Transcript

Good evening everyone and welcome to this meeting of the Education, Children and Young People Scrutiny Commission here in the London Borough of Newham. This evening's meeting is being held in person in East Ham Town Hall. I would like to welcome all members and officers, our external expert witnesses, the public and the press to this meeting, whether they are watching via YouTube or attending in person. With regards to the meeting etiquette, I shall invite all participating in the meeting to introduce themselves clearly, really stating their name and title when they speak for the first time. This is helpful for those listening at home and for the recording. Members of council present in the chamber, please can I ask that you indicate that you wish to speak by raising your physical hand. The same applies to our officers and guests. This meeting of the Education, Children and Young People Scrutiny Commission is now called to order. So, I want to welcome everybody to the meeting. Good evening and on to the second item, which is apologies for absence. Aaron, do we have to introduce individually or they introduce themselves when they speak? Apologies for absence. You mentioned it was three of them. No, I'm asking do they have to do I have to ask everyone to introduce themselves? So when they speak? Yes. Okay. Okay. I'm going to ask members to introduce themselves and then I'll go on to the officers. Starting from my right. Good evening, everybody. Councillor Jane Lofthouse representing Plaster South. Good evening, Chancellor for East Ham and members of this committee. Thank you. One Councillor from East Ham. Councillor Lofthouse. Good evening, Councillor Tamara McAlvins. Thank you. And now to the officers. Well, our colleagues is from here. Councillor Madeleine Salih-Pontin, Fosgate South and also Deputy Cabinet Lead for Education. Laura Eden, Director of Children's Services. We saved the best for last. Good evening, everyone. Annabel Bates, Director of Education in Quaker. Good evening, Councillor Sarah Ruiz and for the purpose of this meeting, Cabinet Lead for Children, Young People's Services. Thank you, everybody. Moving on. Apologies for absence. So, I've received apologies from Councillor Sophia Nakvi, Alan Griffiths, Christina Hussain and Osha. Thank you. Any other absence? Okay. Declaration of Interest. Is there anything that anybody wants to declare? Nope, that's good. So, moving on to the minutes. Agenda Item 4. So, for accuracy, I'll go page by page saying that I won't mention the page numbers I have because I have a different agenda printed to use. So, for accuracy, the first page, page 2, page 3, page 4, page 5, page 6 and page 7. Are there any matters arising from the agenda minutes? I've checked, but there aren't and it's all up to date. Anything? No, I just said page 1, 2, 3 and onwards. The reason is I didn't mention the actual page number I have. The reason is my agenda was printed while ago, so the page numbers are different. Okay. So, in that case, can I ask colleagues to agree the minutes? And someone to second it? Thank you. Okay. Moving on. To the Agenda Item 7, which is Educational Inequality and Disproportionality. Do you want to present it, Laura? I'm going to hand over to Annabelle if that's okay. Okay. I'll give you five minutes for that and then I'll ask colleagues to come in with questions. Okay. Good evening, everyone. I'm happy to give a brief summary of this report and then I won't go into too much detail, but happy to take questions. As the Executive Summary states, this is a report looking at how disproportionality appears within the education outcomes for children and young people in Newham. As it says at the beginning, focused on some areas which are nationally used in deceived disproportionality within the education system in England and so we've been able to therefore compare ourselves to other countries and other boroughs in London as well. This is a fairly new way of looking at disproportionality within the education system and we welcome the opportunity to do so to make sure that we're clear on where we need to do more for children in Newham. As I've said in the introduction, the language used is very much the language used by education, so where we describe different groups of children, that language is used by the Department of Education and it's so that we can use comparative language to others and understand how we compare. So, for example, section three, which describes the different ethnic and racial groups of our children, that's by schools when they're reporting on the schools and that's where we gather information about the school population for our children. So we would have that and that's information shared by families with their schools clarified nationally by the Department of Education. And then beyond that cohort data, we've then looked at some key indicators to measure how well our schools and settings are doing for our children and those include levels of deprivation and any groups that are disproportionately represented in terms of deprivation and then the same for special needs since attainment suspensions and exclusions and the attainment is across the different key stages. I know we're going to come to attainment later, so hopefully you'll see some trends across the two sections. We, at the end of the paper, in the conclusion section nine and in the next step section 10 of capital is the biggest lessons data. The first important point is while our schools do very well overall, many of these outcomes for children and young people, there are some groups where there's a significant difference and those are represented in section nine and we particularly honed in on children who are represented more than once because we feel we need to address those systemically, not to say we don't continue to analyze the data for all groups of children, but where those groups have been served as well by the system in a way we need to think much more systemically about how to address that. Therefore in section 10 we've identified how we're doing that and there's a whole range. For the purposes of this report we've kept it quite high level. I'm happy to go into more detail with you in the questions, but there are a whole range of things we can do as officers working alongside obviously school leaders and school governors who are the leads who will make those changes within schools if they're needed. So much of our role is we have a role to report and to scrutinize and to monitor, but a lot of that's around impact and influence with school leaders and governors. Thank you. Any member? From page number five it says in Newham we have like a high level of SD&D disproportionality for the following group of children, white and black Caribbean, white British and any other black, black brown, black Caribbean. So I just would like to know why they are facing this and how are you going to improve and resolve these issues? So these groups of children are represented in higher numbers compared to their peers in the special education needs category. In terms of our roles as officers the first thing that we are doing is addressing this directly with school leaders, but for SENDs that will include head teachers, SEND codes and also importantly governors, particularly those governors who have a responsibility in their schools to determine what interventions they're using, how they're intervening to support those children and make sure that there's additional support where required. So do you mind if I stop? My question is what is the reason behind why they are facing that? Why there are more children? From these specific groups. So that would be very dependent on the school data which we don't hold. We look at corporate data, we would need SEND codes to look specifically why it's happening for those children. We can't draw comparisons, we can't draw generalizations about why children have SENDs in those groups. Sorry, I just need to finish with that. Through Chair, if we don't know the reason, it's hard to resolve any issues. So we need to identify the reason to resolve this. Sorry, Madeline, I'm just asking to enable two, sorry. Okay. One of the reasons that unfortunately some of our most deprived groups have the highest percentage of SEND is because they've deprived across generations and not just across one generation. So therefore if you have students who across the board, across the different ethnic groups may have propensity or the underlying factors that might make them more liable to have an SEND and yet you put, then you put their mother, their whole family into a situation... My question though, I was asking why these specific groups facing... That's what I'm answering if you'd let me finish. If you then have those parents living for across generations in areas of deprivation, with housing insecurity, with poor nutrition, you know Lester knows this from the Black Boys project, that generations of adverse childhood experiences of difficulty with maternity care for our residents who are black and from ethnic minority groups or from groups that have long-term cross-generational deprivation, it all, it snowballs. And it's... How are you going to resolve it? We're working as one council to address needs across the council and that's what this paper is about. It's taken the data from schools to look at the deprivation