Purpose

The Corporate
Parenting Strategy defines the Council’s aspirations to
become a supportive, responsive, considerate and sensitive
corporate parent on behalf of Torbay Council. It sets out how the
Council will work with cared for and care experienced children and
young people and alongside its partners, including education,
police and health services, and the community and voluntary sector
to achieve this ambition.

The Strategy outlines the commitment of our Partnership to these
objectives, and achieving our ambitions through strong strategic,
corporate and political leadership and meaningful performance
management, a commitment to the ongoing engagement and involvement
of children and young people in the development and implementation
of our Strategy and associated action plans and effective working
together with our partners across Torbay.

Decision

1.    that the Director of
Corporate Services be requested to update the Council’s
Equality Impact Assessment Templates to include care experience
under the list of protected characteristics in line with the
Inclusion Strategy for Torbay for 2025-2030; and

 

2.    that the amendment to
the Terms of Reference for the Corporate Parenting Board, to
include the Leader of the Council and the Senior Corporate
Parenting Lead (as a contributing attendee) to its membership, be
approved.  This change demonstrates the
Council’s strengthened commitment to delivering the
objectives of the Corporate Parenting Strategy.
 
That Cabinet
recommends to Council:
 

3.    that the Corporate
Parenting Strategy 2026-2028 set out at Appendix 1 to the submitted
report be approved.

Reasons for the decision

The current Corporate
Parenting Strategy expires on the 31 December 2025.  In its revised form the Strategy will:
 

·        
place cared for and care experienced children and young people at
the heart of everything the Council does;

·        
emphasise the need for Torbay to be an efficient and enabling
Council;

·        
strengthen the working together and partnership arrangements of the
Council to the benefit of the Council’s cared for and care
experienced children and young people.
 
Furthermore, adding
care experience as a protected characteristic within the
Council’s Equality Impact Assessments would ensure that the
Council considered how it could support care experience young
people as part of its decision making
processes in the same way the Council treats other people with
protected characteristics.

Alternative options considered

The option to
undertake a straightforward update was immediately rejected in
favour of significantly strengthening and improving the current
strategy by:

placing children and
young people firmly at the heart of all that the Council does as
Corporate Parents;
seeking ways to
enable the most effective contribution and participation of
children and young people into every aspect of the strategy;
learning from the
best.  To this end, all local authority
areas judged through inspection to have outstanding services in
this area were either contacted directly or involved in a
literature review of their Ofsted reports and other publicly
available information.  The findings of
these exploratory exercises were used to inform the consultation
and the direct communication with children and young people,
and
strengthening
governance arrangements.

 
The preparatory
consultation left no doubt that while the previous Strategy was an
improvement upon what had preceded it, significant further
improvement was required to set plans to achieve outcomes for
children and young people that were directly relevant to and
improved their lived experiences.  For
these plans to be successful, trusting relationships between
children and young people, the Council and its partners were
required which were firmly located on a shared understanding of the
plan’s solid foundations which made explicit how needs would
be met.