Transcript

Can you hear now? Yes. Okay, you didn't miss much, don't worry. The rights of the press and the public to record and film this meeting apply and everyone present should note that the media representatives may be in attendance or viewing the live stream. The Children and Young People's Scrutiny Commission shares oversight of the main items on the agenda with the Living in Hackney Scrutiny Commission and therefore members of this commission are also in attendance this evening. Before we start I want to thank officers for attending this evening, not only council officers but also our external guests from the Metropolitan Police, City and Hackney Safeguarding Partnership as well as representatives from a number of local schools. We are also especially pleased to welcome a number of Young People representatives here tonight from Hackney of Parliament and Hackney of tomorrow. Finally, all attendees at this meeting this evening should note that the council is in a pre-election period and should keep contributions Hackney-wide and avoid any references to the local areas where elections are taking place. Moving on to item 1 which is apologies for absence. Apologies from Deputy Mayor Bramble, Deputy Mayor Nicholson, Rory McCollum and joining online we have Councillor Etty and Jim Gamble. Item 2 which is urgent items and order of business and I just wanted to note here the outcome of the ILAC's inspection of children's services, children's social care services. We have moved from requires improvement to good and I feel that as a commission we have been on that journey with you, many of us, and you know, from getting the poor outcome previously and working back up to this place and we have seen how tirelessly you have all, and that is everybody, the named people that we have come across frequently in these meetings but everybody else that we know is integral to ensuring the wellbeing and safety and happiness of our children in the borough. So I just wanted to congratulate you all on achieving that for our children and especially against the backdrop of cyber attack and COVID and ever increasing challenges with budgets so well done to you all and thank you for your efforts. So now moving on to item 3, declarations of interest. Any declarations of interest? In which case, moving on to our first substantive item which is Safer Schools Partnership and the role of police in schools. A Safer Schools Partnership is a formal agreement between the police, a school or group of schools and other agencies to work together to keep young people safe, reduce crime and the fear of crime and improve behaviour in and around a school and the wider community. A draft of proposed new local arrangements for local Safer School Partnerships has been developed and police representatives will present this to members this evening. This new approach is summarised at page 25 onwards of the report pack. The aim of this session is therefore to scrutinise these plans and make recommendations for development and improvement. To support this scrutiny process, a number of other local stakeholders have been invited to contribute this evening. We've got the City and Hackney Safeguarding Children Partnership and representatives from a number of schools. In addition, the chairs and vice chairs have met with members of Hackney Youth Parliament ahead of this meeting to talk to young people about their experiences of Safer Schools Partnerships and policing in schools. A summary of this discussion has been circulated to all members and will be published as part of the minutes of this meeting. As mentioned earlier, we have a number of Hackney Youth Parliament representatives joining us this evening who will be asking questions on behalf of broader Hackney Youth Parliament membership. We have a number of attendees who are kindly supporting this item, all of whom are listed at page nine of the report pack. I won't take you through everybody because we've got lots of people joining us this evening, thankfully. We have a broad outline of the timings for this item which is set out at page 10. To begin, I would like to welcome James Conway, the Borough Commander and Detective Superintendent Brittany Clark, who will present proposals for the new Safer Schools Partnership. We have 15 minutes for this presentation and then we will move on to our other contributors for this item. Over to you, James and Brittany. Thanks, Chair. I'll give a bit of an introduction for a minute or so just to set the context and hand over to Brittany to talk us through the presentation. What I should say from the start is this is not a finalised proposal. We thought it would be helpful to bring it to this session given the theme and the subject matter being discussed here, but this is still an evolving plan, evolving doctrine. We're working closely with heads and increasingly are looking to work with parents and young people to fine-tune and refine. However, where are the origins of this piece of work? As you referenced, Chair, Safer Schools Partnership has been around for some time. We are really clear about a couple of really important principles, the first of which is that schools should not be a natural place or a standard place for law enforcement activities to take place in. Ideally, they should be two very separate environments but there is also a degree of oil and water aspects to this where we have two regulatory regimes, two legal regimes which often find themselves somewhat in conflict with each other. One is a head's responsibility for looking after the children in their care and their responsibilities for good order and governance within the schools and at the same time there are a series of policing responsibilities which are bound by both legislation and home office requirements, for example, according to criminal offences. So, for example, a fight in the schoolyard may well be an issue for education alone but if police are notified about a fight in the schoolyard, technically speaking, under home office counting rules, we are obliged to record that as a criminal common assault and be recorded and investigated. So it's always led to a difficult and what could be a problematic relationship between these two environments which is overcome only when policing and local senior leadership teams and local authority leads in education are working really closely together and in what might be regarded as something of a classic British fudge, managing to make what might seem like two conflicting regulatory regimes work effectively together. The original safeguarded children's partnership are now quite old in their original concept and things have changed in the meantime since. So police officers first entered the school environment probably at a time when, certainly at a time when designated safeguarding leads and some of these aspects in education weren't as mature as they were now and the safeguarding schools partnership was originally envisaged as police having a significant safeguarding role within the school environment. That has shifted. We now have an incredibly professionalised school approach to safeguarding in that space. There was envisaged to be a heavy police involvement in management of truancy at that time. Again, this is very much sort of almost the language of the 1990s, not necessarily the language of 2024. But what we found is over time remits have become slightly, I would say, confused, particularly on the policing side and when we, Brittany and I, started looking at this in some earnest about a year ago, I wasn't satisfied that we had clarity in this area. Although there are many reasons and many factors which led to the Child Q incident, I don't want to talk too much about that particular case with still awaiting the outcome of the IPC investigation. Nevertheless, we can see origins of the challenges around Child Q in that difficulty and that confusion between the roles of policing and schools in that environment. So this was an objective or the objective we set was, well, I suppose we first approached this with heads and questioned, is this about reforming the existing Safe Schools Partnership? And I think we, in some early discussions with school leads and the local authority, we came to the conclusion this wasn't about the reform of the existing process. This was about a day zero, really. Let's stop and start again. If we were constructing an effective relationship between policing and schools, what would that look like? One of our benchmarks here was a degree to which the confusion had set in, which we were finding that school staff, you had police officers involved in schools putting on safeguarding reports for events that were happening within the school, even though we had a designated safeguarding need present. And we had teachers in some cases having to strap on body worn video cameras and go and split up fights on the streets outside the school. Our roles and responsibilities have clearly got somewhat confusing and very mixed. We were not providing the support we should have been providing to schools and children, most importantly, particularly in a critical home to school journey between those two, what should be the safest locations of home and school. And we were getting involved in an area of education which largely had been subsumed by an increased sophistication and professionalization of safeguarding within schools' environment. So that was the start of our journey and where we've got to now, what Brittany will quickly take us through in a moment, is a collaborative sort of co-production between the local policing here in Hackney and Tower Hamlets and school leaders, both at secondary school and primary schools, and an outline of what we're seeing as being a more effective framework to manage that relationship. This has not been fully signed off, although it's been an iterative delivery, I guess, as we look to roll this out. It has, though, also, I should say at this point, garnered really strong support at a pan-London level from education leads and the Met, and it's been looked at certainly by our seniors within the Met Police as a likely pilot model for a potential move across the Met towards a revised schools model. So again, really pleasing, I think, from a Hackney perspective to see Hackney acting as a leading edge for wider pan-Met change. Of course, that hasn't been signed off yet in the same way that we haven't come to the finalisation of this local pilot. Thanks, James. So, I'll take us through the slides. I think I just want to kind of start with the caveat, you know, this is iterative. I'm really grateful for all of your time here today. Hopefully we should get some valuable feedback, and I will continue to engage, certainly with education leaders through the forms of the Hackney Heads meeting, which I shall be at in October, but also just through the Safer Schools Partnership, so really, really welcome any challenges or ideas and tweaks that we can make to this. So, the list of the intentions here is essentially just, as James has already said, kind of recalibrate the way in which the relationship, I suppose, between police and schools has evolved and just sort of set to recalibrate that. We want to ensure that schools are still very much working with their Safer Schools officers, but the Safer Schools officers are more crime-focused, and are also supporting the wider work of their local neighbourhood ward teams of whom they are now embedded with, so across the Met, with the new Met for London, with the new Commissioner and his promises to Londoners, the neighbourhood programme badge CEMP model, which stands for strongest ever neighbourhood policing, has moved the schools officers from what were essentially an isolated schools team into the wider ward teams, with the view that the schools and the children that attend those schools and the pupils are themselves community members and actually the local neighbourhood ward police are there to serve and make the neighbourhood safe, and therefore the schools officers that work within those schools should also be a fundamental part of that team. So, their line management now is moving across to the ward sergeants, rather than there being a designated school sergeant, but again, that just gives them that kind of wider context of what's going on in the local area. We've got a promise here in Hackney that we will have one schools officer to know more than two secondary schools. At the moment that model is effective, we've got all the people that we need in post, I won't pretend to say that we might not have resource challenges going forward, but that currently is the proposed model and something that we will certainly want to kind of try and keep that ratio of one officer to two secondary schools to ensure that there's that consistency of the relationship with that school and that designated officer. If we just move on to the next slide. So there's kind of three overarching responsibilities of the schools officer, really is that tactical adviser, so this is again kind of refocusing them on that purpose of crime and safeguarding related issues, rather than them being blurring the boundaries as James has already described around issues around truancy or maybe what might just be unwanted behaviour rather than actual criminality. So being able to speak with school senior leaders, just to be that tactical adviser about how they might want to deal with a crime problem and being that sounding board, but also being there to advise and guide where necessary on either crime or safeguarding related issues to ensure that the right outcomes are reached for both the school and the police, but also more importantly for each individual child. The safer corridors part is something which we had already piloted across three schools in Hackney and this is around providing that visibility to the pupils going on their home school journey and that's also bolstered again by that board team, so I think that kind of link into them being part of that wider board team is really fundamental to the success of us being able to resource effectively those, what we've deemed as safer corridors, essentially those ingress and egress routes to and from the school and they've all been mapped out, so we've got a map of all of the home school journeys, the prominent kind of routes which pupils would be taking, both locally, obviously within Hackney Police, but in conjunction with the school and that's all kind of mapped out on maps with sort of highlighted streets, so we know which ones we'll be focusing on just to ensure the safety of pupils on that journey. And the third part is around the schools officer essentially being able to facilitate a toolkit of options, so where we still want to have really functional engagement with pupils within a school, appreciating that we might not always be the best people to deliver engagement sessions with pupils on certain topics, so we can either provide materials which might be really helpful crime prevention advice, but we can also certainly facilitate that engagement, whether it's ensuring that pupils have access to police officers to just break down some barriers and understand what police officers do. But the choice then is between that school and that school's officer to essentially have that discussion and work out what would best work for that individual school. So the toolkit of options, which was presented as an appendix within the material, is there essentially for schools to basically choose what might suit them best, without us kind of forcing what we think would be right, obviously given that element of choice for the school. But we also want to really kind of enhance and improve that engagement with the primary sector, so we know at the moment we do a lot of engagement in terms of the secondary sector, but we really want to kind of expand that out to the primary sector as well and on the basis that we know that it's beneficial for children to have that engagement and access, I suppose, to the police at a younger age to ensure that their first encounter might not necessarily be a negative encounter that they have on the street. So I'm just going to whiz through this, obviously, as tactical advisors, I think that is very much acknowledging the fact that officers do have that sort of obligation really to record crime, so where we can have those discussions with schools about an issue that might be evident within a school, that the school's officer can provide really practical, helpful advice, both on a criminal perspective or maybe a more severe or complex safeguarding issue, but we're really trying to pull them away from getting involved in this sort of non-crime aspect, as I say, talking to children who have been truant or, as I say, might be displaying some behaviour that is just not wanted, and just making sure that their role as a police officer is really clear and defined within that partnership. I think I'll probably skip to the next slide if that's okay. So this is just an expansion of the safer corridors. We will obviously focus very much on crimes such as robbery, violence against women and girls. We obviously know there will be some public order offences and antisocial behaviour, and that will also be done in conjunction with council enforcement officers, where we can also utilise resources there, and also where we can improve some of that engagement, even in that safer corridors route, having some youth workers and people that can engage with the children on the street to ensure that we've got a broader range of people that might be able to help support children on that homeschool journey. We will be able to additionally resource hotspot locations, so, for example, where we might have a significant crime issue outside a certain school or a certain area for, you know, I mean it might be like a knife-enabled robbery issue, for example, we can, this won't be the only answer, we can flex additional resources in from our wider VCU colleagues to ensure that we focus on those sort of significant challenges that we might receive. So the basic kind of offer is the safer school, safer routes, but if there is an emerging issue, then we can flex additional resources in where appropriate. Next slide. This just kind of outlines when the police would be required, so, again, quite simply, if it's obviously an emergency, we would want the school to call 999, but the examples of where you might then want to engage with the school's officer around that sort of discussion around from their point as a tactical advisor is in that sort of non-emergency box. Next slide. So this slide is, again, is around that engagement. We've tried to assess the demand that the schools might have on that school's officer, so to try and make it really fair, we've done a bit of a points based system, so at the beginning of every year a school would have, say, 20 points. Each of the engagement options are weighted according to maybe how resource intensive they are in terms of either time or officer numbers, so that there's a fair allocation across all schools. We do understand that some schools might not want to use up all their points and some might have more of a demand, and that would be for us to manage kind of locally, but just to ensure that there is that sort of fair option and ability to access the, not just the school's officers, but obviously the wider team, and that will be reflected in the toolkit, which again you can see in the paperwork. Next slide. These are just examples, but again, you can probably read them better on the paperwork, because I think it's too small, so we'll skip past that if that's okay. I just wanted to touch on communication and engagement, because as we've said, we really want to ensure that there is both the strategic engagement via the sort of existing partnerships and networks that we've got, you know, both within the local authority and the police and those sort of relationships, but also making sure that there is access to not just the school's officer, but the wider sort of management of those school's officers, so my offer would be for my neighbourhood inspectors, of which I have four across Hackney, to have a drop-in meeting probably virtually, because I appreciate the, you know, the logistics of trying to get everybody all together for primaries and secondary leaders, whether it's heads or DSLs or whoever's deemed most appropriate, to have that drop-in session with the inspectors to raise any concerns or ask any questions or make any suggestions, for example. That won't preclude any of the kind of the wider strategic engagement. As I said, I will, I will obviously be