and the disproportionality among certain groups and we're working together with our colleagues in health and community health and with other areas like children's social, young people's social care so that we can build on the resources we've got and the positive outcomes we have. So for example, we already have some of these groups doing better than they have in the past but it's not good enough. We continue as councillors and as officers with that struggle, pushing on forward and using things like the Black Boys task and finish group to inform us so that we can start to aim to learn not only from other councils but from the data and the information and the residents we have already. Thank you. Right. Colleagues, listen. Sarah, would you like... Can you put your... Yeah, put your hand up and I will call you to answer because we can't keep on passing the baton. Sarah. Thank you. I think one of the ways in which we can help and support and improve actually lies with school governors, if I'm perfectly honest. So if you are a school governor, then the questions you should be asking at the schools is that you would want regular reports on attainment for specific groups of children. So I'm a governor at two schools. One of them, we receive regular reports. When I say regular, at least once a year. But the other school, we don't. We continue to ask for that. Every school governor, every school has a governor who has a special responsibility for children with SPND and I think that's one of the ways in which we can improve because if we don't keep asking the questions... I think it's not just down to the education. It's about do we keep asking that question and if we do keep asking that question, we should then expect to get different answers and different outcomes. Okay, thank you. I'm just going to move on to this next question. Did you get... That's fine, yeah. Okay. You were going to add on. I was just going to add. I'm happy with Sarah's... gave me clarifications. Thank you. Okay. Imam. So my question is related to absence from a school, point number six, number 26 if I'm on the right page. So it is identified by the DNP that absence of a child will contribute to disproportionality and inequality. What responsibility does the local authority have to address this issue of a child's persistent absence? Well, that's a really good question. That's a great question. Thank you, Councillor. I will just flag that that comes up in a later paper as well because there's a full paper in attendance in today's meeting. So some of this I'll be presenting shortly. There are a number of strategies we've used. Some members of the committee will remember from last year that we had an intervention with education because there were some serious challenges for attendance in schools in Newham, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic, some families and reintroduction to school really challenging, particularly for some of those children who have experienced other difficulties in school. We were fortunate to be able to expand our attendance, and we now have a targeted attendance team who go into schools where there are children with persistent absence. We've also, to Councillor Ruiz's point a moment ago about SEND, we've also spread this out through training and supporting governors and school leaders to understand how they can intervene. And we've been, I know that you've attended training yourself, Councillor Ruiz. We found that sort of really significant impact on improving, particularly those persistent cases because it's empowered. I'm going to look at the data and the scrutiny, but also those, because often we make the mistake as a system of providing training for head teachers, whereas actually the people calling parents, the teaching assistants, the attendance officers, they're the ones that needed to have some of the training and support at some of those families. That's had a significant impact. And the final part really, and I can share more on this when we talk about attendance later if it's helpful, is working as a children's services team. We have a multi-agency group across children's services and with our partners in health, our partners in other parts of the Council and in other organisations that meet to talk about those children who are most at risk of being persistently absent from school. And they're often, not always, but often other professionals are involved. So there may be a health reason why that child's persistently absent. There may be a health reason for the family. There may be parental mental health challenges. There could be housing issues, which in Newham, as we know, is a significant challenge for some of our families. It's really important that the whole system think how do we prioritise school for the child, because often that's a way to move out of some of those other challenges. So we have really the whole system and that's why we've made so much progress, as I hope you'll listen. Thank you. Just wanted to add to that, because I will keep on banging the drum for governors, is that actually on every governing body, at every meeting, there is an item on attendance and we've managed, you know, before we wouldn't, we might get an odd report, but actually on governing bodies have actually honed in on on attendance because it's really important. And I think it's particularly important when they're concerned about safeguarding. Sometimes, so we saw a huge number of children who didn't come back after COVID. And for a lot, there was an understandable reason, but our concern was that actually the safest place for children is in school. And those were concerns we have to follow up. So yeah, I mean, I think that we did a very good campaign on attendance, were commended by the DFB for our campaign, but actually, and the schools have recognised that we have taken it really seriously. So anyone on Twitter will see that very often the schools actually say on Twitter, you know, congratulations to all those children who managed to come in for a full week. It's really important. Thank you. Anyone else? Jane? Yes, but following from what you said, about the safest place for children in schools. That would also apply to suspensions and exclusions, wouldn't it? Which certainly won't assist students attainment. So I wonder if you might have a comment on that. Of course, I mean, similarly, there are some groups of children who are more likely to be suspended or excluded than others, which is of significant concern to us, as outlined in the paper, particularly those groups who appear in more than one measure. We have a very proactive and effective intervention team who work within both the education service and also across children's services, who support schools to try to avoid exclusion, because we know the life chances of children who are excluded from school are significantly impacted. And so the first thing we do is to focus on that early intervention and prevention approach. There have been some improvements in terms of our permanent exclusion, so the difference between exclusions and suspensions is an exclusion is permanent, suspension is a period of time and then a return. However, we really wouldn't be happy until those exclusions went down even further and ideally were removed entirely, particularly for those groups most at risk of being excluded. There are differences, I think it's fair to say, and I haven't talked about school detail because that's not the focus of this scrutiny, there are certainly differences in terms of how inclusive some schools are compared to others when it comes to suspension exclusion. Some schools are more likely to use suspension or exclusion as a tool and so we are focusing on being really equitable with our challenge there, knowing which groups of schools or which schools are more likely to use those approaches and making sure that when they do use those approaches they're completely appropriate. So every school should must have a behaviour policy that clearly outlines what would qualify for, for want of a better word, a suspension or exclusion. It can't be used against a child for a different reason and we should always intervene there. We do have statutory powers to do so as a local authority if that happens and we often, well we support every exclusion panel when we're invited. Sometimes we're invited by the family, sometimes by the school, it depends and when it's an independent review panel we ensure that there's good training for all of those involved in the independent review panels. It's a very rigorous process, again it's been commended by the DFE for the rigour involved but it is an area of concern that will continue to be an area of concern for us, particularly as I say for some schools. So we need to hone in and I imagine Sarah would want all the governors to be doing so as well. So the up-to-date data as of 23-24 says that for suspensions we're 11th out of the 152 local authorities so the lower the number the better and for exclusions we're 43rd out of the 152 local authorities. So comparably we're okay but that doesn't mean that we're not going into every child and checking they are okay and also really thinking about the disproportionality and the question of why that is. Thank you. I wanted to follow it up but I know Sarah's going to. No, no, you carry on. No, I'm going to just talk about primary and