This meeting of the Children and Young People Scrutiny Panel was scheduled to receive updates on several important topics, including the performance of Children's Services in the borough, the impact of a new strategy to ensure the council can provide enough suitable accommodation for children in its care, and changes to the Children's Centres service in the borough. The panel was also scheduled to note the findings of an independent review of children with SEND in residential provision.

Children's Services Quarterly Performance Monitoring: Q1 2024-2025

The panel was scheduled to receive a report on the performance of the Children's Services department for the first quarter of the 2024-2025 reporting year (April-June 2024). This report was scheduled to provide information on the performance of the service against several key measures, including:

• the proportion of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs)¹ issued within the statutory timeframe of 20 weeks;
• the number of children on Child In Need (CIN) plans² and Child Protection Plans (CPP)³;
• the number of children in care;
• the number of children receiving support from the Family and Adolescent Support Service (FaASS)⁴.

Update on the impact of the new sufficiency strategy and draft plan for 2024-25

The panel was scheduled to receive a report on the impact of the new sufficiency strategy for children in care, A Place Called Home, which the council published in October 2023. The report was scheduled to set out the key ambitions of the strategy and to provide an overview of the actions that had been taken to achieve them in 2023-24. It was also scheduled to summarise the actions and priorities for 2024-25.

The report described the national context for children's social care, noting that local authorities across the country are facing challenges in finding the right placements for children in care. It stated that the average independent fostering placement costs approximately £1,000 per week, while the average residential placement costs around £5,600 per week. It added that almost all local authorities have at least one high-cost placement costing £10,000 per week or more.

A Place Called Home sets out four ambitions:

• Ambition 1: To prevent entry to care and to support and safeguard children to live with their families, where this is best for them.
• Ambition 2: If a child cannot safely remain with their family, our ambition is for family-based care with trained and experienced foster carers in Greenwich, to enable children to maintain their links with their families, schools and communities. This includes those children with Special Educational Needs and complex disabilities.
• Ambition 3: Where local family-based care is not the right option for a child, our third ambition is to secure a safe and stable placement with the care they need to thrive. This might be via an Independent Fostering Agency (IFA) or a Children’s Home.
• Ambition 4: When the children in our care reach the age of 18 years, our ambition is that they enter adulthood with somewhere to call home, a supportive social network, the skills to keep themselves safe and well, and for them to be in education, employment or training (EET).

Independent review of Children with Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) in Residential provision

The panel was scheduled to note an update on the independent review of children with SEND in residential provision. The review, which covered all children with EHCPs in residential placements, was commissioned by the Greenwich Safeguarding Children Partnership (GSCP).

The report pack contained the specification for this review, which had been carried out in two phases.

In the first phase, Royal Borough of Greenwich (RBG) officers completed quality and safety reviews of each child. These included discussions with the young person, family, and key professionals involved in their care.

In the second phase, an independent reviewer analysed these reviews, along with other case records and available publications from the national panel, to identify any emerging themes, and provide recommendations to improve multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.

Children's Centres Consultation

The panel was scheduled to receive an update on a public consultation on proposed changes to Children's Centres. The proposed changes were being made in response to cuts in government funding and increasing demand for early years and childcare.

The proposal, called Children’s Centres Beyond Walls, involved moving some Children's Centre services away from fixed sites and to more flexible locations, such as schools, community centres, and even people's homes. This new network would offer a more flexible and responsive service that could be tailored to the needs of each community.

The report pack contained a breakdown of the services offered at each of the borough's 23 Children's Centres and set out the proposed changes to each centre.

For example, Rachel McMillan Children’s Centre, which is run out of Rachel McMillan Nursery School in Deptford, was scheduled to be repurposed to provide more childcare places to meet increasing demand. Children’s Centre sessions would instead be offered at “satellite sites” within the community.

The consultation period was scheduled to run from 19 August to 7 October 2024.