there at the Hackney Heads meetings and also the wider Safer Schools Partnership board, which again, if anybody's got any suggestions as to what and how that might look going forward, I'd be really happy to take suggestions on board. We would really like to be able to have a bit more of a link into Parents and Guardians via the school communication, so I'm not asking for email addresses and phone numbers, but obviously if there is general crime and prevention advice or any additional messaging that we think would be really useful for our wider communities, and I say communities as in the Parents and Guardians of peoples at the schools, for schools to help facilitate some of that messaging, so that we can really reach out to them and make sure that they're getting the right crime prevention advice or wider advice for their children who are attending school. But generally speaking, the school's officer will remain that first point of contact for the school. As I said, one officer per two secondary schools, so that's a kind of real overview, whistle stop torn, really conscious of time, so if anybody wants any further information, there is my email address, so it's Brittany.e.clark. I don't know why they need my middle initial because there's no other Brittany Clarks in the Met, but there you go. Please feel free to email me directly if outside of this meeting if anybody online or whatever doesn't have an opportunity to raise something tonight. Thank you, Chair. Thank you so much for that both. Now we're handing over to Jim. We've got five minutes for you, Jim. Thank you, Chair. Can I just confirm that you can hear me? Yep, I can hear you. Thank you. There are four things I want to briefly touch on if that is okay, and that will be within the five minutes. First of all, I welcome the feedback on the Safer Schools Initiative. The value of this role in diverting children from the criminal justice system I think has huge potential, and our commitment to it remains unchanged. I think the emphasis for us is ensuring the right people are in these positions and that dedicated resourcing isn't pulled away, so the move of the personnel in the way they have been is something that we welcome, and that will be reflected at the partnership. The other issues that I wanted to briefly touch on, if I can, first of all is to thank Scrutiny for the letter that they wrote to the DFE concerning the importance of independent decision-making concerning scrutiny and not least the triggering of safeguarding reviews. This relates to the proposed changes for Working Together 23. Now, I know that the response that we got to that letter under the stewardship of the former government was extremely disappointing. I will be writing to the new ministers to highlight my concern that Working Together 23 puts us back to pre-Laming 2009 when it comes to independence and ensuring people aren't marking their own homework. So what I would say is I would ask that you consider potentially revisiting your letter given that there is new leadership and perhaps a government that will reflect more favourably on the concerns that we raised. Looking at the child cue report and the update report, one of our key recommendations beyond safer schools officers was a protocol with the IOPC. That protocol is in consultation. At this moment in time, we are not content that it meets our needs, and we are in negotiation with them, and I know they have reached out to the chief executive in Hackney, and I look forward to having a meeting. But ultimately, the integrity of reviews is such that we need to be able to access baseline information when a policing incident moves into the realms of a complaint. But I don't think that means that we then should be sharing rapid review reports with what in essence is a conduct or criminal investigation. The IOPC have the authority and the ability to speak to anyone they wish when they're investigating whether or not a conduct or criminal offence takes place. We don't have that luxury with police officers. So that's ongoing, and we raised our concerns with the national panel regarding that, and we really haven't been very satisfied by the work they've done in this regard, not least the consultation process, which has not been as transparent or engaging with as many people in our position as we would like. What it means in effect at the minute is if we were to sign it off, it would be a quid pro quo that if we get information from the IOPC, we should share all of our notes that we have taken during our own particular learning review. That would mean cautioning people, either nurses, teachers or social workers, before we engage with them about learning to suggest that the information they give us may be passed to a conduct or indeed criminal investigation. There's nothing to stop conduct or criminal bodies from engaging with anyone they think they need to, but we can't inhibit what we do from that point of view. The PACE consultation prior to the former government moving was generated because of the issues in child view. That is paused at the moment, and we are pressing for them to do more because it currently stands, it still doesn't prioritise engaging with parents prior to a search taking place, moving a child only in extreme circumstances, searching a child only in the utmost extreme circumstances and when doing so, moving them to a place like a police station where that will be monitored and there are other issues around that, but primarily those are the very brief overview of the key issues that are ongoing from my point of view, they'll feature in our annual report and as we move beyond September into the new school year, we will be launching as agreed on to child queue our new insights engaging young people about diversity and respect and feeling safe in schools and we look forward to reporting back on that and including in it how safer schools officers are betting in and making a difference. Thank you. Thank you very much for that Jim. We're on time so we're doing well at the moment. Over now to the head teachers, so I think starting with Richard, that's okay, we've got five minutes from the two of you, so you've got two and a half minutes each. Five minutes each, sorry, got that wrong. There we are, I've got there with the microphone and yes bad pennies do return, some of those that were on scrutiny when I was on in the past, so it's good to be back. I'm the Executive Head of both the Ayerswick School and New Regents which is Hackney's pupil referral unit, so hopefully I've got some useful things to say. First of all I do share actually all of the objectives that you've outlined. I do think safest corridors is really important and looking at hot spots and if you look at trying preventing permanent exclusions, which is one of the things that I think Hackney schools most want to do, there are usually incidents that take place within the public realm when a child is in school uniform, which sometimes lead to quite significant sanctions including permanent exclusions and I think schools find those most difficult to deal with when actually there are youngsters involved from more than one school and sometimes there are youngsters involved who are not identifiable by any uniform and so literally you don't know what you're dealing with and you made a point about teachers wearing body-worn cameras, well we have body-worn cameras and we wear them but we only wear them when we're in the public realm, not in school because that's where there is a risk and I think anything that can be done to mitigate that risk because sometimes you do end up having to deal with situations that really you're not trained to deal with involving individuals that you don't know. I think that would enhance the safety and wellbeing of people, particularly senior staff, working in schools. I would perhaps like to see a little bit more emphasis on joint risk assessments and on understanding that things can change relatively quickly in one particular school and I suppose my concern about the points system is that potentially that might become part of a rationing process and sometimes something might happen in an individual school which suddenly needs a much higher level of response and support from police and other external organisations which a school cannot predict. So at the beginning of the year we might select our menu, we might use up our 20 points and then something happens that no one can anticipate and let's face it we've seen that during the summer with the riots and all of those sorts of things. No reasonable teacher could predict any of those things. I think it's important that the system works flexibly and that also we respond in a way that is about the skill set of the particular Safer Schools officers that we have because some are incredibly skilled in some areas and not others. You've got the same challenge that we have so my challenge is to try and ensure that every teacher is performing really well. Your challenge is to have that same consistency amongst Safer Schools officers. I've spent 16 years trying to achieve this consistency in school and possibly not quite managing it so I do know the challenge but equally I would say there is shall we say some level of variability within Safer Schools officers and I would say that last year the officer that was allocated to New Regents was excellent and New Regents is something distinctive to all of this and I hope that we can arrange something which is outside of this sort of structure for New Regents. I do think that there has been a recovery from the awful mess that was around child queue and everything that went with that. Certainly I find in my experience that Safer Schools officers are engaging with protocols, they're incredibly respectful of when they come into schools and working with head teachers really effectively on that and also the days of officers thinking they can come into school to in effect arrest a young person have pretty much gone and that's essential because schools have to be a safe space for young people and we don't want to do anything that stops kids coming to school in effect so but I do think that is there and in place. I would just say though as well that there isn't anything in this particularly about the importance of police sometimes accompanying school staff on home visits. Now that's not about truancy which is sometimes how it's depicted, that's about safeguarding. If you haven't seen a child we're now you know midway through September, if you haven't seen a child from the beginning of term you've got to do things about that to try and work out where that child is and what's gone on and sometimes if school staff are hitting a brick wall and not gaining entry and not being able to contact parents and all the rest of it we really do need to call on the resources of the police to help us with that and so I think there's a little bit of work and perhaps tweaking that can be done around this but I do think that this is a framework that can be successful and that certainly achieves what I think are the overriding objectives of policing of young people which is to keep them safe and the area that is the most challenge is not keeping them safe in school. Schools are by and large safe spaces most of the time. It's about keeping them safe in the wider community which has I think in the last few years proved quite a challenge particularly since the community police force sort of went and you suffered cuts in your own resources that has definitely impacted adversely on the well-being of young people when they are travelling to and from school and when they are engaging particularly between the hours of about four and six thirty when many of their parents will come home from work but I commend you to the presentation. Was that five minutes? It was yeah six we did very well. But don't worry because I don't think we have our representative from Mossbourne so it's just you this evening from schools and welcome back Richard. In which case we can move on to I'm gonna have some slides up now. We met with some of us met with youth parliament representatives to talk about their experience of Safer School officers and we've got a summary of what they shared with us that will be above me but we're also joined so actually I can I can run through those so the main four points were a lack of trust with wider police may inhibit engagement with Safer School officers especially if there has been previous negative experiences the role of the Safer School officers should focus on crime and ASB and not school behaviour policies the SSO should tailor their approaches to the different needs of schools and pupils and children did not necessarily understand their rights in connection with SSOs or police more broadly and further support would be welcome. We're joined by some members of youth parliament online did you want to add anything else to that? We've got a five minute slot for you if anybody wanted to come in at this point. We've also got some time for you later around questions but if anybody wants to come in now just let me know. OK perhaps not. We'll come back to you guys for some questions later. OK in which case we can move on to Q&A with we've got two commissions here so slightly more people and we're hoping to get through as many questions as we possibly can. I think if we can stick to two questions at a time please and just to be mindful of answering both questions that you're asked and try to keep it one person responding if possible. I'll start with Councillor Garbutt and then Councillor Sizer please. Thank you and thanks for the presentations and for the consideration of this. I know James and I have been thinking about this for a while as well as your predecessor so I'm really happy that we're having this conversation. I'm kicking off because I wanted to ask about - am I echoing? Oh your mic's on your computer I think. There we go. I'm asking just a bit of history because in some of the documents we received it shows that the number of Safe School officers increased across London. They kind of doubled in a ten-year period up to June 2022 so data from Caroline Russell from the Assembly and I just wondered what information was provided to kind of senior officers of the outcome and the impact for that increase like so that's the kind of history bit and just the reports we saw as well state my support for Safer Schools officers which I think is based on a MOPAC public attitude survey but it might be on something else but if you can just unpack those and I think other committee members will ask about the current proposal. Thank you. Thanks so it's always embarrassing when you've got slightly to defer on the first question asked. So I wasn't involved in the local police I was involved in a different area of policing at the time when we saw that growth so I'm going to have to come back and just because I don't understand if I'm honest why we saw that growth at that point in time or what the policy thinking was in the Met that drove that or in MOPAC so if I can provide maybe a written response into your Chair to share with the group on that. We can very quickly get that position I'm just don't have that to hand. Sorry Zoe what was the second question? The second one was a reference in one of the documents I think it was your the MPS disproportionality report that was like attached to one of the reports that stated that there was high support for SSOs Safer Schools officers and I just wondered where that came from and if it was from this MOPAC public attitude survey which has one general question rather than any kind of deep analysis of the support. We'll be able to check what the origins of that was but I mean I'll just just expand on it because I think it is interesting because you've asked a simple question you can sometimes get a simple answer you know and we went through this with the heads in that earlier discussion so if you ask people you know do you like the idea of Safer Schools officers often the answer will be yes well actually really what you're trying to get through is something much more fundamental beyond that. What do you want police doing in schools? Now that can elicit some quite different responses so and I think that's to Richard's point where we've got good Safer Schools officers delivering cogent good well structured support to students and to schools that's a good model but equally you can have some very different experiences so actually I don't find those type of questions or the answers massively helpful I don't think in working through this what's been more valuable for us is a really trying to break down into the individual requirements. What do we need to support children? What do heads in senior leadership team need from the police? How do we better sort of structure something which delivers the sort of dialogue that we've spoken about there and doesn't mean that you have these you know the oil and water analogy I talked about before you don't have two different systems sort of crashing into each other actually get a really effective partnership looking at the needs of child and work out right who can provide something in this instance to best support that child. Now that's a much richer response than you know yes we like Safer Schools officers to binary you know yes we like them no we don't which you know you sometimes get the no sort of questions so we'll definitely come back with a response but don't worry we haven't been beholden by some of those simplistic survey type questions. I've just seen that Leo let's put the hand up and I just wasn't sure if you wanted to come in to contribute towards the five minute slot for Hackney youth parliament or if you wanted to ask a question but over to you Leo. Hi my name is Leo I'm one of the elected leaders of youth parliament thank you so much for having us on this call I actually wanted to ask a question as part of the Q&A so one of the things that we were curious about in our meetings is how the police officers are trained to become a Safer Schools officer because obviously in essence you are in a way a youth worker you're coming into contact with young people and there's a lot of training that goes into being a youth worker and we wanted to know if also young people were consulted in this process thank you. Thanks Leo really really good question something that's been raised again in some of our discussions so there is training input to becoming a Safer Schools officer one of the reasons why we're really keen to advance this proposal is something which the wider Met might look at and we might look across London is because it gives us an opportunity to influence that training because I think it this was much like the idea of Safer Schools officers these were often things were designed some time ago and in possibly a slightly different environment so we think we could do quite a lot more to update that training and I'm I'd certainly I'm not confident at all that the voice or the input of young people was particularly prevalent when that training was first created so Leo I think you know you're you're spot on there if we we look anew at that training and you're really right to sort of draw comparisons with things like youth workers you know we should be looking at that sort of model and the input of young people to help calibrate that training. There we are. Really briefly I think it's a great question but actually the the training I would advocate is not around more training of Safer Schools officers it's around more training of non-Safer Schools officers you know we probably can all give chapter and verse about negative interactions between youngsters and the police and entirely innocent youngsters at that and I would advocate that actually the training that needs to be done in the Met is around officers that are not Safer Schools officers in terms of how they engage with young people they would get a different response if they engage in a different way and that's a huge generalisation but I really think we should be pressurising that all officers are trained about how they deal with young people. Thank you. Councillor Sizer. Sorry just before you move on was Leo's second question I didn't think it was I remembered it now it's around where young people consulted. Sorry I thought I'd touched last year but maybe I didn't do it justice so I'm not confident they were consulted in the original training to develop but what. My understanding is that the question wasn't necessarily about the consultation of young people for the training. I might be wrong Leo were you asking about a consultation for the. Oh the model ah sorry Leo. Which was