secondary and what sort of difference. The suspensions and exclusions are much more frequent in secondary school, that probably won't surprise everyone. There are some in primary school but our main focus is on secondary school for all sorts of reasons. Exclusions and the behaviours that sometimes are attached to suspensions and exclusions occur more frequently in secondary school, that may be part of the reason. Also primary schools have a very different context. Feel more included and involved in a school where they spend all day with the same teacher, with the same cohort and you know whereas a secondary school context is less inclusive for some young people, not all, but for some that moving between subjects being less well known. Not to say some of our secondary schools don't do an incredibly good job with including young people but that is a national issue. Part of the challenge for us is ensuring every moment of a school's education is important. Be really careful around transition because as you move from primary to secondary we need to think how do we help those young people who may not feel as included to avoid exclusion and we also know and this is something we're still looking at the data of to really understand that if a young person is excluded in secondary school their younger siblings are much more likely to be excluded themselves later and that's a key cohort for us now to think about how do we work with so even our primary school is not excluding how did they work with the secondary school to avoid exclusions later on for those children. Sarah. Yeah just really because I think that there are always concerns for me around suspensions because and I mean an exclusion is an exclusion and I hate it but actually suspensions can have a far wider effect on the community so if your child is being suspended for three days in the main they're not likely to be at home with their mum and dad or their mum they're likely to be roaming the streets and so I think that schools need to look at the consequences of those suspensions and I know that we're looking at it quite closely. The other area I think is that there's probably a significant number of children with additional needs who get suspended for things that possibly neurotypical children wouldn't. I think it's about a balance and I think that sometimes schools are not great with behavioral needs and you know I think it's a real testament I think to some of our schools who have very very difficult young people and they manage to manage without exclusion or suspension and I think it's something that we need to we shouldn't accept it but actually we need to be offering a little bit more support. I think yeah you're right I'm hearing from a lot of parents this I got some case words they're saying instead of giving my children support they're giving detention and exclusion so you are very much right on that area yeah. Thank you. Jemima and then Lester. My question is actually connected to what you just said. I appreciate that a number of these my needs are small however what we do for those that are suspended like we just said they wouldn't be at home because the parents are at home and they will be on the high street shopping center where what do we have at least with it? So it's a great question. The context that Councillor Ruiz has mentioned is important because for a long time we've talked about exclusion being the worst outcome for a young person and therefore as a not just a new one as a system we've looked at exclusion being the thing we target with schools. We really need to now look at the impact of suspensions and ask and hold schools accountable for what those children are doing when they're suspended. When this child is excluded there's much more scrutiny and rigor around what the child is doing so when you're permanently excluded the school has to provide education immediately for them to do at home then they have to find an alternative place for them to go and they work with us on that we have approved there are other alternative revisions. With suspensions it's much too loose because effectively the child has been removed from school for a period of time and they will return and in my experience as an educator if you do work during that suspension for the child to have a positive reintegration they're also less likely to have a further suspension they're more likely to have a positive because it should be an intervention rather than a punishment and so it's changing that narrative. That narrative will take some time to change not with all schools but with some schools and also shifting the responsibility pleased to say that the changes that are potentially coming through the new children's wellbeing and schools bill will help us with that because it will give the local authority more power to intervene and more power to hold schools accountable. We can intervene more directly with maintained schools at the moment because governing bodies feed into us with academies we have less power to intervene at the moment. Laura quickly. Just to add the other thing is it's about preventing that suspension in the first place so whilst we wouldn't let's say open all the youth zones and say all the suspended children can come in here because you don't want to you know think oh make it attractive make it attractive what we do have is sometimes some schools will say to the youth so would you open earlier than you would so the teacher can come in with a couple of young people because we can see that things are becoming to be difficult maybe they're dysregulated because of something at home or something that's happened in their friendship group so they're working with safe spaces let's say in youth zones to prevent the escalation of suspension and exclusion for example. Chair I have a quick question in relation to Laura's comment, sorry, and Nabil's comment. I'm looking at the chair who's here to speak. Brief yes sure. It was really good when in 2014 the government at the time changed over the terminology for children that have emotional and social difficulties at school and it made it less of a negative badge however that coincided with a lack of funding for training and a lot of other related services that may have been able to to go in being minimized because of the academization so the Tam Marsh and the the SCN staff that we still have and the support staff through attendance and through other areas within the SCN department that we still have work very hard to support colleagues in schools as much as they can but these days a lot of the funding for training the staff is in schools so therefore it's for the schools to choose what they train the teachers on so in some schools if they've got a choice between upping the number of kids that get an A rather than the B or looking at how to manage your classroom so that all children feel included and you're not putting children under undue stress most schools will try and do a bit of each but of course it's up to the school to choose so what we can do as Annabel said before is work in our maintained schools with our governors and with our staff through the stuff that we already have with attendance and with attainment and with Tam Marsh and the SCN staff that we still have but you know we there's a lot for us to do and we're looking forward for that push that drive and also some funding we hope because we've had the funding towards capital funding for buildings we've had some of that money and we're waiting for the next chance of money and the next direction from the government to lead us forward into that kind of work thank you colleagues can I ask that just one person answer otherwise if all four of you want so it's going to take more time yeah I'm happy to stay here till 10 o'clock on me right quick question in relation to Annabel's response okay okay bringing you so Annabel it's nice to hear that you said you SCN department hold a school into account to prevent the further inclusion and suspensions how do you hold them into account please so again it relates to some of the other areas we've discussed because our our responsibilities vary a little so when when something when a process hasn't been followed appropriately for exclusion we can intervene and that would normally be myself or Laura in our capacity we can intervene in most cases it's not that process hasn't been followed but something hasn't been prevented so the school hasn't been inclusive and that's much more about us raising it with the head teacher raising it sometimes with the designated safeguarding lead if depending on the young person circumstances raising it with other professionals that would know that family some of our young people in that position will have other professions working with them and also raising it critically with the governors people that run a governor's because that's that's the accountability framework the accountability framework for our schools is unless it's an inspection is really the leadership and governance and so our governor is asking why a child is suspended when a child is excluded governors have to chair the panel so they have an opportunity to change the decision of the school if they feel that the exclusion isn't appropriate and in order to do that governors need to be well trained and consistent um as Kansas Early Ponson said we need to try and influence