes that we can have from it really thank you. I think it's really important now that it's not just a break on the map as this could be a part of you to go into but it's actually also breaking down barriers there's a perception sometimes which is a scary perception of what a social worker is and families could be scared to say actually I need to speak to a social worker because they actually have a genuine fear of it. We're talking quite young to young people about this but breaking down these barriers between the years to come they're not actually I need to control myself I now know where to go and I think that is so important to have that those early interventions those early prevention steps come strong and connected so thank you very much for looking to you. I just wanted to share I mean if you think you're right you know everything we're doing was to share you know and all the much that you know there's all got connection and families and you know that feeling of what is it social work will do and it's something that we're always always and even keen to just yeah communicate really positively and I just wanted to share with you a letter that I received about three weeks ago from a year six pupil at the Great Jib Worcester and the class were tasked to write to somebody that they felt would be a future employer and this is a letter that I received from this young boy. Dear Sarah and Madam I'm writing to you today to show my sincere interest in becoming a social worker for your pattern. I have a passion for social care and would love you to join your beautiful environment. I would be a good social worker because I am empathetic and I enjoy talking with people about their problems. I'm also very patient so they require more time than usual and need to talk to me about their problems they can. I also think I will be a strong candidate because right now at school I'm a prep reader this means I read to the year ones and the year two children and I also help them with their school work enabling them to improve on it. In addition I love playing outside with the year three children and I've made quite a few buddies from playing with them and teaching them their football skills. I have seen what I need to do to get this job so I'm going to work really hard to get all the degrees that I need to work with you. I've heard so much about your wonderful council and what you do for children and others and that is why I chose your council so many others. Thank you for considering this and that. That is really lovely. It makes me quite, I just, every time I read it it makes me and I just think you know it is getting out there you know. We have a good service and we want to help people and that we will protect nobody too but and that's just a really good example of you know it's hitting home. People here understand that you know children's social work is a good place to work and we do a really good important job for children. That is really showing the success of the work that you're doing in practice then it's also not only helping people find prospects into education but also helping us find our future workforce. I think that is something we can perhaps look to utilise for other jobs, if I can tell my daughter what she's doing better for young people, she knows about this and other, if you get a job that's not a problem. Of course making sure that more people go into that and education to our colleges and these jobs that we desperately need but people don't necessarily think of when they are thinking of their career path. I think you can utilise yourselves then to be actual gamers. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. We're going to go on to, is there anything sorry you want to say to our cabinet members before we post the work project? So for me, only I just mentioned Dan there that you know he mentioned before about what he mentioned before about the bad impressions of bad media. Maybe we should spend some time talking about stuff out there and showing what we are doing for the benefit that he thinks and take it away from those. I have one comment about that and something to do with you James but I'd just like to thank your opposite team if I can for them. They are an amazing set of people and I truly great for them. I would also congratulate you on your new appointment and I'd like to, I'd like to say congratulations to Tina Russell on her new appointment but I won't. But I will thank Tina for all the work she's helped me do on this panel. I mean you've already given me the last 10 dates in a new role so thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. I just got to the question. [inaudible] [inaudible] It's not usually because of work done to condense the work programme here a bit so we have got really to add some items on but obviously we'll look at the next meeting. We've got the impacts of courses for children's birth being brought back in-house. I think that's going to be a really important one to do and I'd look into some very interesting things about that. And then we've got the SMD Ofsted frequency inspection. So it's got the next two weeks. It's going to be a full one so I don't know if we're going to be able to get out of the round because I think that would be a really important one for us to get our teeth in. So you know, bring a coffee with you. So is everyone happy with what they've got currently? And you know, one suggestion I've also spoken about before and I know he wants to also talk about something which was the work we do with the early years and with our health visitors and our clinics that we do with young people on screen time and it's quite saving it to be looking at screen time at the moment for young people as there's a report that's been collected connecting increased screen time on young people with instances of missed health and it's also being spoken about in the House of Commons. So I'd like that to be added to our work program and then you want to make sure we're including everything. Yeah, so there's lots of reports going around there. It was basically the BBC article which was BBC Gloucestershire yesterday. He searched BBC Gloucestershire to type in the word something like boxing at school. He would find that was one of the teachers saying. So it's just about the pressure on schools to you know, become slightly examined batches that some of them are very involved kind of restrictions. Yeah, kind of stuff that's understandable but maybe too much of it, too much pressure. So something on maybe your parents and plus it's happening at schools are the concerns and then he said at the end of that thing what kind of goals parents and pupils have because at the end of the report it talks on the kind of a survey done to parents find it and it's like coming quite negative. Even in the school, God goes off there and as you said 70% said their child was unhappy at school and you know we want to focus on look on our pathways with children. You can do well at school and get good grades. We don't want to have good grades and expect from happiness and so it's something looking into that and it will be good. So the school survey is it the one and then how open and transparent they are to the wider community. So we'll be able to maybe talk to some schools and say you know what is your process and find out if there is an ideal process that schools are using and what you're becoming. I think that's what we're talking to. Because I think the webmaster said 70% of the people like it. I just wondered how they found that figure out. I think there's an offset. I think it's part of the offset. It's obviously agnostic. They talk to parents what they think so you can see that 70% said their child's unhappy. 51% said they didn't have a child saving their children at school but then it still got green at the moment. These academies have set off to that initiative well we have less staying in the academy. No no I'm just thinking because if that kind of figure is only except by doing the offset reports and it's been packed. That's the shape of the school you pick. Unless you go through an offset you wouldn't know the activity. I think we need to think about how we do this, why, rather than individual schools. I think that's it. It's my best plan to find out. Our schools maybe going some schools maybe going down this route it's taking it will get them better offset grades maybe but then it's understanding what are the impact on the job you know but I'm not so unhappy to open the stores. Is there that best practice on how parents and children. We'll do some research. And then there was one movement we picked up in the news and value and care project coming out of September actually. Yes that's it. We might need something else. Well it means then September might be out but you might be able to have that report from screen time. We will be looking at that means I will be looking at all opportunities and however you get the information that you need to be able to scrutinise. That means some of the data is confidential so we won't go into a confidential setting because we have to be as excellent as we needed to be I see at that time. Thank you so much for your support for my first plus ever account here so hopefully next time I have a few more members to be able to send out an email. Thank you very much.

• Thank you very much. problems?