one of the key learnings from the key recommendations which have a key report was that young people would be engaged in this process so I think it would be useful to know that. Yeah sorry Leo misunderstood. So there has been some engagement with young people we've had but we haven't because we haven't finished the design process we haven't finished that engagement so one thing we've been working with Hackney Education on is looking at whether we could use Young Hackney and some of the vehicles to test some of these proposals that we're coming up with and get we were looking at a sort of a group engagement session where we can lay out in a similar way to Brittany did probably a slightly longer period lay out at the beginning of this meeting really test across those three different areas where young people thought the greatest value would be how they think that could be adapted improved. So there has been some engagement today but we haven't completed that engagement. The other area of engagement that we've we want to do to go further on is the also the engagement of parents as well so I think which Brittany did touch on in that presentation. Thank you. Sorry Jim did you want to comment on any of those points? Yes I did thank you I'll be brief. I agree with Leo entirely and the feedback from the young people reflects exactly what they were saying at the time of the initial child queue and the update. I think engaging with children and young people and which we did at a significant level during the review is sadly lacking in some of the work that that's pushed forward and I think going back to the basics in the queue recommendation I mean we really were focusing by reflecting the feedback from young people that the training of safer schools officers needed to be different but also that safer schools officers need to be a conduit by which local patrol officers not involved in schools were engaged so that they would understand the hopes fears and expectations of young people they'd become more recognized and known to them and it would begin breaking down barriers and I think we can almost become so focused on ticking boxes that we forget the basic principles of listening to the voice of children and making sure that what we're doing works for each individual school and so I'm listening to this you know the absence of the line of a child of a line of sight of a child is critically important we covered that in the Chadrack review and we know there are issues about missing but also about absence from school and I just want to reassure scrutiny that we will be revisiting each of those in the next each of these issues in the next quarter because actually if the voice of children is not being present then we're going back to leaving it to the police and I'm not suggesting James is driving that but leaving it to the police and the schools and I'll say this not wishing to offend any of our education colleagues are doing a great job and the feedback from children and young people wasn't just about the police it was about the way they felt in school and the way they were treated in some schools and how searches were also affected in those schools so there are a range of issues where we need to go back to the core principles of the queue and the queue update recommendations to make sure that the voice of children and young people is being reflected and they're given the opportunity to feed back on the progress that's being made so far. Thank you. Thank you very much for that Jim. I'm going to bring in Councillor Sizer and then Arzoo I think wants to come in. Thank you. I think my question has been partly answered in that it sounds like the training is an evolving area and is being revisited at the moment so it was it was a question and a plea around special educational needs and neurodiversity that we can I don't know if there is any focus on that currently in terms of SSO training if so what is what is the input but if not please can we ensure that that's you know really absolutely foundational for any training because it will have such a massive impact on our interactions so yes it was just an update on where we're at with SEND please. Thank you for that Councillor Sizer and if I might just come in on that point around training because I think it's come up for a few of us and I think it goes back to Leo's point actually which is I think it's good to look at the other people who work frequently with children and young people to get an understanding of the sort of training they undergo frequently because I saw reference to trauma informed practice and ACEs and some of that stuff is a bit outdated to you know there's ACEs a bit controversial for some people and you know I would have expected to see adultification given the context within Hackney I would have expected to see something around disproportionality again given the context given the fact that I'm here in part because of child queue and the subsequent reviews and reports that have come through emphasising these things so it would be really good to see and not just for safer school officers all officers come into contact with children and young people in the borough so it would be great to see that that was something sort of a training offer that would be accessible to all officers and just as Councillor Sizer said and also around neuro diversity and all of the other you know considerations that teachers and social workers have to make in relation to the children that they work with on a data basis to have some sort of shared learning around that. Thanks Chia yeah I mean I'm trying to avoid sort of literally listing every sort of police training course off as we go through but so senders gets there is some input for all officers and particularly there's been a refocus on this in particular looking at how best to engage with children who've got a neuro diversity related to autism ADHD there's a roll out and we were looking in the communications the other day where there's some of the signifiers and cards and emblems that young people are using to signify their neuro diversity there's been some need focus on officers understanding and understanding how they react and how they adapt their communication approaches to deal with those situations. On this particular pilot work that we're doing we're also fortunate within our we have a shadow board of community membership who supports us on the change activity that we're undertaking here in Hackney and one of those members of the scrutiny shadow board is one of the is the lead for the send parents association and group here in Hackney so we're looking to work more closely with that group and test some of this proposal also for our people referral units as well as a slightly different offer outside of the scope that we just described there because there's a very particular set of needs and requirements from a school's officer in that environment so that does sit separate to recognize that. The adultification training I mean as Jim will know that was a requirement and recommendation from the original chalky report that all officers in Hackney or perhaps in central east receive adultication training it's been a long journey to get that set up we're coming to the later stage of the development of that training which will be pan met will be happening across across London but central east will be the first site to go live with that where we that will be starting this financial year and that aim and objective remains exactly as described in the original recommendation that all central east officers will receive input on adultification. The I mean and again separate from this focus on schools scrutiny will know from some of the other sessions there's been an intense focus on discrimination and the presence of that as a factor in the use of policing powers particularly in stop and search which has sparked in part the pilot with MOPAC of the of this new scrutiny model which again is happening as a first here in Hackney but is acting as a trailblazer for model which we're now engaging with MOPAC and looking at that as a mechanism to explore across the rest of London. Hi everyone I'm Jason Morantz I'm the new director of education and inclusion in Hackney education and I was involved as when I was assistant director in some of the early conversations with secondary and primary heads and recently was collaborating over the summer as you were preparing for the presentation tonight and and um completely agree with the comments on training I think what I would say is just emphasize what what Brittany's already said is this is a pilot but even so there needs to be ongoing dialogue about this so we very much want you to come to our headteacher meetings we very much want you to I think you go to our well-being and safeguarding meeting as well Brittany you're a regular attendee we need to identify those ongoing opportunities for you to come and share even when this is finalized because as important as training is it's that continuing professional development so taking feedback regularly so that you can continue to train your officers and improve them so um I welcome your attitude towards that and I hope that we can continue this conversation so it's refined continuously and not just left at early training and and when the proposals are signed off that they're taken as done okay. Thank you very much um Jason I so I've got a number of hands up but we've actually just been joined by um Catherine Duller who is from Mossbourne the Vice Principal um from Mossbourne Community Academy who had a five minute slot so I wondered if we could bring you in now um Catherine and then we can move back to questions um if that's okay yeah sorry for my uh lateness we had a big safeguarding issue after school today so we just got the young person off site um looking through the proposals I think the proposals look very good I would say that our interaction with the Safer Schools Police Officer has been really determined by the personnel involved and we've had some very very good Safer Schools Police Officers who have offered some real support and assistance to our community and we've had some not so good Safer Schools Officers and that difference in terms of approach has made it quite difficult for us to plot and plan how we should engage really onto the levels that we should engage I think um looking at the the element around searches in schools I think we have to be really clear about what schools are doing and from our point of view if we have searched a child that means we're asking them to turn out their pockets and empty their bag and that's it um and I think it's important that everyone working in the arena has an understanding of what that word looks like in different environments because that's quite important um and the last thing that I wanted to say really was um in previous documentation around how the partnership should work there has been a need for um or there's been reference to schools uh holding a responsibility for training the Safer Schools Police Officer and and um I there's an issue I think around that because there's going to then be a difference in um terms of the level of training that happens that that was an old model and I didn't see this in the new model and and what's been put forward and I just wanted to flag that previously that's been an issue so that's it's good that that that training will be centralized from our point of view. Thank you very much for that um Catherine um I'm going to hand over to the Two Hat Youth Parliament representatives who've got Arzu and then Romeo and then I've noted all of the hands that have gone up um and we'll hand over to Commission Members. Arzu over to you. Good evening everyone uh I'm Arzu and the leader of Hackney Youth Parliament. My question for today is do Safer School Officers know about young Hackney and the work it does? If so how do they promote it when it's needed? Thank you. Can I also take the question from Romeo as well please? Good evening my name is Romeo I'm also an elected leader on Hackney Youth Parliament my question is is there a particular age range of of your officers and if you do believe do you believe it's crucial to have younger officers to help build a rapport with young people and help establish a form of trust with them? Thank you both. Thanks both um yeah again good question so do all of my Safer Schools Officers know about young Hackney or how to engage? I can't be convinced they necessarily all do at the moment but we do want to involve young Hackney as one of those voices of the children in developing this approach. I was just talking to Brittany offline there as some of those other other responders were speaking and I pick up again on Catherine's point she made a moment ago about training. I think we we will certainly be looking and one action we'll take away from this meeting is to look at whether we can bake in additional um sort of CPD professional development days into the safe new the new revised Safer Schools Officers model and I'd be really keen if we could bring young Hackney and then think about how we best coordinate the central management of the schools based training probably through Hackney Education in into that um I think so to to your um as we to your to your initial question I I we we I mean I'll make a commitment now that we will involve because we're already involving young Hackney in in in testing this model but I will as far as we can will involve young Hackney also in in supporting some of that professional development of our Safer Schools Officers um and Romeo to I should note these questions down quicker your question was around age range yes of course age range of the of the staff um so on the whole the police in Hackney now tend to be a lot younger than they were sort of 10 or 15 years ago but we get older staff tending to cluster in certain roles so for example my response officers so the officers that you'll see in the in the marked police cars driving around are often very young in in service now around 70 or percent of my response officers have between naught and four years policing service so they tend to be the younger age bracket schools officers traditionally was one of those roles which probably attracted a slightly older demographic of police officer often because it was seen as one of those roles that maybe fitted in closer with with police officers who were parents themselves and it gave them a more uh sort of steady um you know daytime working environment rather than working you know nights and other shifts that police officers often have to work um it i think it ties in with the point made by some of our school uh leaders here that what's important is is not just filling those vacancies but filling those schools officers with the right officers i'd be really interested to explore that a bit further with you and with young Hackney if that's the vehicle we do that through where where you think advantage best lies whether that's with younger officers who are maybe closer in age range to students or whether in fact some might feel well that that that can be difficult because those those younger officers find it difficult to uh you know maybe it's an older officer who's who's who's um you know relates in more in more of an advisory capacity with a young person for example i i don't know but i'd be really interested in in the interviews of young people as to who they think are a best place to engage with the schools officers thank you for that um i've i'm going to take the questions from council sorry sorry chad i don't know if you're okay i'll be really interested if romeo's got an initial view on that point if he wants to come back romeo did you want to come back in on on that response that you had no it was a very good thank you thank you thanks very much can i have council selman and council benny lubbock and then i'll come to the two people that we have online um thanks very much for um all the presentation information just um so noted about the desire to be delineating between the safeguarding role and the policing role under the tactic tactical advisor description there's the reference to um essentially thread of advisory role around about safeguarding related issues and i find it really helpful to understand a bit better what the role of the safety schools officer in that context is and i guess linked to that although i think i might have to revise my question a bit on the basis of the answer that you've just given um was about so when you're sort of outside of school so in the safe corridor type set up and so you're outside of school but still as a way in which you might respond to that issue might vary in terms of whether a policing um response is more appropriate than say for example young hackney fled's response so as an example that i see the asb is linked in there asb can cover a wide range of stuff thinking about stuff like um you know recreational use of cannabis there's a policing response to that or there's something which is substance abuse response or youth services response um and i would find it my question is going had been i would like to understand how that operational coordination works between kind of safety schools officers schools and young happy in terms of actually what is the right kind of response here or are there different elements of it and because my experience from the local stuff that we've seen in our award is that once it gets to a certain level you sometimes get that multi-agency working kicking in but that doesn't happen on a routine basis no again very good question very good point and and that sits behind some of our our thinking on this because the way you finished with it sort of epitomizes really what we what should be the approach to safeguarding in the school which is there is a need that that child has or a group of children have and it should be a group of professionals then sitting together and working out we all bring a very distinct and different usp and set of skills into that conversation policing is a blunt instrument but frankly i mean we are a law enforcement agency first and foremost and we have the monopoly on the use of force in this country and we have some extraordinary powers which accompany us to deliver that that makes us very useful in some circumstances and very damaging in other circumstances and what we don't want and i suppose the the kind of notion in our mind that we're trying to get to it start this process was the idea that schools have a problem they call police police just storm in with size you know 14 boots you know drag the kid out of the classroom and etc so that that caricature is the absolute worst response we and we want to get away from what we want as a response is school's got a problem school doesn't know whether that's a problem for the school to deal with necessarily or is this an issue that policing needs to help with is there another agency that could help with that regard and like the best multi-agency work in the child safeguarding space it should be a discussion between professionals to say what is the best outcome for the child here yes we need to consider what are our legal obligations but who can then contribute to that if there is a contribution that policing can make then we have to make that if it's appropriate that we don't make a contribution we leave it to others to best affect that then of course that should be the the best outcome and this this doesn't just happen in isolation the the work that we're doing here around improving the schools and policing dialogue and relationships it's alongside another project for example which is looking at significantly increasing the use of our deferred prosecutions model when we're looking at young people can we look at diversionary approaches to to young people coming into police custody so this is part of a suite of efforts coming off both casey and child IQ reports and and all that we've seen go before guided by the action plan set set here in Hackney in conjunction with the council to build rebuild trust and competence between policing and the communities here in Hackney and off the back of that can use five to seven key projects one of which is the school aspect but it sits alongside these other areas which are all aiming at the same objective how do we get the best outcome for the young person or for the citizen if it's relating to adults how can we bring multi-agencies together to identify what the best course of action is policing has a role in that but it shouldn't be the dominant voice. I guess just as a follow-up which is more of an observation than a question is just coming back to I