because we can't instruct to influence schools to train their staff to be more inclusive because we don't hold that funding we're hoping the government's going to put some more central funding into this so that we can push some thank you let's start you have any particular data on school some schools more trigger heavy than other schools yes and can that information be made available to parents when they're making a choice for this school to move to secondary and primary now not all parents may use that information but if i had information which said a particular school was trigger-happy with african children i would ensure that my child yeah that's a good question um there is no mandate for the school to share that information the local authority so some of that information broken down by school was shared um in response to the commission into black boys in the borough and with council mccallum not so this the that commission looked at the data anonymized and then we shared the data with around if we were to share that information with parents how we would do the going outside of our officers remit and we could end up with legal challenge from some of us i would welcome the government suggesting that local authorities do so in the way that we do with other data so schools have to publish their office did great rating rating they have to publish their safeguarding policies um declare that all members of staff have had have been recruited appropriately and through using safer recruitment processes um if you know we don't have this power sadly but we would welcome i'm sure um schools being asked to do so we can't force them to do so i mean maybe something else for governors to look at in many cases i would say i don't want to generalize too much but it's some of the schools outside of our maintained remit who would need more focus that and i'm not sure we can do that which don't of course have local authority governance i mean you know that's the anomaly yeah and a real challenge because um yeah i mean i think personally word most parents know about exclusions from schools through word of mouth right but actually if i'm honest i think the schools that probably exclude the most are academies and we don't have any governance governors on those schools yes i i mean no we don't have local authority governors on academy unless that they've been invited i mean um um decides to sue you to sue a little poverty for publicizing it um it should be about spending to children with certain characteristics i think i've been really courageous and also the um it is probably it's foi able somebody could do an foi request even for an academy oh yeah all right anything okay fyi release everything yeah okay thank you so so what about encourages a student or university to do research in this area do they even do the effort so there are a number of people doing research in this area of students i'm quite leading academics a number of journalists actually are also looking at this because it is it's not just a new challenge that doesn't mean we shouldn't look at it but sadly there are some groups of children as we all know well who are far far more likely to be suspended or excluded from school in this country than others and it's very much in the interest of those people my my concern just speaking as as someone with a lot of experience and trying to avoid exclusion for children having worked in alternative provision for example is that doesn't always help parents because it's one thing for people to be looking academically at things it's another thing for parents to understand what that means for their child and that's where we're slightly stuck as officers is how we make this information parent friendly for for our parents it's not always very accessible and equally this far i think we should be far more concerned about off-rolling yeah than suspensions and and you know that's a whole new bull name because we can never get proof of that okay thank you now that my colleagues have asked questions i've got a few questions okay okay so when illustrating disparities disproportionality ratios are being used the example you've used here is ethnic group versus exclusion and suspensions what are the other socioeconomic disadvantages you take into consideration when calculating disproportionality ratios so we've we've only so at the moment we're comparing the ethnic group data alongside these different factors within their education outcomes we've yet to do the next stage of this could be to do some more intersectional analysis of other factors which we haven't done yet at this stage this is our our first year of looking at the data in this way um as a system within the council not to say schools aren't already doing it so i would say that's the next step for us is to look at how the different we've we've managed to show where the same groups of children appear once but we've yet to intersectionality so if you are if you are of a particular ethnic group and um you have special educational needs and you've been excluded from school what does that mean in terms of your outcomes that's the next layer of this and you live in the world i mean it's one thing to say is we've used published data for this so for some intersectional work it's more difficult for us because we're not in the building with the children so we use dfe and intersectional analysis will require schools to that with us willingly okay thank you so um schools receive money to reduce outcome gaps between uh people premium uh pupils essentially let me see the word yeah uh people premium pupils and non-pp pupils and it says the schools have to show how the funding is used so does it mean that the cohort in the para 4.2 will be given extra support to have better educational outcomes it means it should definitely be in that report so every school has to publish every year of using a dfe template how they're using their people premium funding which children identify which children benefit and how they're measuring the impact from those children's educational outcomes we are now carrying out analysis of those statements those statements are also approved at governing body and then put on the website okay it should be we are still looking at how many of our schools are meeting those requirements not all schools meet those parts of an offset inspection so if they don't meet those requirements it comes up in the instruction um but we still need to keep looking because not all schools are doing that as well as they need to be and not all of them are identifying which groups of children benefit okay their gap for us okay thank you um so we have the ethnicity breakdown of uh children with send evidence children with send being in inclusive education lessons the disproportionality or inequalities in terms of the oh you mean learning about yeah so through our um pshe programs so personal social health and economic learning programs um all schools are now looking at how disproportionality affects um communities it's important that um our children aren't made to feel um negatively represented in that work so we've done a lot of work with our pshe forum to make sure we're also strength space because difference doesn't necessarily mean um that a child is less or that they haven't got something to offer many percent of children offer huge numbers of strengths to their peers so we're developing a program with our pshe leads to celebrate those differences as well as help children understand how differences could make them more disadvantaged and the other big piece of work that's that came out of the 2020 post pandemic and some of the increased focus on making sure our curriculum is more representative of the children who go to school in this country is establishment of education for change which is a charity set up by some of our head teachers to look at how how are we developing an anti-racist curriculum how we're empowered and our children young people identify positive role models within our schools to identify how they see themselves in various for example professions in literature in history and all of the other ways that all peoples have contributed to human life over history and we've um newham has been highlighted as a real yeah a very you know brilliant yeah i know we have incredibly diverse schools diverse communities and there's a lot of very strong practice in this area i know we've talked about lots of things we've not got right yet but it's just worth noting that our schools have also been commended many of them are at work so do we commission that charity no no we don't okay um okay so i've got um two other questions uh just to send children receive a broad and balanced curriculum that meets their needs to tackle inequalities who monitors this is it the local authority the governors or is it the offstead good question so if a child so the two groups of children who we identify send in this report one are those with education health and care plans so if a child is an education health and care plan that the timetable the curriculum the education offer is monitored by all of the professional bodies involved so that education would be our send service the health part would be our health partners within the nhs and other health partners and then care would be our colleagues in social care depending on the age that could be children social