guess Jim Gamble's point that he was making earlier that if part of that is about saying the school's best place to work out which agency to pull in one of the core concerns coming out from child Q investigation was actually concerned about that Judge McColl and how that Judge McColl was being made by the school so that might require a bit more unpicking and I guess just linked to that it comes back to the earlier conversation as well about the voice of young people in this and as an object there's quite an acute difference from the language that is being used from the beginning about co-production with senior school leaders with the reference to engagement with young people which I recognize is still a draft but it's quite a press draft and that still hasn't happened yet when the recommendations coming out tell people to really center that voice and that be the starting point so I guess I really appreciate all the work that's gone into this and there is some positive stuff coming out of it but I really hope there will obviously be commission recommendations but as an individual I really hope that there's going to be some quite there's quite a lot of quite because it's quite a lot of quite meaty work that also has to go in to ensuring that that's there. My challenge is to screw with a little bit of that very politely obviously I mean what I think we're presenting here is a very high level concept of how we could approach this precisely because that's what we want to take into those discussions with young people and parents and others to how we operationalize and deliver this the way in which you approach that the way in which we draw up for example a terms of reference and an MOU and the role of the schools officers none of that is solidified but obviously we have to have something to walk into that conversation with young people from professional perspective I mean I'd be happy to say criticism if you feel we've sort of gone too far down at the design route before addressing that but I was hoping what we brought here was a very high level sort of concept that we then take into that space to look at how do we actually then deliver those three areas how do young people see that best being achieved and best delivered in school and certainly when we think about the role of policing inside that school environment those as Brittany talked about that sort of menu of options that schools might want to draw on absolutely that's where we want the young person's voice in shaping that because I think we're really even from our perspective we can see there's an awful lot we've been doing at schools which we weren't the best person that people deliver and you know that's better delivered by a teacher or a young person themselves or it's better to police if you provide information and assets and material into a school environment source for them then absolutely we're happy to go down the road I just wanted to come in with a bit of a comment on that point really something that's come through for me and forgive me because policing is not my thing what are we trying to fix because we've identified a problem but I don't know what we're working towards and why that requires safer school officers if we're saying that safe school officers are going to be focusing primarily on crime and more conventional policing why do they need to be safer school officers why aren't they because if we're taking away those bits that felt like they there was more sort of interplay between the sort of school space and policing it then feels a bit more like yeah I'm just not quite understanding why what are we and it sort of comes back to the point you've made around engagement because it feels a bit like we've assessed the situation schools aren't happy with this bit the police aren't happy with this bit so let's try and find something but what what are we here for in the first place so in terms of you know the the objectives are supposed to be about positive engagement to build trust and confidence which I don't think has come through just from the base you know the the cursory glance that I've had of the proposals that have been put forward what we're going to do to build trust and confidence in the police especially if the police are going to now be focused more on crime and less on the softer things that perhaps it might have been included in what they were doing previously improve safety and enhance safeguarding in school but if we're now talking about a bit more about outside of school then why is what's the link with school we're not outside workplaces why are we outside schools if it just what are we here to fix? Okay so what we've got at the moment is a confused set of roles which are overlapping each other and are conflicting with each other we we're in setting out as three areas we're hoping to move that towards greater clarity and deliver what those what those three as Brittany outlined what those three areas seem to achieve so one is we have a role as part of a multi-agency set up to support schools and work to resolve safeguarding issues or risks that might become apparent through the school environment and that's what I've just was talking through I think in answer to that last question the safe schools office the reason that needs to be a safe schools officer was or a specialized officer rather than a generic police officers it requires a police officer who understands the policing context and the policing powers but also has an elevated understanding of the educational context through that additional training and understands this isn't like policing on the streets where you're the only agency of an operating in that space that this needs to be quite a detailed and careful discussion between schools and that police officer to understand the head's responsibilities for good governance and behavior within that school policing responsibilities for our aspects understand the needs of the child and to to work out what what the best response therefore is to that particular risk or factor the other the third bit of it really talked about was the neglected space that we see was on the existing model what that didn't provide was support from policing for the children in that critical journey between the two safe spaces we talked about at Bowman school and that and that's around a normal policing response of of patrolling deterring crime dealing with with with criminality we we find it with us young people getting robbed whatever whatever that whatever that the criminal activity might be third aspect I think which just touches on the old point there is it is around the engagement piece we also recognize that schools are a community and we want to build an engagement with that community as we had traditionally we had a safer schools officer who were in some schools not in others who might be involved in school activity in other cases weren't as we heard from the heads talking some some very effective schools officers doing as well others weren't necessarily doing it it as well that's also quite constrained by our our resourcing challenges we we can't necessarily get get the officer into every school to be present for for you know every day in in a way that we might want to do to to deliver that engagement so what we what what we think we can do is move that one in which the engagement is led more by the so local neighborhood team rather than necessarily that specific schools officers so the young people in school aren't just building a relationship with the schools officer that's important but also having access to and building a relationship with the local neighbor team the officers they're seeing patrolling and operating and working around that that neighborhood and that locality so the the menu of options that we talked about is is the attempt to bring that wider neighborhood team into the life cycle of the school what we can't do is say well we'll be there for every evening concert and every prize giving day and every whatever whatever that might be but if a school feels it's appropriate wants policing to get involved in the community of that school at some key moments in the life cycle throughout the year of that school whether it is a school fate or or or or giving some inputs in assembly or you know being present for significant moments in that school's calendar that's what we want to present that opportunity to do so we can engage with young people and build up a relationship at that point where we're not engaged in an on-street potentially confrontational relationship with those young people but actually they're getting exposure to the neighborhood officers who are policing their area and they're brought in into the into the you know into the community of the school but in a way which which does so in the way that head and a senior leadership ship team also want not school saying which i think what was happening in the past we're going to turn up we're going to deliver these 15 lessons in your assemblies you know whether your life or not here's here's the text this we're going to stand up and talk about you know a knife drum we're going to stand up and talk about stay safe online and whether school wanted that didn't want it whether thought was a good lesson or a bad lesson to be honest it was a one-size-fits-all and it's what schools got that was not an effective model of schools thank you for that i'm conscious that i've been doing a lot of nodding for hands that have gone up i've so and we've not got very long left i think um councilor fajana thomas did you want to very briefly come in and then i've got about five people i've already noted you council benny lovick you are next and then it is mckayla who's at five thank you chair i think james he's done the beat himself very well can i just start by saying thank you to james and britney for being here tonight and for the work jackie's team have done in terms of engagement with the police in the last couple of months and thanking richard as well as catherine as a teacher who's welcomed this model of the police are developing it i raised my hand when you mentioned when you asked what we are trying to fix and what i wanted to say is that you read the old framework around school safer school partnership at the beginning of this meeting which is about working the police working with the with schools to reduce crime reduce fear of crime and keep our children safe and that's exactly what we are trying to do or what the police is trying to do working with us to make this work it's unfortunate i took a very horrific incident to get us to start doing this but each time that i've spoken to any either educational leader safeguarding leader or a police uh senior leader around this model before welcome that actually this is something that hackney's developed that can become a model for the whole of london in terms of how safer schools officers work and majority of case work that i receive around schools are about uh outside of school the ingress and egress of school phone being stolen young people fighting outside the school two schools having clashes with them and one of the as you see the three overarching rules as describing this model is actually tackling that and i believe if we're able this is not uh this is in developing stages and i'm sure uh the scrutiny of mission we comment and make recommendation and support the police in developing this further but i believe with this model that things will change in terms of how safer school officers work with our young people in hackney that that's our focus is moving from enforcement to safeguarding keeping our children safe both in schools and both in school and outside of school police officers are not there to help help teacher with their behavioral policies but to help keep our children safe that's what we're trying to fix thanks very much thank you um council bernie lovett please uh thank you um detective superintendent clark mentioned that um it was uh desirable to have uh police contact with younger children primary school etc i'm wondering what the evidence has been for that um obviously with the previous model liberty found that it increased it increased the likelihood of minor behavioral issues being treated uh unless needlessly as uh criminal justice issues so i'm wondering if this new approach addresses that um similarly the running mead trust was saying that um in some situations a teaching assistant or a youth worker might be a better place than a police officer to deal with those things um so on the specifics of the of the new uh framework of the new the new the draft plan um the limit of 20 points would this reduce police activity increase it would it keep it the same um i'm wondering how that how that impacts that as well sorry i'm going to also bring in mikayla if that's okay because we're a bit pushed for time now kayla hi my name's mikayla i'm a member of your parliament i just wanted to ask what will police officers do to create a positive relationship with young people in schools thank you for that okay thanks um so the the role in the primary so the primary role i suppose the need to step down is the primary comes from two sort of origins one is the aspen schools themselves the primary teachers and leaders felt they weren't getting good access into policing i'd agree with them i mean our focus tends to be on on secondary schools some of those same challenges unfortunately maybe 20 years ago we we'd be pretty amazed if we saw issues of violence around school gates and primaries but we're we are getting it now and from school school leaders not necessarily from the children either sometimes from parents around gates the primaries we've had challenging situations uh there so but there hasn't been that access there hasn't been that contact point uh like a school's officer we talked about tactical advisors where where where does that primary head go to to engage with the police and try and have a discussion say i've got a bit of a problem i don't know whether policing can help here or should be helping here or not but could i have a chat and understand what policing can do to assist that so expanding down into the primary sector is is in part that second aspect really is around where we tailor some of the inputs that we provide so the ask from primaries and again we haven't engaged with with with young voices on this and possibly this is going to be a more difficult area to engage in this point on given the given the age range they'll be happy to be guided by by professionals if there is a way to achieve that but the idea that quite a lot of the inputs we were traditionally giving so things like online safety inputs and aspects like that whether we were directly in providing some input or whether we're simply providing the guidance into schools to support school input on that and now relevant in the primary space in a way that probably 10 years ago we or 15 years ago we felt were just sort of relevant in the secondary space so that's the second aspect that we think has been a reduction in the targeting age range where we best apply preventative sort of advice and guidance and support to to schools and the third bit which is same to those three i talked about in the secondary space the kind of additional benefit of course then again is is starting to build some relationships even if it's just a presence or an engagement with young young young children at a primary age with with an officer our hope being that it then if a young person's had that primary engagement and had a positive relationship with a police officer that's a great foundational start for hopefully a more positive relationship as they grow up the 20 points piece does that mean more or less compared to before it will depend on schools so probably there are some schools who have had so there are some schools which don't get a schools officer at the moment who haven't haven't provided with schools offices so that will be an improvement and a growth on that for some they're probably some who are getting more inputs than those 20 points that will be a reduction what this is trying to achieve a leveled mean which we can deliver across all the schools though to richard's point what this absolutely won't preclude is where there's an operational need to go and provide additional support to a school that will absolutely provide it so the 20 points is not about whether police turn out to an emergency call at the school absolutely policing will will do that regardless if there is an additional need an acute need in a school absolutely policing will sit down regardless of the points and discuss with the school what the best approach is but it's as a broad guide for us so that we can be realistic with the heads and say look we can't we're not we haven't got an open sort of pot of resources here this is a sort of what we think is a sensible package of options we can provide for you we also don't want to dictate what those options are we shouldn't be telling you what you're getting as schools policing you should be sort of be able to pick and choose what works best for your school we know there's some schools that don't want the police to be present or don't want the police to be present in uniform absolutely we can meet that there's other schools that want us to be very present in a different way what we're trying to do is provide a framework that's realistically deliverable which will meet individual schools students needs that's the objective there and to the young person's question around how how are we going to build those positive relationships in the schools I mean I spoke a little bit about that a moment ago what we'd like to do is be present and be engaging with you outside of having to be there for a policing purpose so if we can be there when you've got a big event on in school if we can be there maybe when your new year sevens are coming for a look around if we can be there on an exam day or when people are celebrating its success or something that that for us is a great moment to engage with you as a community because you we're a service you should be able to access the service that young people should demand access to and the starting point of that is having a relationship and understanding who those people are who are delivering that service for us and so being able to be part of that that that's you know at the right moment and guided by the school and young people to be present and be there at those moments for us we think is is the best way to start engagement but as we said before these are just our initial ideas what we really want to do is test this with young Hackney with the young people if there's radically different views if you think it's some might think it's not appropriate for us to be in schools others might think they want we want we should be engaged in some different environments this doesn't preclude us engaging in other spaces we you know regularly coming and stopping in in youth clubs and things with our our our neighbourhood officers you know that that's not going to stop that aspect but we'd be really keen on that discussion with young people to understand where do they think those touch points where do they think those places are that we can best speak to young people in a way that builds trust and confidence. A very brief follow up just just touching on what Jim said around the reduction potential potential for reduction across the piece would there basically be the same resource you're anticipating obviously distributed yes yes the same the same officer so it's not a reduction in the provision it's not we are not abandoning a Safer Schools concept we think we're improving the area of safeguarding contribution but we think we can deliver it in a way which will mean we can we can dock into the primaries as well in a way that we weren't doing traditionally. So in terms of questions I've got Councillor Young, Councillor Sametow, Councillor Martins, Councillor Ross, Councillor Gordon, Catherine and then yeah sorry I've been watching you all do and doing the nods and I've been jotting names down but that will have probably have to be it for this item and just to ask members to be mindful of the range of questions that we were hoping to ask and that we're covering enough grounds to be able to make the recommendations that we would like on this topic. So Councillor Young followed by Councillor Sametow take two at a time if that's okay. I've got two questions to two different people I will restrict myself to one and a quick comment I just want it was interesting to hear from Richard about what from an OSWIC and Regents College point of view what you would want from a Safer Schools Officer and very interesting to hear from Catherine that they've had what they've seen as good and bad could I could we hear from Catherine from the Musborne perspective what do you what would you see as a good Safe Schools Officer what did your good Safer Schools Officers do and what would you like to see more of and I hope that helps to answer the question on what is it we're trying to achieve, second one was just to say I wanted to just circle back to when you first started as a Borough Commander which was very shortly after the Child Pugh horrors you came to a young Hackney hub in Woodbury Down and you met with some young people and also had an open meeting I think there was another one in Dorston and you heard from some young people who had some pretty appalling experiences one particular whose special educational needs young person who'd had a pretty awful experience I wondered if as part of your engagement process you might circle back round to come back to some of those youth hubs to following the changes that have been made to say how are things going now for both young people and also the you know the adults who enter those spaces. Can I take Councillor Salma's question and then I'll come to you Catherine and then back to you James. Thank you Chair and thank you everyone who's contributed so far my question again like you I'm going to try and do two different people's questions together and I'll try to rush as much as I can first to the school side with the teachers I kind of look both that way we're talking about all the trainings and all the support and all the resources being given to the offices and as much as I am actually really happy that we never forget Child Pugh's name because he keeps you know something that reminds us on a horrible moment in our community but the offices didn't just walk into the school it was the staff that called those police officers that were there but now that there's this idea of police officers and schools and a lot more different I'm kind of fearful of teachers being trigger happy to just get the officers involved when it comes to how young people are kind of with their behaviours and things in schools so how are teachers not just teachers but staff across the schools being prepped in terms of the relationship that they have with these officers and the role that they play in the school and the fact that the policies of the school's behaviour and the SSOs whether that comes into it and my other second thing is really good point that Jim said in the chat I saw it popped up earlier on the importance of humanising the officers with the young people but also in terms of with parents as well as the community as well and that comes with the importance of the language used when we're presenting this things like crime and all of these things that are popping up in the presentations and the dialogue of conversation we're having no parent wants to send their child to school and have a presentation where crime and all these other languages are used in something that's going to be presented as part of police officers being involved around schools so my question is what are we doing to create a more positive and more engagement in terms of the language presented and is there sort of like with social media or articles or things that's being created to create a more better way of like more positive way of presenting the officers involvement. So I'm going to go to Catherine first and then to James and then if you wanted to come in Rich. So I think the first question to me was about what looked good what we have found to be good and I would say that a consistent calm approach has been very helpful in ongoing cases. An example would be where a child's been a victim of a crime actually and they were mugged and then blackmailed around things on their phone and the Safer Schools police officer was excellent at supporting us in supporting that family met with the parents talked through the options with them in a very calm reasonable way didn't make any promises about what could or couldn't happen but came with the expertise that I don't have in terms of the law and policing and outside of school so that kind of approach has always been very useful. They have been what has also signified good practice from our point of view is when the Safer Schools police officer has been flexible and reactive in terms of the school's needs and they have been able to work alongside us and I think that was being alluded to earlier in terms of recognising they are part of the picture and us working together as opposed to people working in silo. In terms of what my question was and actually I think this answers the second question that came to the schools, a concern that I have is that the relationships and the way in which the model is being proposed it seems like a very good idea for me I'm an advocate of the points-based system that seems like a good use of resource. My concern is that quite often within schools the officers have been redirected to other areas outside of school's work and my assessment of that is that that's when things can tend to go wrong and the advice that comes back is that our Safer Schools police officer isn't available ring 101 and then you're dealing with somebody who has not got that same level of school's training and so my question around and I'm sorry if I've missed it in the model if it's been talked about before is there any level of ring fencing that can be done to a core part of that Safer Schools police officer that that means that if schools have a concern they can reach someone within the team even if it's not within not your own Safer Schools police officer. Yeah, James you can come in then. Yeah let me do them in a slightly reverse order so yes there is a degree of ring fencing we can do around the schools officers I mean there is always a challenge of policing if there's a large protest in central London a lot of my asset gets taken away from me to deal with that issue and you know we can't escape that that's a reality policing needs to flex to a bewildering array of challenges it has to face some of those central pan-london or national challenges and some hyper-localized challenges we have got some models as a mechanism sorry within within policing that allow us to to ring friends as far as possible the school's officers but also what britney's built is more this was partly the failing of the original Safe Schools model so if if that single Safe Schools officer wasn't there there was nobody to call to what we're advocating with this kind of network of schools officers attached to the ward clusters that we've got is that the if you have two Safer Schools officers for the cluster they're then both responsible for those those schools within there so there's a second point of conti that their person not available what we've also then got was an escalating series of contacts above that up to a sergeant inspector and ultimately up to to britney as the superintendent responsible for the borough so and and that's provided as part the business should be fired as part of the model is so each senior leadership team in school would have that range of contact points escalating up from that school's officer and it goes to the point around uh the other question actually asked about what what training is going to teach us in terms of bringing police officers into school and i don't i can't really talk about chalke specifically because we've still got the rbc inquiry ongoing but what i would note and jim drew that out this really effectively in his report was of course one of the challenges there was it was not schools officers that turned up to george rq the school officer wasn't available and it was mainstream officers that were in that environment who didn't necessarily have that additional training or nuanced understanding of the education context didn't have that debate in that discussion with with school in a way that we're envisaging in this model and part of the problem was that that that individual officer wasn't available and therefore there was nothing whereas what we're trying to build in is if that individual officer is not available there's another officer with that specialized knowledge and if they're not available their sergeant who's also had that input and training is available so there's a sort of a network um to deliver that not just not just the solitary officer um young hackney yes absolutely uh we we've been continuing to talk around uh and hold a community conversation with young people around the borough we haven't specifically i haven't i haven't specifically gotten to young hackney's since that point we're most recently talking to some of the sixth form colleges around some of this it dovetails into your point you made about the language and crime because interestingly from young people as we engage in this model the one thing they said they were most concerned about was the worry about being a victim of crime on the way to or from school that was from the sixth formers themselves we were talking to so yes we need to be careful how we use language but easily we need to recognize if that is some of the young people's primary concerns we shouldn't sort of dress that up and and turn that into a sort of a an you know an adult language of safeguarding when actually young people just want to know they're going to get home with their iphone without it being snatched off them by somebody else so i think it's important to address that crime aspect i think we can think carefully about how we communicate this model one of our again the quick wisdom slides probably didn't quite do it justice but one of the when we talk about the safe corridors in particular we would like to engage with young people in schools themselves to use that as a vehicle of communicating that approach back out to parents so we can showcase because the power of this is not just having additional police officers on the route it's having additional police officers and routes and those who might commit offenses against young people knowing they're there so we'd achieve a deterrence effect it's then also it achieving a hopefully a trust and confidence improvement where parents and those young people know that those police officers are going to be along those specific routes and can therefore have greater confidence so and that's part of that is how we communicate this potentially through with the support and through the schools to parents and young people to inform them of those changes but absolutely we want to get back into young hackney to consult on the on the detail here but also i'd be very happy to come back and pick up some of those conversations that young man in particular we were able to resolve that challenge that he had after that conversation which was really good did was that uh oh abstract i'm sorry abstractions i've covered i think that's all can i just come in that most of that covered what i would say but in in response to your point about teachers endlessly ringing the police certainly in a secondary school there would be one point of contact uh alongside the deputy heads of myself and the vast majority of times where the decision is made to contact the safe schools officer is because the child has been a victim of a crime more than anything else and of course that child is much more likely to be able to speak about that with an officer that they actually know who they're familiar with they've seen at the age all of those sort of things um but uh no teachers are not just endlessly contacting safer schools officers it would go through one person i'm very quickly just coming again this comes back to the importance of language and thank you both for clarifying that and this is again with communities and this image of what police represents to a lot of people as well and it's really important that ongoing conversations like this happen because um if you explain it in slides or in you know written formats or whatever some people can just it will just go ahead and all they'll be focused on is police schools police schools and that's the main thing that's in their head because of all the images that's there when you talk about things like um if the child is a victim of a crime the officers are there to protect the child these are important and also Catherine gave an example of that phone as well case studies like that and making it simplified as possible in a way that humanizes it going back on what Jim said that's the kind of language that we need when we're trying to explain this rather than simplified um stats languages of just um ssls and anagrams and all of these things and just making it more human yeah thank you very very brief and then andy if i can i'll i've got another three people who want to speak um okay so i'm ducky burke i'm the group director for children education i'm also the chair of the savior and hackney board of which britney and her team are really important players and i just wanted to say that in terms of the wider context in which that britney brings to this particular piece of work because as you may well be aware that in our youth justice service in hackney which the police are really integral part we have really good out of court disposals we have a really good diversion scheme so our entire mindset is child first and that is backed up by police colleagues we've introduced along with police some really excellent initiatives that are going to be picked up by the met in terms of they've got a qr code for kids who are stopped and searched and i think sometimes the police aren't good at telling some of their success stories so the number of stop and search of young people in hackney has halved in the last 12 months and the disproportionality of those stop and searches has dropped by by a considerable amount so um just in terms of the mindset that officers are bringing to the safer schools work they're very much part of shaping the offer that we have to prevent criminalization of young people through the youth justice offer and also the support to victims through the youth justice offer as well that they're integral part of that so i just think it's important in context and they're great supporters of our care leavers and our children in care to prevent the criminalization then as well so i thought it's important to say thank you jackie um so council martins and then council ross please and then i'll see if we can have a final round with andy and and um thank you thanks chair um i just wanted to kind of touch on the disproportionalities and um the point you raised earlier chair in terms of um how in terms like the focus of crime and being more crime focused i just wanted to ask how this helps with addressing disproportionalities because i think touching on the language point that council samatha pointed out it almost seems counterintuitive so in terms of that how do we then prevent the criminal criminalization and also adultification of young people if we're being crime focused thanks sorry can we take a second question council ross thanks chair um i've got two quick questions i'm gonna ask my second third but it does link to the question i've just asked which was um you know in the local safeguard impact this review has highlighted that racism was one of the likely drivers um in the case of child cheese so i'm wondering how um the new approach will be audited to ensure that the interventions will not disproportionately impact black and minoritized children and young people and my second question is quickly going back to again engaging children in the process the child q update report also recommended that children be included included in the recruitment of um sso's and i'm wondering if you're intending to implement that recommendation thank you can i just add a just a further bit to that question around um the recording of ethnicity because also if we're talking about disproportionality we we need to be able to see what's actually going on to be able to assess that so as part of that auditing process will you be able to record ethnic will safest schools officers be able to record ethnicities we appreciate there have been challenges around that oh in in what sense i mean it of how did i sorry it came up in the report um but that it's not mandatory for safety school officers to report ethnicity so that the disproportionality issues perhaps were not as clear for people to to see i think i think it depends what sort of activity we're talking about if we're talking about reporting of crime then within the crime report we would record ethnicity and or self-defined ethnicity um but it's very difficult for us to quantify wider engagement of children within schools for example if we were to do um and i suppose this is where this wider kind of safeguarding discussion comes if we were to have a um an interaction with a child for a you know a discussion around safeguarding on engagement we wouldn't i mean our systems obviously log crime so the way in which we're interacting with children and therefore then defining their ethnicity would be really would be really challenging because our systems are there to record crime rather than specifically interactions of individual people outside of recording crime so stop and so if you stop and search definitely records ethnicity yes so in which instances wouldn't ethnicity be recorded well for example if we were to do an engagement session i suppose with some children we wouldn't log the ethnicity of all of those children thank you for that and sorry and hand back over to you for the other points thanks chair um so uh on on the point of racism and scrutiny yeah we're very keen we have a microscope over that i mean we one of the reasons we have been working closely with hackney council and with mopac and setting up the london the first in london version of this of a new scrutiny model with locally recruited scrutineers who really for the first time more adequately represent the communities that we're policing as a scrutiny body and expand the remit of that scrutiny group to look well beyond traditional stop and search boundaries but really to look at use of policing powers and a whole range of different spaces we would see them as being and we've talked about them that we've presented on this proposal to them as well because we'd see them as being integral in working with us as we introduce this new model to test some of that and certainly their work in in in examining and working with us to try and improve as jack burkes referenced the outcomes of improvements in disproportionality and stop and search have been really really crucial for for that work and having that community voice there so again we want to export that same model into into this space to look here um you know the crime the crime focus that you mentioned again i hope i haven't get sort of misled here so when we're talking about a crime focus is really about protecting children from becoming the victims of crime this is not we're not going into you know very very clear school is not an environment where in anything other but the most exceptional of cases that we want to be involved in any sort of investigative or or police related activity and it's a place of education it's a safe space it's not a place for for police inquiries to be conducted in less than a point of absolute extreme or a danger to sort of children in that school so the crime focus is around reducing the chances of children being victims of crime there are some difficult spaces there and the most obvious of which is where children are victims of crime which the children are the perpetrators of that crime um and as jackie said that's where this forms part of a wider landscape where we're looking at reducing likelihood of children coming into the criminal justice process but also reducing the likelihood of them reoffending or committing acts which are dangerous to other children off the back of that and we know there's a complex range of reasons why people why young people are being drawn into crime and it's not all about our child agency it's also about exploitation by older people by gangs like at circumstance and a whole range of other factors so we're you know certainly we're very very alive to all of that and that's really as as jackie said sits at the heart of driving a lot of these these changes and transformations we're trying to make and the recruitment point is really interesting i mean so will we have a panel with some young people sitting there and sort of saying yea or nay over a police officer's career probably won't get to that stage can we can we maybe create a space