care or adult social care if they're over the age of 18 and so all partners will be part of the review of the quality the other part of education of course is the school or setting that the child is in and so the teacher and the senko the senko is a person they're often the the person that holds all of that together because they know every child that has an education health and care plan and then crucially the other people involved in reviewing the quality are the child themselves if able to and the parents or carer sometimes an advocate's involved depending on the level of need so the child with with very complex medical needs may need an advocate to support with communicating their input there and so that's monitored quite rigorously because it's a it's a legal document an education health care plan and the responsibilities not to say that there's still work to do some of that monitoring is a better quality than others and we still have challenges i'm sure you all hear from from people within your your parts of the local authority for parents saying this isn't good enough or we're not receiving this part of the ehc plan and so there's always work to do it might be health it might be education and the other group within this report are those sen supports children identified as sen support don't have an education health and care plan but they have been found to be presenting with special educational needs of some description it's a much looser group it's there to protect our children's needs and that it says this child probably needs some sen support as it says but it isn't reviewed by the local authority in the same way it's monitored and again our senko is the key person there and we are if we were to say where do you need to do more interventions probably with that group to send support group because there's no funding attached really to send support it's minimal you can have some some but it's minimal and that's a national issue that everyone's talking about at the moment but also those young people often are presenting with needs that aren't as clearly diagnosed maybe social emotional mental health they may be they may be more so for example a child who has poor attendance often won't have been able to be assessed for education health care plan so they may be categorized as sen support just a much more complex group of children and that's where we we need to focus more of our energy because the monitoring doesn't tend to be as tight okay my last question how is the high needs block funding being shared amongst sent children does every child get an equal amount or it depends what their needs are do we monitor each child's progression to tackle this proper disproportionality inequalities so for example if a child's with send is identified at the end of his school years which is GCSEs they're going to achieve level two formats in English but if it's not likely to happen will that child get more funding or it don't work like that so each child will receive some funding the amount of funding is dependent on their needs identified in the plan so the quality of the plan is critical because so for example some children will need specific health interventions which will require funding they may need equipment they some may need specific therapeutic interventions that will require specific funding in terms of the education part the school will receive funding to ensure that they meet the needs identified so some children for example will require a specific number of hours per week of certain subjects in order to help them progress because the purpose of the plan is to help that child make progress through their education and each part of that system needs so the funding is allocated on that basis there is also and so it is equitable in that it has to be meeting the needs we could do with a lot more of it in the system there's enough high needs funding to meet the need of that children that's not just the challenge in newham but it's particularly stark for us in newham all of our schools are struggling to meet needs financially some of our schools even more so because of falling pupil numbers which i know is a different topic but it's it's pertinent here because some even some of our most exclusive schools who have been you know celebrated for years supporting children with send are now struggling to pay for all the additional support because of the way that the funding formula is set up so i i would say that it's quick answer to your question is it's not that child and it's largely quite equitable but it's it's not enough okay thank you um we move on to the next item before i do that i i skipped agenda item five so um so before i move on to the agenda eight um i want to know um is there any reports that um to be updated on an urgent on any urgent safeguarding issues concerning children in the borough no parent okay thank you you also missed item six as well sure yeah okay not you know not that i wouldn't notice was item six on my agenda yeah because i have got the old agenda that's why okay i had an excuse there sarah okay so yeah we'll we'll do that at the end yes okay yeah um um are you going to present it as well okay one of all five minutes i'm sorry everyone so item eight is two papers in one we're presenting this is our annual report on education attainment data and also education attendance both of these we report and that's possible they're presented annually by the dfe so this is verified data um education attainment relates to the school year 2033 24 as it captures all of the attainment outcomes of children at the end of the last school year which is verified by the dfe in a binary which is why it comes now um overall attainment in newham is incredibly strong and has been for some time our children and young people work extremely hard and do really really well and so our families and children are really to be celebrated for that and we've captured here quite a detailed breakdown of all um ages of a child's education from early years and their fondness it's ksh2 then ksh5 this is the data that's published by schools schools obviously measure progress at other times but this is the the um the way that we capture it using national data we've also shared in the introduction on attainment just some headline figures but also some of the key areas priority moving forward um it's helpful that we're sharing this at the same time as sharing the earlier paper around disproportionate and inequality because clearly for many many children things look good some it's not good enough and so we need to really hone in on those groups of children in terms of attainment um the other paper i'll just briefly because we're doing them both together mention the other paper which is helpful to look at because as we said earlier um good attendance is there's a strong correlation with good attainment children attend well that's achieved better that's not just in newham that's a national data set as well and that's one of the reasons that we've been sharing this attendance paper with you at the same time as attainment as we did last year to demonstrate some of that progress i've already touched on so i won't i'll answer questions on it but i won't go through the progress we've made on attendance i've already mentioned that this evening but there has been a significant improvement for most children's attendance in newham and there's a fairly detailed set of next steps in there as well um i'm happy to take any questions yeah thank you any member okay thank you and i had one about the phonics um uh results because they're rather anomalous really aren't they they're below the others so um i could ask you why you think that might be but i'm also thinking because the overall achievement is so great does that mean that that little blip has kind of been remedied and overtaken so one doesn't need to yeah it's a really good question so if the phonics has been slightly below the other the other data sets for a while however it dropped particularly during and after the pandemic and that was a national trend because because of that period of a child's development being so impactful in terms of communication skills vocabulary development if you miss those those early years and perhaps don't have some of the access to outside of an education setting as some of our children don't you're growing up in a family where english isn't the language spoken at home or there isn't um enough capacity to do phonics at home for example as more more affluent families may have someone to do that with the child then that gap is stuck for some of those groups of children and also babies during the pandemic coming through phonics now and they early opportunities to develop vocabulary exactly so there is that and we're keeping a very close eye on the systemic babies and toddlers because as many other people are across the country because we want to make sure that that the blip that you described goes it's true to say that our key stage one and key stage two results have been considered as our primary study very very good intervening when a child is behind in phonics so that's the strength in the system and one thing going back to something i mentioned earlier but it's worth being aware of this as we keep an eye on it one concern we have is as school resources reduce as schools have left less finance all of these