where young people have got an input into the sort of aspects that we're looking for in recruitment of these of our of our dedicated officers or helping us set the terms of reference and other aspects of that of that officer's role yes i can we can we can see a space for young people's voice in there whether that fully meets the recommendations for young people to be involved directly in recruitment i'll i'll leave it to to others to judge but we want to move as close as we can do accepting that we're you know big institution with our own rules and governance around some of these things thank you for that we've got two final questions i've i've got so i've got like five minutes so i'm really going to have to hold you all to time so council gordon and then very briefly andy if you could keep your response quite succinct please and james council gordon thank you very much chair um i've got a question and observation if i may um so um my question's really um just sort of pulling together several strands of this evening really it's about ongoing governance and oversight for safer schools partnership um can you sort of describe um how that's going to be achieved is going to be a steering group and when you've referenced various different bodies um including the shadow board um i think what i'm particularly concerned about is that this is you know obviously this is we're feeding into the sort of early stages of this but this continues to be a sort of agile living document um which takes into account you know best practice new research um events and also the the ongoing voices um of children and young people as well as their you know their parents and the wider community so that's really my sort of first question really what is going to be the formal structures and governance and oversight and how will they you know sort of continue to react to respond and if i may i've also got um an observation um this is drawing on some of the um questions from colleagues in relation to to anti-racism um so on page 28 um the paragraph 3.2 the policy underlying policy justification in one of them in relation to SSOs developing a role more as tactical advisors is that one of the reasons they're being diverted from becoming involved in either non-criminal very minor criminal issues is that that could disproportionately impact young people including black and global majority children and obviously building on the sort of evidence based on that um i suppose i'm hoping for really in sort of later iterations of this it's sort of maybe more active commitment to anti-racism rather than acknowledgement that that those sort of things can happen so i think that's you know um i hope i'm not maybe misinterpreting that but um that was the way i read it that it seemed to be quite passive really about those issues i mean obviously it's policy justification but i think what we need is a you know an active commitment to anti-racism i think that sort of builds on the um you know maybe some of the questions that council samus was asking thank you and just briefly from andy please all right okay all right thank you very much i i was just part of my question was answered so um i just wanted to make the observation uh just to concur with uh what uh richard was saying about uh how we use uh uh the safe school officers within schools um we do um as as richard rightly say that there's designated the head teacher and someone else designated to sort of you know invite police and um but you know in my experience most uh police officers come in to support students who are victims of crime and uh in particular in our case if we're not able to get hold of the uh safe school officer we would uh demand that we get someone from the kate team for example and we wouldn't invite any other police because we do know that they haven't got the training so that's the the key thing there i think um i i um catherine talked about um you know positive experiences with um the uh and what that looks like and i think um in our experience it's when you have that merger between the sso and good community policing because they do provide us with the kind of information that we'll need to uh support students and in the absence of that and i think a good sso is one who has his finger on the pulse what's going on with the communities and the families and that helps us to make more informed decisions to support our young people thank you over to you james thanks so i i took a very heavy hint to be quick with the response so governance wise i suppose three three main areas at this point so as a as a project the piece of change governance really this sits under um our change board within within the vce which i chair the shadow board is learning from our uh work on trust and confidence action plan with a local authority which had a heavy community voice we want to export that into our new change framework so we have a shadow board of community members which sees all of the products which my change board receives and has an active voice in shaping decision making it doesn't make decisions because ultimately it's an internal police piece of governance where we're not accountable to the council we're account i'm accountable to the commissioner the commissioner's accountable to the mayor and that is the law of the land but we do want a very heavy community voice in that space so we have a shadow board of community members about 20 to 30 community members who help shape that scrutiny i suppose is the next section of governance which i touch on and again that's drawing on the scrutiny model which we've established with hackney council and mopac community-led scrutiny and we've already had early conversation with them about how they can support and scrutinize as i mentioned in answer to my earlier question the the evolution of this this model and i suppose a third piece which is the governance of the school's structure itself once this is up and running we this has not yet been sort of refined we need to have some further conversations with a number of those people in the room but certainly we think there's a space for what was the safest schools partnership and those partnership boards to become a a joint uh a sort of council schools and police professionals governance uh um sort of structure sitting over this so hopefully that gives you a sense of where we see that heading there absolutely is and there's continued to be and we were an active party in the anti-racism conferences um earlier this year um absolutely a commitment to anti-racism i'm hoping that the demonstration of our thrust towards removing discrimination from some of our other policing practices is is some evidence of that commitment that certainly extends into the education space and not just from policing but of course working with schools around reducing discrimination in within the exclusionary um within school exclusions and other areas as well you know these there's a direct correlation and we see it regularly between levels of disproportionality in school exclusions level disproportionality and engagement police and disproportionate representation in the criminal justice system this is a system-wide problem and we're committed as a party as the anti-racism conference throughout to be to be part of that um i forget what uh so the the last question was on the community yeah so absolutely vitally important that's one of the reasons we wanted to move those schools officers within the framework of the local neighborhood teams because we information around risk comes from the schools comes from young people themselves but also comes from those wider neighborhood offices to understand have we got a bit of a problem in that park over there are a number of young people becoming victims of theft or robberies or something there we might pick that up from a very different source than necessarily in the school so yeah can i just ask the chair is there a formal sort of uh collaboration between the two the the safer school officers and the community policing are there um in our in in hacking here and if so how do they work to to together to enhance yeah to enhance um you know that relationship of school safety build positive relationship with students we might not be able to explore that we're 15 minutes over and i'm just conscious we've got young people who want to contribute towards the next item and everybody's waiting and we might have to we might have to send some questions if there are some things that we've got burning questions that we want to answer but i think for the most part we've covered quite a bit of ground and i thank you for bringing this to us at this stage this is the stage that we like to have things because it's a stage where we can make recommendations and pull together from various different pieces of work that we've done the insights that we have and i think the main thing that comes through for me interestingly now annoyingly um you know i work in youth engagement so nothing about us without us so always the starting point should be the beneficiaries so and even if your starting point is just pulling things together if you don't have trust and confidence which we know is an issue here we know is in particular an issue among particular communities it doesn't matter what you do they're not going to come to you and they're not going to want to talk to you about things and they're not going to see you as the pillars of the community that you ought to be so this is why i think trying to go back to those key objectives that the whole premise was founded on and finding out from the young people what does that look like um and then speaking to schools and speaking to parents and speaking to the wider network young hackney to find out how that can be fleshed out so that would be the main thing that comes through for me and and still i'm still not quite clear about why is this schools and i don't like arches so sorry just just to mention because i just think when you just think about trust and confidence i just think why do you have to bring arches into school it's just it it doesn't feel like it's a part of a model that helps to you know especially if we you know yeah it it felt like there was some quite punitive things on on the list and i don't go into work and have to walk under an arch unless i work in the home office so i i wouldn't expect that to be the case for children unless we've got a reason to believe that's that that that i think i think that's a point where it's going to be guided by the safety of the children so we don't have arches as standard on hackney schools but what we're saying is if there is an acute need if there's a threat of those risk of retaliatory gang violence within the school setting where we think weapons are going to be brought in we have to have an option like that on the table we don't want to use it as a matter of course but it's guided as ever as we've noted here by the needs of the young people safety it's on the it's on that list that pick and mix list pick and mix list of things to choose from and it feels as though a few of those things i i i believe personally would compromise the relationship between children and the police if they're interactions with police the police turning up with an arch at their school or or searching and i think that you know you know it might be i might suggest things like talking about what their rights are in relation to the police in relation to stop and search and just exploring with them how to build that trust and confidence but i think we've got a lot to work with that we'll be able to hopefully flesh out some really good recommendations but thank you all and i'm sorry for going over in particular to those of you who are waiting to come in um for the next item um thank you thank you james and thank you for the work that you're doing on this and and for bringing it to us at this stage um thanks chair thanks all thanks for the young people's input as well tonight britney mentioned if there's input you want to provide outside of this britney's email was on there any any council members any any people watching from the public and particularly those young voices feel free to reach out to us as well thank you very much now moving on to the next item again apologies for going over um this is housing this is item five and housing support for care leavers in 2022 23 the children and young people and living in hackney scrutiny commission jointly undertook a review of the housing support for care leavers in hackney from this review a report with 10 recommendations for service improvement was produced in october 2022 cabinet produced a response to these recommendations which were agreed at cabinet on the 26th of june 2023 the attached update at page 49 of the call pack provides a progress report from corporate parenting housing needs and housing strategy services on the implementation of the agreed recommendations to support this item the chairs and vice chairs of both commissions met with care leaders through hackney of tomorrow our care council ahead of the meeting and shared the outcomes of this discussion with the wider scrutiny membership again this will be published in the formal meetings of this meeting the full minutes of this meeting the timing of this item is opportune as one of these areas identified for improvement within the recent children's social care ilac inspection by offstead as experience experiences and progress of care leavers here inspectors noted that following the following needed to improve the timely allocation of accommodation for care leavers and the consistency and responses to care leavers we have representatives from from corporate parenting housing needs and housing strategy services here this evening to present this update to scrutiny members the full list of attendees is on is reported at page 47 of the report pack um we're probably gonna have less time than we had scheduled for this um but we'll try and get through as much as we can with succinct questions and um and answers we've also we're also joined by um members of hackney tomorrow um online who will be coming in with some um questions um okay so we'll start with can i invite officers to present the update report for five to six minutes um and then we'll hand over for questions hi everyone um i'm laura bleany i'm the head of corporate parenting and ashley and audio here from our um leaving care service who've worked with care leavers for many many years and jennifer is on the screen from housing needs and james from housing strategy so i will provide a very brief overview i know there's always lots of questions so we're very very happy to provide written responses to anything we haven't and including from the young people um i mean i guess i'd start by saying we are very very well aware that housing is the number one issue so as difficult as challenge can be we are really grateful that this is being kept on the radar it's been a couple of years but it i think it potentially always will be the number one issue and there will always be areas for improvement and it's not surprising that that was echoed in the conversation between care leaders and austed and it is helpful to have it top of the council agenda in terms of improvement for care leavers i think there was some positive acknowledgement from austed in their conversations with jackie and diane that there have been some changes the big ticket item is the change to the housing register but we're yet to see that um coming through in terms of real change for young people but it's still um something that's in terms of outcomes hasn't changed i guess the three key areas for us in terms of housing for care leavers because it's quite a big subject is supported accommodation and so up to the age of 21 the leaving care service has a duty to help care leavers find suitable accommodation and that's largely supported accommodation um off said have just from late last year begun to regulate that so the quality of supported accommodation in the market is quite varied we have our own qa processes but we've also jesse has um brought about a new commissioning function in the children and education directorate which is just getting off the ground and quality assurance is really key to that so we're talking about both value for money but also quality so that i'm really looking forward to because that will be really helpful there's also i think conversations in the council about supported accommodation needs for all age groups and i think speaking to colleagues in housing strategy team and others who are looking at that supported accommodation because we know that some care leaves at 21 who are maybe just below the adult threshold services would really struggle in their own independent independent tenancy and would benefit from some sort of support accommodation and there are some models out there that um are successful newham for example do have some support accommodation proposed 21 so we're keen that people think about care leaders as a specific group in terms of the longer term support accommodation um the second part um i think is the access to social affordable long-term housing which is the real key which preoccupies a lot of care leaders thoughts from 18 onwards and they know that 21 is coming and they worry about it hugely and the practitioners worry about hugely what's that look like so we still have the quota the long-term system we have it's quota we have just um have finalized the the 18 young people that would benefit from the quota system this year so we're not getting letting go of the quota until we know that we've got the the new system up and running but we're also working very closely with jennifer's team to get um the other care leaders who are want to access a housing and tenancy in hackney or the housing register are eligible so they've got legal status in the uk etc onto the housing register we've um ashley and team have been working really hard it's about 200 on up to the age of 21 and another 50 or so they're already in the housing system um the change was made in the policy from april we've been reassured by jennifer and team that our care leaves aren't going to miss out from the delay because it's going to be backdated till their 18th birthday so actually some of them are going to do really well but we um i know there was some feedback about the communication about that we we want to be really 100 pistol clear with our messages to the care leave about the processes because if we aren't clear in our messages it can cause a lot of confusion and kind of different expectations about what's going to happen so with it's in process well our housing colleagues are working really hard to get that up and running and embedded and then the other side of the access is the supply which james can talk to because just being on the housing register we know the challenges with the housing which is not going to be the answer to all all the issues for housing care leaders and then the third part that we've been doing a lot of work on is post tenancy support so when care leaves are in tenancies how do we support them to be successful tenants not to lose them the worst case scenario which doesn't happen in hackney which is all credit to jennifer's team and housing colleagues they don't make care leaders intentionally homeless but if care leaves are getting tenancies earlier and struggling without the right support that's the potential risk for them so we have a we've had we're in the second year of a joint contract with an organization called settle which is a specialist organization which is offering post tenancy support we also secured between us government funding for housing first project which is offering we've got 10 tenancies from our housing colleagues to offer those more higher needs care leavers support so housing and very intensive support with center point so we're just in the early stages of that project and we hope that we can use learning from that to really think about with the work that in ricarda seen tenancy services are doing about how we support tenants with additional needs and thinking about helena who leads that team has come from islington where they do a lot of specific care leader specific support which sounds really good so what can we do for care leaders specifically that flexes to what they need some kelly who's won't need any co-tenancy support they can they can get on with their lives without us and some will need a huge amount to be successful tenants and and manage issues that come along so what we want is a system that can flex around that and we we have a really good understanding and support and