interventions cost money phonics interventions cost quite a lot of money additional you need additional staff to deliver phonics interventions because of phonics interventions in small groups it's not in a class setting particularly for those who are falling behind and without good phonics it's harder to learn to read and write effectively and so it can have an impact all the way through your school life and actually if you look at data from other parts of the country where phonics isn't as strong you see particularly GCSE English outcomes are extremely low and then that has an impact on other results as well so the primary school should be commended for how they intervene but it's something to be very careful of making sure that those two groups are looked at the children who've kind of been born during the pandemic and had those early years during the pandemic but also any schools with financial difficulty making sure that they're able to maintain that progress when you know resources are more restricted did you want to come in i was just going to say that um with the children that were affected um by the pandemic particularly those that were preschool or in reception therefore they missed out on those very very early and social skills and the teachings and the specialist teaching by reception and nursery staff to introduce them to their phonics as in as something that flows smoothly from all of the extra input that they do for speech and language in general because across the country we've also had a difficulty with that same cohort coming into schools with lower levels of speech language so that means that the schools are working incredibly hard and those staff are working incredibly hard to bring up the speech and language to bring up the social skills and the socialization skills to encourage the regular attendance and then to approach the and do a lot of back-filling so the schools are working very hard what we will of course be looking at um next year is we are expecting you know this to be we hope better but there are things that we can look at to see if there's ways in which we can support schools but of course not all schools are maintained schools thanks i was saying it's sort of caught up but you can't be too confident yeah shantu hi on page number 44 i can see the level of support of key stage one key stage two for um for reading and education health and care plan support and sc and d support i can see the update of 2023 as a percentage but i couldn't see is the the the graph the draft the the gap there is a gap i cannot see any improvement in 2024 key stage key stage one in 2024 um the government stopped measuring key stage one in 2024 so they they've they took that data up until 2022 how about the progress i couldn't see any progress either they've stopped taking that measure as well so this is published data from the department for education they've stopped taking that measure so schools don't need to report it what's the reason because if we don't know it but if the government have said you don't need to measure it anymore then schools don't measure it so they don't they don't because they don't need to they've been told not to do you know what i mean it's like if if you if you are always collecting data on one thing and somebody says you don't need to collect that anymore you don't collect it anymore so how we can measure then well they might measure internally schools will but they don't share that data oh so it'd be through the governors yeah yeah governors again by the time i finish in 26 i want everyone really to be a governor yep um oh i'm in preschool sarah we know some of you are angels too some of you are governor angels yeah and we love you very much yeah yes there can be yes for some young people because you're um if you're suspended it has an impact on your attendance data and it's important we understand the reasons so for everything i've read just on our list of children who are persistently absent we have the reason why and there is always a narrative per child if it's mentioned i'm teach because that's what we're talking about and that's what we're talking about and that's what we're talking about and that's child if it's mentioned uh this absence is primary and secondary um they're combining primary and secondary are we looking at section four um make sure i'm on the same page nine I've got you. Okay, 5.2. This is combined primary and secondary. Primary and secondary. Do you have any figures separate or primary and density? Is there any predictive information that you can use? Presumably the level of absence I would have thought would be greater in secondary and primary. Given the cohorts where the absence is particularly hard, what work is being done on the particular items in terms of being primary? So really good questions. So actually the number is quite high in both in Europe or has been historically but for two different reasons. In secondary it's linked to some of the challenges around suspension. Sometimes a sort of not suspension but a young person giving up on school. So electing to not go in which is a part of the same problem. In primary we've had a historical issue with families taking children out of primary school for a long extended holiday and so our persistent absence rates were actually very high for primary so much so that the DFE queried our data at one point. So we have two kind of different tax if you like. One is around the attendance campaign we've mentioned to encourage families not to take holiday during term time to improve attendance at primary which isn't an issue at secondary school. Our young people, apart from those where we have persistent absence, secondary school children you know attend very well. They want to do well in school. For persistent absence in secondary school it goes back to some of the things we talked about earlier. It's really holding schools to account so if they've got persistent absence our target attendance team go in and they meet with the senior leaders of the school. They talk about the individual cases. Sometimes they talk to the family to find out what's going on to make sure they're getting the full picture just to show the impact some of this is having. 98% of our schools buy into our attendance service. It's a traded service because although we're sometimes having challenging conversations with them they can see the impact it's having on their outcomes. It's improving their attendance. One thing about attendance is that it does come up in your offset inspection so it's an accountability tool. If attendance is poorer then a school will be penalized for an inspection. So schools really should, although we want them to do it for the right reasons, they really need to do it for that reason as well. So there is quite a kind of a strong wraparound approach to this with each of our schools. Final question. Do schools have an incentive if kids aren't going particularly well in secondary school to allow them to roam the streets? That's my off-roading question Esther. So some schools, and this is again not just a new challenge, some schools would prefer not to have some children in for secondary school because it has a negative impact on their outcomes and that's definitely a challenge. When it's a permanent exclusion or suspension we can intervene and we would always intervene strongly within a year 11 because that's a critical time to not be removed from your education. If we had more resource as a council then we could intervene in all year groups but year 11 would be a priority for us. The transition point that's been raised a couple times is really key. So if a young person has had attendance issues in year six what are we doing to rapidly improve that in year seven? So those those critical year groups are important but it's absolutely true to say that there's a system unfortunately for a while has had a perverse incentive to let children not go into school because they then don't appear on the figures. If we have evidence of that we intervene not only directly with the school if it's a multi-family trust we'd intervene with the trust but also we write to the director of the DFE because they need to intervene. That's the direct intervention for the Department of Education. Finding evidence that's very difficult. Very hard. Thank you. Shantil. Hi from the page number 45 the first paragraph Attenmann 80 SCP Attenmann 8 SCN support all of the category Attenmann and progress has been dropped in 2024 comparing 2023. So may we know the reasons? Paige are you on? I think it's this 45 last paragraph. Retains page of the again. I can't see I think most of them have stayed the same rather than dropped. Some of them have gone up. The first paragraph. We're looking at a graph. Are you looking at a graph? Yeah secondary and that's secondary or primary. It's secondary. You mean the attainment? The attainment eight. The one with attainment eight. Secondary attainment. Achieving so well. I mean part of the challenge is that these are such small margins because the attainment is so high that when it's a when it's a drop it's because more children go from an A you know they're they're the drop is at a very high level. So for example you'll have fewer children getting an A star and some getting an A. It's so that's why there's a comparative drop but overall the outcomes are still really strong. The exam boards each year I've been an examiner okay the exam boards each year they have different questions and they have different emphasis in the marking. It's always stringent but there may be a push to be tougher some years than others. It doesn't always happen but sometimes that can be the reason why there's small fluctuations because you'll have as I said as an example earlier schools will actually undertake training on how to push kids from B's to A's to to get that extra value added to get those kids up to the next level but sometimes it doesn't work for a number of reasons. Okay any other questions? I'm sure you must have got some. I do. You're not pleased are you? I'm very pleased. I'm very pleased. It's more TV time. Okay. B time. There's a football game on. Okay so on my packets on page 27 it says that the attendance has improved in p10 and p50 two cohorts. Is it because that the fines have been introduced for taking children out during term time? That will be part of it. Okay. Yeah and not all schools use the fine. Okay. Before a fine is introduced there is a series of sort of interventions so conversation with the family, a letter stating you know please don't take your child out of school. So there are a number of stages before a fine. Not in all schools like that. Not in all schools some some are more punitive than others and some schools don't use the within their ethos they don't use the fines. Okay sorry in comparison to schools who are using the fines and the ones who are not using is their term time holidays higher than the other schools? There are. Do we have that? There are some we do have some of that data so there are some schools that buck the trends they don't use the fines and they they don't have the term time holidays and in Newham it's an interesting anomaly those are our catholic schools. They've never used the fines and the families don't take the children their attendance is extremely high families don't take them out during term time. The rest of our schools by and large generalizing a little where the interventions have taken place that may or may not have led to fine it has improved the attendance of children missing school term time holiday. The catholic schools answer to a higher place you see and it's other and it sounds so much worse yeah i mean it goes so anecdotal yeah it isn't anecdotal actually and i don't know whether it still happens yeah but um at a school i was governor at when my daughter was at school through from sort of end of april to end of september they had a 50 percent attendance on a friday and a monday because in the part of the borough that was everybody had a caravan. Oh okay. It was Tuesday night they would come back monday night that was their pattern and the rest of the the rest of the time from sort of october through to january was fine okay right um i've got one more question um so you talk about the newham's school attendance support strategy it sounds really great i have to say i would like to know how it works does the school refer a child and then they work with the family and then again you have these children missing in education cme strategic board really impressive stuff but if you can explain a little to myself and colleagues so the um attendance support strategy we don't we sometimes work directly with children we work directly with the school and we have termly meetings with the attendance leads so normally there's an attendance officer depending on the side of the school with a deputy head or somebody with responsibility for attendance they meet with our attendance team so they go into the schools and they look at the list of children who are they'll have there'll be a a rated list if you like some children are showing as red because they're persistent absence issues what have you been doing so it's really talking about what they're doing with each case um looking at what's worked what hasn't worked if there's a school where there are concerns because things aren't improving the team will go back in again and there are a number of schools where we're doing that they'll go back in again sometimes if it's appropriate that attendance officer will also speak to the family and see what try to mediate for the school to see and sometimes other professionals can do that too so the child has a social worker or is known to another professional then that professional sometimes can be a helpful mediator with the school depending on what the issue is if a child's absence is perfect um is high because of a suspension we can then also intervene with some of our influence as well and so that's a very rigorous approach there's a clear i mean the team already has all of their meetings that term all the way into july um i've just agreed all of the timings for all of them so it's it's full on it's a it's they're a great team and they're now being asked to share how they work with local authorities all over the country it's very impressive i have to say highlighted as good yeah okay well done thank you i'll pass that on it's very nice really good um and just on the other point sorry catch them before before i um cma strategic board issues last year that's as i chair the strategic board it's as made up of um the attendance team the admissions team because sometimes a child waiting to go into school that's that's a point of where they may not start school and that can be tricky for some of our families if they're new to the country new to the borough a poor housing issue for example so the attendance team the admissions team our inclusion team our safeguarding education safeguarding children's social care colleagues we have everyone from members of the early years teams the virtual school it's a real team effort and in that meeting meets every two months the board looks at our children who are who may be at risk of missing education who or who are missing education we have some cme officers who go out to go out to children so the child is not attending and they they go on to the pa 50 and this is now it's a really critical point our officers will go out and they will go to the family um they work very closely with social care obviously because there will be safeguarding concerns if the child's not turning up um and at the same so at the same time as the attendance team are working with the school we have the cme team going out to the family that's how it yeah yeah it makes sense isn't it's really good thank you did you come on yeah sorry i'm just it's one of my one of my areas um but of course the team actually do all the work i just stay lovely every now and again and one of the things that's really really impressive not just the fact that this um the team and the way in which it has worked with schools has been noticed and recognized nationally is the fact that locally 95 percent of the schools pay for it now if you know any school heads you will know getting money out of them because it is so short is really really hard so the fact that they voluntarily because they don't have to buy into our service voluntarily buy into this service and it hasn't always been the case has it this has been built up by the team it's because heads talk to each other okay as anabel has explained attendance and the efforts that heads have taken towards changing a culture of attend non-attendance to attendance is monitored okay not very often by ofsted and they will go they will drill down even though we don't do deep drives anymore they will drill down into what has been undertaken and how things have been uh regularly monitored tracked and improved upon so the very fact that our heads are talking to each other and saying do you know what they're worth it go on go on give them the money and they'll come in and they'll they'll really make sure that not only are you fully legal but ethically you are doing the best for our children in our schools thank you um i've got two questions on attainment um so i know as a borough we're doing really well um with the attainment in primary and secondary schools and my question is what targeted interventions are in place to raise the um attainment for these cohorts that we're talking about and other question is how does local authority monitor the effectiveness of interventions to improve attainment so attainment is one of those areas that we don't have any statutory powers to intervene on as a local authority however we monitor it very closely for all the reasons we've discussed around the impact on life chances if a child doesn't achieve as well as their their peers then they're disadvantaged later on the the exception to what i just said is children who identified as send and children who are in alternative provision there we can intervene and ask the quality okay look at whether um there is appropriate support for them to make progress um we do however use some of the strategies i've already mentioned to influence and try to have an impact on the way that schools work to improve attainment similar to some of the other examples i shared earlier we have a really quite incredible practice in a lot of our schools so the main way that we actually do that if the school is open to it is to encourage schools to learn from one another so we have the best maths results in the country which is extraordinary compared to every other part of the country from the most you know all of