i think one of the it's been really helpful i think jackie leaned in ricardo's here who sadly couldn't be here tonight but now all housing services are under ricardo ricardo's agreed to chair a subgroup of the corporate parenting board that really focuses so we've been meeting regularly as key officers but at very senior management level we've agreed the agenda which is largely along these themes and just to make sure that some of these things that we've got initiative c to the end and to bring us together so some of the things about monitoring the impact of the changes to housing register which is tricky because i think that housing colleagues are still really suffering with the impact of the cyber attack but we're working across data to to see what we can do so we're really joined up and so we're not we always want to be further along for our care leaders than we are and sometimes things that feel frustratingly slow for our young people as they do for us as officers but i am still confident that we are moving in a positive direction and we get back every year and hopefully you'll have new ideas but we'll also have positive progress that we can share i think that's it unless jennifer or james i mean james can speak much more to the housing strategy part we're we're a bit over over times if if you could be uh very brief um jennifer i like the way you smiled when you said sorry around belong it's the second time a member said that to me today um i'm just going to cover two points very succinctly one uh the start of our housing first project um which is for 10 care leavers and young homeless people that with some of the most complex needs moving into social housing and being supported by center point as a provider as you know housing first is aimed at people with multiple and very serious challenges quite off health conditions covered coupled with substance misuse and experience of the justice system and possibly physical health conditions so work has been going great guns on that uh strategic processes have been worked through and so far center point have accepted three uh care leavers onto that scheme and the search is underway for the appropriate housing units within our stock because they need to be what shall i say we need to be quite sophisticated in the identification of those properties because we don't want to set those individuals up to fail so i'm really pleased to say that's going great guns we are staggering the intake over the year um so that's why the numbers are only at three uh secondly the work on the housing register wherever possible we are trying to use data or evidence or information that we already hold on our care leavers in laura's team to ensure that we don't have to make care leavers jump through hoops to go on the housing register i've committed that we will have all of those 200 on the housing register by the end of september um which considering it's a hugely manual process it is quite some feet um and we're well into that now um thirdly i just wanted to say and it will caveat it'll sort of segue into james around supply so as as we know the housing register is not a guarantee of social housing but it gives people the best chance at securing housing and our care leavers are now in the priority the highest priority band so that is that is giving them the best available chance last in 22 23 we only received 682 properties for allocation to hackney residents with about half of those being studios and one beds a worrying trend we are seeing um which we should expect is as the housing crisis is still worsening believe it or not we are seeing more and more and more desperate families who've been in temporary accommodation for decades now um bidding for smaller and smaller properties so what we're seeing now is more families bidding for one bedroom properties where they're actually um entitled to two because the weight for one beds is is is not as long as two beds so what we're seeing is increased pressure on one bed um which obviously will affect hair leavers ability to secure those one beds so we're now seeing strain across the whole housing portfolio because the supply is so tight um and on that i'll hand over to james thanks jeff i hope you can all hear me counselor conway i'll be very very brief less than 60 seconds so the in short answer we are focused upon the supply options across the whole piece we have been we will be i'll answer questions on those in the moment everything shipping containers buying land out the borough street properties does the council do it does the company do it does it all do it and i'll answer those questions as and when they arise one thing i can kill off here now as jennifer said we've also got the evidence base a new evidence base for both the housing strategy and the local plan that changes things every time we look at it the members here senior officers here pretty much everybody will be aware that we have a shrinking lower age population and we have a massively increasing older age population into which one two bedroom properties are the need across the entire piece so all that stuff is there in the background housing strategy local plan they're red herrings at the moment they will not be ready until the back end of next year we don't need to wait for that care leavers are still a priority in our current position statement and we're getting on with the supply issues i'll talk about those when i get questions thank you very much um to those of you who've just um contributed um i'm gonna hand over to um china ellen and evelyn if you have any questions um you can kick us off hi i'd like to ask a question um partnership working across the council was critical to the successful delivery of improved support for caregivers can officers set out what structures are in place to ensure that there is effective cost departmental working to better meet the needs of care leavers elena did you want to come in she can take two at a time sorry it's okay mine's running a separate recommendation so i can come in after um china's has been answered unless you'd like me to ask now um okay you okay you want to come in on the access to information point okay no it was a separate one okay okay i'm happy for you to ask your questions now um for you to kick us off um so i appreciate that um uh laura and jennifer both said that uh the the new rollout of the plan of putting caregivers in the housing register is still in process so this might be a difficult one to answer but there still seems to be a discrepancy in information regarding the new plan so if possible can officers outline the process for making sure that all caregivers are placed on the housing register so is that something that care leavers have to do themselves or does this have to be through their personal advisor or the housing options team and it'd be good to know as well how many caregivers have so far been placed on the register can i ask a question also laura around the 200 that we're talking about is that 18 to 21 year olds so and also there's a communication piece i would imagine with those who are 21 and above who might be of the impression that so they're not included in this maybe if i answer that one jennifer might need to come in the process but we've looked at all care leaves up to 25 so there's about 200 under 21 and about 50 over 21 that we know about we need to um there's obviously a big kind of hump every year i think i looked the other day we've got 72 looked after children who are 17 so we need a long-term process where it's very clear and when we're clear about that we know we need to communicate that really well um but we haven't got there yet so we're concentrating on trying to um get this big lot which is going to have to be something outside of the usual registration process which can be quite painful because it's quite intensive so we're trying to do a batch lot which is taking some time and then we need to work out with jennifer's team jennifer's team need to give us about what is the everyday process which shouldn't be that you have to come through us and then that should be you can come through us we can help you if you want to if you're turning 18 tomorrow this is how you can join the housing register we have asked um that our older care leaves are prioritized because they are you know they shouldn't be waiting longer you shouldn't have 18 year olds getting a house before a 22 year old so we are working through that so it's not just it's not like the 22 year olds are going to miss out um for the delay so there is we're taking those into account too and then there will be once we've got really clear about the longer-term process clarity about the message with care leaders and i know it's a bit of a holding time so what we don't want to do is put in kind of half a message and then people get very confused about what which is already happening a little bit which is tricky yeah i know exactly i think that has been happening and it's been a bit distressing but that's getting our thinking and maybe jackie would be the best person because she's got the ears of all the big with across the council which is what we need to make a difference okay okay um thank you for the question about the working together because obviously the corporate parenting board is supposed to do what it does on the tin so it's everyone who works across all the corporate directors across the council but it's more than that it's about our partnership as well so um you know we have housing reps on there we have people from health and they are working with us to make sure that it's not just children's social care and education that are worried about our care leavers we have members on that board as well so that that's the the biggest kind of oversight of um of the work for children who are looked after in care leaders and we also have our pledge and under each of the promises in the pledge we have work streams um and they are depending on what the focus of the work stream is for example we've got on that's entirely around health but they can't do it by themselves so we work you know we work around meeting needs in that way and as Laura has said um Ricardo Hyatt who is the group director for climate homes and economy has agreed to chair the work stream around care leavers and housing particularly because it's really helpful he's just taken over the line management of Jennifer Winter's service as well so we've got housing under him and James as well and but an example of how I think we've worked really well together is in terms of the care leavers hub so we had our colleagues who were in our kind of corporate property services who helped us identify a property we had our finance colleagues who helped us work out how we could afford to do it we had our asset board that agreed that we could do it we've got a project manager who's helping us implement that and we've got um some care experience young people also helping us with what the the finished project will look like so I think quite often behind the scenes there's a lot of um collaboration going on and we can't do anything in the council without having our finance colleagues backing us so um things for example like um council tax we had to get our um we had to put business case in or our finance colleagues helped us with that they had to work out how much it was going to cost that to work what the implications were going to be and then on top of that we are active members of the pan London um care leavers work stream which uh the director of children's services and Emma Smith and Fulham is the lead on that so it's been through them that we've got the free prescriptions the free transport which is currently being rolled out as well so we're part of bigger things as well as there's a lot going on behind the scenes but ultimately the corporate parenting board is one the board that has the oversight of all the bits of the council and our partnership working together. Thank you um very briefly from Jennifer and James and I'm saying that because I'm trying to be strict on having multiple officers responding to questions because then we get through a very small number of questions so if we can try and stick to whoever we think is best place to answer the question then we hopefully will get through as many as we possibly can um sorry Jennifer I feel like I've put you off there. I'm getting used to it Councillor Conlon um hi Elena and China um so I won't go on for too long but the normal process for people who are joining the housing register is an online one by invitation at the moment um we have made some requests for colleagues in ICT because we now need to configure that online form to reflect care leavers so that you almost go down a different route in the background so to speak otherwise if we don't if we just give you the online form link it will reject you because of the way the system has been set up and programmed so we're waiting for our ICT colleagues to deliver that for us but in the meantime my officers are working with Laura's team we're doing lots of frenzied sending backwards and forwards of documents because we need to satisfy our internal auditors that we have the right evidence in the right place for the housing register and trying to secure all that information so that you guys don't have to do a lot of the leg work and we're not having to write out to you and ask you for information that another part of council may already have so we're trying to fast track the service for you and as Laura said that is very much around getting this hump of like 200 people on and then once we've done that we'll be able to plan from okay this is how we want the new service to work for care leavers so we've kind of because we've made this commitment to get everybody on by the end of September that's really what we're focusing on at the moment but don't worry as soon as we get it clear we will definitely make sure that communication goes out. Thank you Jennifer and James. Very briefly, one of the things we're working on probably next is a housing pathway for care leavers that will cut across the whole system in Hackney so though China didn't ask it the real question is partnership working just doesn't stop with the council we can't do this on our own housing associations for example have as much housing stock in Hackney as the council does so we're working with housing associations one to try to increase supply get their chief executive to sign up as they did to the domestic abuse pathway to give us more stock and see how we can use that yeah so again I'll come back to this pathway but I think that's the tool that will allow us to bring everything together what Jen said what Laura said what people are saying across the system in Hackney so we can all see what the housing pathway looks like people like China and Ellen will be able to contribute to that pathway and build it and we'll take their advice on it so again the partnership work and stuff China isn't just about the council we have a lot of work that we're doing with with housing associations and other partners as well thank you very much over to the commission now if we can run through the questions according to the recommendations and that would be helpful so you can stick to the different themes does anybody have any questions on recommendation one which is access to information advice which I feel like we've sort of already touched on so we possibly move on to recommendation two okay can I just check whether you're going to bring in the evidence from the focus group on recommendation one so with some evidence from the focus group about access to information that we heard the other day and I suppose that that was part of why I'd mentioned about the age because that had come up quite a bit and I mean it features in this question that we've got here around so the sense that we got was that different care leavers have different relationships with their social workers their pathways seem to be very different with many of them presenting as homeless which we sort of thought that we you know that that shouldn't be the appropriate route for a care leaver to take and just very different understanding and experience of sort of the information on what's happening which I appreciate is really complicated you know it's a really long document in there you know you've got our recommendations you've got where you're up to now you've got the challenges that you're facing it's quite difficult to communicate something to young people that isn't a finished article but at the same time you're wanting to communicate to the young people that something's going to change and I think that there is a piece around that because it's about managing expectations of those who aren't going to get anything and it might just be really important to let them know that that's the case but then also just around just providing some greater clarity on the even if it's just the phasing of things so what it's likely to look like yeah because I just it seems to be a bit of a recurring thing around corporate parenting and I can understand how it happens because it sort of filters down and you know and you've got a lot of turnover of staff you've got new people coming in people might not have received training but is there some way that we can ensure that young people always have access to where we're up to now so that they've got clarity on what on what comes next for them was there anything else that you wanted to add to that but yeah that was the I just wanted to know whether they're bearing in mind that you know the IT system still needs to be put in place and so on whether there might be you know a sort of dedicated housing needs officer or a person so I'm a young person trying to access this who am I talking to am I just talking to my they're not called my social worker are they at this stage but you know am I just talking to my social worker or is there a housing needs officer who is the care leavers housing needs officer and I know that I can ring them I've got their email address etc. Yes I think shortly after the original scrutiny committee Jennifer's team identified two so we do have two housing officers that specifically work with care leavers which has I think helped and stopped people before that though at 21 they would have to go to the greenhouse with everyone else and get any consistent information so that has made a big difference and it's also somewhere where our staff can go and ask for advice and support I think and it's beyond this that we were talking about this today about the local offer so everything that we offer you have to publish that we have it published on a website in the past we've tried lots of different things including having big brochures but the moment you print them something's out of date we have in the last year used text messaging service because we thought quite carefully with comms and young people what's the best way to reach people we were we were thinking but some might still benefit from hard copies of things so we're continually trying to learn I guess what's difficult is there's lots of stuff in the local offer and you might not hear it until it's relevant to you and Kelly because circumstances like everyone changes over time so as Ashley was saying I think she was speaking to Greenwich today and they were saying they get the same feedback however much they try and communicate so it we were speaking to our comms person again today so it is definitely something how are we consistently updating making sure and part of it is I think about practitioners helping foster carers help in having a kind of multimedia so we were saying we've done the text message they've been quite helpful because it's an instant messaging but we're going to do an end of year email round up people who may not and opposed to one and part of the linking with housing is how do we know that we've got the right addresses for people because tell you don't have to keep in touch with us we have to try and keep in touch with them so I think it's a fair criticism different messages not only by us by other young people they might live with in support accommodation that come from Islington where the offer is different or foster carers who have looked after this it's complicated and I think it's an ongoing fair challenge to us how do I know I thought I didn't know this I didn't know that someone else told me this so we have to continually think about how are we being really robust in the information we're sharing and when do we share it because I do think if we've got kind of so in Oxford we agreed we would offer council tax exemption to care leavers who live out of borough who don't get the automatic council who are paying it we're just working on the systems behind it so we're really clear this is how you tell us what so we definitely we're clear we'll pick back that date to April we don't want people to miss out because of our delay but we'll just want to be 100 clear what you need to do to get us to pay your council tax so we don't give them half a message and then create chaos and is there anything planned for the 21 to 25 year olds because it was interesting to hear that it was 50 which I suppose is a relatively small number considering I know not in housing terms but considering that we've got like 70 80 leaving care so you know in the past couple of years many of those have been housed already so they would have been housed either through the quota they're renting on the private rental sector so there is quite a few more obviously than known to us than the 53 or whatever that's on that but yeah they're living out of borough they're in universities they're not not in half living in half they just have other circumstances at this point so yeah. Because I think something that come up when we did this piece before was just wondering whether many of these young people end up on the housing register anyway so you know is it useful to be looking at who are the young people and because in a way you know we might be talking about the same people when we say oh no we can't offer these this accommodation to these young people because we've got these vulnerable adults here and actually you find that the who's comprises the vulnerable adults might include some care leavers also so you know there still is some work going on with that cohort because there's something that just feels quite brutal about that cut off point you know but I suppose if it's moved to 25 then that becomes the cut off point but you know is there anything more that can be done to support those? I was just going to say just going back to your point Councillor Conway around support and what that looks like you know the vision is the care leavers hub and within that you know housing advice carers advice so it's hoping to kind of bring all that together so those messages our care leavers get they potentially can get it in one place so that is the vision you know we're hoping by the end of the year beginning of next year we would have opened and launched our care leavers hub it's just another way it's another vehicle of care leavers getting information because I'm conscious around you know the information they're getting now but we want to be able to kind of phase out support that they get and how they receive that information so care leavers hub is just going to be another vehicle for them to be able to get that as well. Thank you for that and Councillor Sizer do we have any other questions for the commission? Well I mean if we can ideally go through the park I'm not doing a very good job at sticking to that so maybe let's just go rogue and see if that helps. I wasn't going to go rogue I just wanted to it's actually a comment not a question I spent quite a lot of time today looking at the local offer website and just wanted to say I think it's really clear and really well done and to just really thank all of the work that's gone into that I think in terms of a local offer presentation it's really user friendly so thank you it was just that. Thank you Councillor Sizer and sorry the hands I think Councillor Binny Lubbock I've seen first and Councillor Ross and then I'll come I'll have another round. Yeah I'm not being fairly clear whether or not the changes are going to mean that year on year there's going to be more or fewer than 18 social places taken up so it'd be interesting to hear that but I'm also glad to hear that work's begun on the housing strategy and the work on this is happening before that's all completed because I was going to ask when that will be completed so that's good to hear that's happening I'm wondering when the Hackney Housing Association compact is going to be reviewed because I think that's an important part of this it also says as part of that section do we need that we need a permission and independent review of the Hackney housing company and I don't know why we have to do that can we not just instruct them to make sure that a provision for care leaves is part of their scope and I'm also interested to know whether there's progress being made or what progress is being made on rebuilding the internal carer recruitment team because obviously that's really important for state put sort of replacement. As there are a few I think I might just leave you with that for now so we've got a few people is it James? So I was I was I got in there to answer to County Roberts but if you're going to take questions first shall I shut up and come back to it or do you want me to answer his question? Yeah sorry I'm confused no no no I'm happy for you to come in okay thank you very briefly Councillor Biddy and Lubbock in the order you've raised them one is the housing association come back up for review it's up for review within the six months of next year we will nail down the that's its third year of operation so we're going to do a review between January and the summer next year happy for you to be involved I'll have more precise details at the exact time scale towards the end of this year but we are doing it starting January February next year number one number two why does the Hackney housing company need a formal review it doesn't at one level just a very brief bit because this question will come up the Hackney housing company exists for a very specific purpose its purpose is more or less to mitigate sales loss on the regeneration program that's what it was set up for that's its cabinet's approval we will have to change get a cabinet approval for us to use it for care leavers that won't be a problem I don't see that as a problem now I wear another hat I am the director of the Hackney housing company in other boroughs I've used housing companies to provide care leaver accommodation what we have done is we've hired independent consultants already to look at what the financial model would be that would potentially allow us to go on a street purchase program in order to acquire accommodation for care leavers mainly in Hackney but potentially outside of it as well that piece of work has been done so we're looking at the blend of rents the reason we have to look at the blend of rents is because we would let accommodation for care leavers at something akin to the to you know along the living rent level which is a very low level but for every unit that I would let at that level I need two or three to let that poor market rate in order to subsidize across the pace so we're still working out what that looks like and whether it's theoretically doable at that point we'll come to members for an approval to get on with it and hopefully we can get on with that at the moment I won't put a timescale on that but that's a piece of what we've completed and that should emerge at some point in the next next few months or so. Thank you for that Councillor Ross please. Thank you chair just going back to access to information and advice I noted in the report that you've done some great work to set up the text messaging service as well as the Leaving Care Duty line and email address and I noticed that with the text messaging system you'd mentioned there has been some engagement with care leavers which is great I wondered if there had been any engagement with the the duty line the email address and what things have looked like even with the text messaging service since you've established those things. I've taken another question if that's okay I think I have next Councillor Young did you put your next? Mine relates to recommendation four so. Councillor Pinkerton? Recommendation four as well is that okay? Go for it. So hello so recommendation number four talks about the need to undertake further research and modelling to assess the impact of placing all care leavers on the housing register at 18 particularly in relation to how the rights of care leavers with children are those attending university could be preserved in such a system as obviously care leavers have the you know right as anyone else to apply and travel and attend university anywhere else in the country and they may have had to overcome other kind of barriers in accessing that particularly around you know applying for student finance and things like that so are officers confident that care leavers who leave Acne to attend university are not unfairly treated in any aspects of the housing offer thank you. So maybe I'll answer the question about because it links to your question about do we know if it's less or more we hope that it will be more but as Jennifer will always say if she's there she's got a hand up we don't you can't guarantee how much you know we can look at trends that's part of the reason why we still got the quota we don't want to you know we don't what the last thing we want to do is make the situation worse so we're hopeful that that will make the situation better but we we want to keep our foot in both camps so we're sure about that the issue with university is tricky in and we've talked about this about young people because lots of young people sign a tenancy you can't have a tenancy here and a tenancy so it's something to work through so at the moment you can't join the housing register if you've got a tenancy somewhere else that's just something that you can't do when we're clear about how this plays out it might affect people's decision about where they go to university which is a significant decision but I guess other young people make those decisions about am I going to go to university out of London or not or there might be ways that we can work around it but at the moment the bottom line is if you've got a tenancy somewhere you can't you can't be on the housing register you're not homeless Ashley knows much more of the details I think it's important though to to keep in mind that when you do finish university say at 23 your band-aid would be backdated to your 18th birthday so you'd automatically be bumped up considerably in the queue of of those that are bidding if that makes sense so you're not necessarily losing that time you're in university once you're ready to access social housing but if that makes sense okay yeah um and I so the text messaging service has been quite it's it's difficult to keep young people's phone numbers up to date which is a constant challenge I think for practitioners but um just as the a good example of kind of the feedback we've had is the TFL so TFL from about this time last year maybe a bit less than that introduced half price bus travel for all care leavers and so we sent that out to around 500 care leavers at the time and 171 signed up for that since then so it's been we've had a lot of response as a result of those text messages it seems to be reaching a lot of young people the duty inbox we get a fair few emails each week from either young people or probation as young people are being released from custody from doctors that are concerned about young people that they think might be care leavers things just it's a it's we get a lot of kind of general I think this young person is a is a care leaver so there is it is a quite a busy inbox I would say probably 10 emails a week approximately remember to put your microphone on because um sorry um can't hear yeah sorry about that um yeah thanks for that I was just wondering about the duty line as well and in terms of care leavers accessing these um points of contacts um are they kind of is it more care leavers than kind of GPs and probation officers would you say that are accessing advice through these points I would say it's a fairly mixed bag to be honest um yeah it's I am not I would say that the duty line is less popular than the email address I think young people it's my experience that young people don't call and call anymore you know there's there's email there's I think if we could work out a way of them texting us and and maybe that's something we could think about for the future but yeah I would say the duty phone line is underutil underutilized but I just think that's the way of the world now I'm being reminded that with very over time which is of course my fault but we would have to agree on whether we want to go beyond 10 o'clock we want to send questions I mean we have a preference for not doing that because we like to to to to discuss things publicly and I think what's being proposed is that we send the questions in and that we don't go beyond do we put it to a vote we put it to a vote to go beyond 10 o'clock to go beyond 10 o'clock no okay in which case um because we do have a couple of other items afterwards which we should be able to get through briefly but probably then means that we've got just another couple of questions before we have to move on to that otherwise we we do have some key lines of inquiry that go through each of the recommendations are you happy for us to send those to you um which we can then publish in a in a later agenda pack I mean now might be the opportunity for commission members to think of if there are any questions that aren't in there because if we know that the others are going to be I think the questions that we have drill down into quite a bit of detail I think the main themes that came from the sessions that we had with the young people is the lack of clarity on what's happening but also what I think was apparent to us was the phasing was was a challenge and I think that that's the key thing that's sort of coming through is that is it is it practical are we going to be able to achieve this and when and when can we communicate it to young people so that they have a bit of certainty around their futures because we know from the conversations that we've had with Hackney tomorrow that it's a recurring thing whatever it is that we're wanting to talk to them about housing comes up repeatedly so if we don't okay yes please council again um I don't think this is on the key lines of inquiry but stop me if it is uh so there was a question in the key lines of inquiry which I think would have gone to James about um the housing crisis really and about how that housing strategy or the strategy to provide more housing is what the answers are um but I just wondered within the uh recommendation for the response to recommendation four which basically says there's a housing crisis so this is going to be difficult however we do it how are we going to monitor that and ensure that we don't have care leavers languishing on the housing register albeit that they're you know a a banded and we're doing absolutely everything we can how are we monitoring and ensuring that this is better this is delivering better outcomes for care leaders that's already on the key lines of inquiry then stop me bring Jennifer in I think so there are ways there are certain data points that we can monitor the success of this um we do have to be really careful around as as Councillor Conway said managing the expectation for ourselves as well as the care leavers by putting care leavers onto the housing register care leavers will still be expected to bid and have we want them to have choice around how and where they live so to some degree their bidding practice will be very much their own decision where that what properties they choose to bid for and how often they choose to bid will be down to them for those for those care leavers that need support with that support is available but I don't think as a measure of success we would ever be able as a council to say we will never see a homeless application from the age of 18 if they so wish so we can't use that as a measure of success because it is their right and their entitlement and they can do that if they so wish I don't think we can ever say we will we will be able to get everybody in social housing some of those care leavers might have a change in circumstance and decide they don't want to go into social housing but there are certain things that we can monitor we can look at the amount of bids that people are making we can look at the waiting times between them being put on the housing register on their 18th birthday and how long it takes for them to get a property in time we can look at the amount of suitable properties that become available for allocation year on year we can look at the support needs of those that are bidding and not bidding we can also look at their ethnicity and cultural observations so there are a certain amount of things that we can look at to evaluate potential success I'm saying in quote marks of placing care leavers on the housing register does that help Councillor Young? I don't think I'm going to be able to bring anybody else in because we've got to finish at ten and we've got another couple of items so I'm very very sorry for my poor chairing around timing so I think we're going to have to bring this item to a close we definitely have follow-ups based on what we've picked up in the conversations that we've had with young people and thank you for persevering with us this evening and for all of your work in this area because we've worked with you on this and it feels it's great to see the progress and to even in the areas that we've not made as much progress as we hope to see the wheels in motion and to see the promise that that offers to so many of our young people in an area that's just so integral to their safety and just feeling rooted in their community and secure about their future so thank you. Moving on now to item 7 which is the Ofsted ILAC inspection report the children's social care service was inspected by Ofsted oh sorry I've missed a matter sorry safeguarding arrangements item 6 in April 2024 the Commission wrote to the Minister for Children, Families and Well-being setting out its concerns regarding the update to the statutory guidance working together to safeguard children this letter was published in the May 22nd 2024 agenda a response from this ministerial correspondence team was received on the 6th of June 2024 which is enclosed for members to note and we'll probably agree to meet with Jim going forward to discuss this and how best maybe we might want to follow up on that as a Commission. To be noted item 7 the Ofsted inspection children's social care service was inspected by Ofsted in July 2024 and the outcome of the inspection report was published on August 29th 24 the report notes that children's social care was awarded good rating overall members are asked to note the report and its recommendations and to note plans for the action plan to be presented at the Commission at the next meeting on the 14th of October. Great item 8 work programme the Commission updates its work programme each year to ensure that it's current and reflects issues of local importance suggestions from the consultation work collated together in a consultation report which was shared with members in June 2024 this is at page 83 at an informal meeting of the Commission in July 24 members reviewed suggestions and agreed to prioritise topics for the 2024/25 work programme this is resulted in an outline work programme at page 89 the scope and focus of each of the items will be agreed with relevant officers and cabinet members shortly do members have any issues arising from the work programme if not members are requested to note and agree the current work programme. I just have a question those highlighted in orange that's what's been agreed is that then is that right so those were done for the informal meeting which kind of to highlight some of the areas which were part of the priorities from last year so rather kind of overlapped with the new suggestions okay yes it's on page you're on page 89 yeah okay and then so noted do we note the current work programme we're happy okay great item nine minutes the minutes of the 11th of March are attached for members to note and agree matters arising from the minutes to check on submission to the PSHE guidance and a draft report from the outcomes of the missions investigation of people absence and will be circulated to members shortly any other business so we just we need to follow up the check is not here the PSHE guidance we need to understand that that's gone in if it's okay so we'll have to we'll have to pick that up with Jackie about whether that's gone in the submission on the PHSE PSHE guidance because she isn't here so we have to do that outside of this meeting but any other business sorry guys thank you thank you thank you thank you [ Silence ]

Transcript