the places where parents can afford private tuition our children do better children are really really much above their weight in lots of ways and so for that reason many of our schools are visited by people from all over not just the country but the world how do you get these maths outcomes we've had teachers from china and all sorts of places um which is wonderful uh so what we try to do is be strengths-based and celebrate and say actually why don't you go and learn from that school so particularly for newer heads who may be less experienced some of that work go and learn from those schools that do it well who are flag with flag and and many in the majority of cases that works if a school is not open to learning um then we would talk to governors we would talk to head teachers we would try to um you know challenge and support in that way um again it's it's not something we can intervene on attendance we can intervene quite directly yeah yeah um you know there are a number of things we can attainment's not the same but we are very blessed in newham i've worked in lots of different places and the attainment here is so strong yeah it is there's lots to learn from yeah try to build on that strength thank you moving on to agenda item nine health protection annual report are you presenting it all right we have the author online victor evening chair good evening commission can you hear all hear me yes great thank you apologies i can't be there in person um but i'll just do a brief introduction of the child protection annual report that covers um 2023 24 which is in relation to safeguarding promoting the welfare of newman's most vulnerable children so it kind of covers the headline performance outcomes that we've achieved in newham the governance arrangements for safeguarding children and quality assurance um sort of in reference to the conversation about um disproportionality and inequality um it references that in children's social care um in this this year we're um undertaken a deep dive in relation to um we know where global majority groups are over representing the figures in terms of um offstead we're currently rated good and overall with outstanding for leadership and management and we're kind of imminently expecting another inspection um in the next couple of months so last inspection was in 2000 full inspections in 2022 we made significant progress increase in terms of increasing the permanency of our workforce in the report it says that permanent workforce about 71 percent uh but we're closer now to over 80 percent um during 23 24 we had a focused visit on care leavers um which found that improvements have been sustained and identified no priority actions and this is important because in the new inspection austral have introduced a kind of separate graded judgment in relation to care leavers at the moment i'm just um completing our self-evaluation which kind of tells us where we are in terms of our quality of practice and services and that kind of tells me that since june 2023 24 post 2022 inspection up until now we sustained our performance and improved in many areas um so it highlights the governance arrangements so that includes this commission it talks about our practice and outcomes board which is chaired by our dcs and director of safeguarding early help where we look at performance every month and look at solutions and where we can sort of strengthen areas um it talks about our partnership arrangements and it focuses on the importance of our practice framework circles and support which we've been rolling out across cyps and now rolling out across agencies to ensure that we've got a shared language and approach to working with families and then finally i'm not going to go into all the detail but there's a there's a lot of data included in the report and also quality assurance measures to test the quality of our practice um so uh without further ado i'll open up for questions or anything else that um laura may want to add my babies did you want to add anything laura no i think victor's given it coverage and we can just take questions if that's okay with you chair colleagues any questions from the child protection annual report it's for noting by the commission isn't it's to note that we're not going to contribute anything to it because it's relating in scrutiny shantu i would like to know about two we're saying on page number 57 257 children were open to newham's your justice service so may i know the details oh yep children open to the youth justice service have been arrested and either received an out of court disposal um if they've admitted that they've done it or they've been found guilty in a court and received an order the orders are referral order youth rehabilitation order or they can be in a young offender's institution we have some children within the youth justice service who have been remanded to local authority care as well as remanded to custody or we're supporting through a bail package before they're going for their court trial for example yeah do you not think we needed amar body for this no no no i'm i'm the responsible on this one youth justice comes under me okay okay not amma all right so how are you going to support them who are facing uh going to court and so we have a uh actually a really good service in the youth justice service based in cumberland road um where we have um a full team who not only support our young people uh in prison because we also have to accept that we do have some uh in custody and they actually they have we're still responsible for them even though they're in custody so they would get a regular visit each young person so if they go to court and and receive a a community referral or whatever then they will be assigned a a pa from the youth justice service who would mentor they would have programs etc etc so there is a whole wrap around for those young people and we also work with the families of those young people because the the young people are that isn't just about them it's about their family their siblings a wider friendship group and we have now started to look at working with the victims of those crimes um which is can be quite tricky i mean you can't force a victim but actually that sometimes helps the perpetrator to perhaps fully understand how it feels to be the victim but very often the perpetrator has been a victim themselves so it's it's it's it's not easy but michelle and her team yeah do a really good job and and would always welcome we did visit right so it's really truly amazing look at um gangs county lines uh victims of modern day slavery i mean it's yeah yeah so i know yeah you've been having yeah michelle edwards leads it i'm very impressed and we are also jew so not only have we got an ilacs a certain social care inspection due we've got a youth justice inspection due this year okay can i just come in as the statutory dcs just to let you know the service is rated as requires improvement by a hmip so whilst it is an impressive service there it requires improvement in terms of the intervention to children the rate the performance indicators that we measure are first time entrants so those going into the youth justice system um rate of custody and reoffending rate our key performance indicators are okay they're doing okay in against the backdrop and you'll see when we hear the performance report next week of knife crime going up and crime going up so our young people are doing as well as we can and the staff there's room for improvement so i'd like to know the fee sorry through chair the figure is 257 how was the figure before i don't know the figure youth justice services nationally are going down and down so that i i haven't got the years before data i predict probably three years previously there would have been about 400 children in there and that's because um we all youth justice services and ours take a child's first approach offending behavior when you're a child is a vulnerability you're not a criminal you're you're a vulnerable child who is you know offending in a way because of a number of factors adverse childhood experiences for example so the criminal justice system is treating children differently in terms of when they come to the attention of the police they're looking for the reason behind before i bring you in jama i'm sorry i'm just going to come back to your comment sarah what you said that um where you're bringing the victims to the people who's committed the crime or the young people i think that's a very very powerful thing because in newham there was a campaign a christian group from america came in a few years ago called why forgive and i attended their meeting so they went to the secondary schools with the victims to show young people the impact these people are having life-changing uh injuries the families and children were crying in the audience so i think that's a very powerful way of doing is it it's let me just kind of correct my lead member okay victim awareness is a victim response is a standard that the youth justice service are are judged against it's a new standard in the new framework we've always worked with children around what we call restorative justice it's very rare although it can happen you can have a restorative justice conference where you bring the actual victim to the person who's committed the crime okay you would do some victim awareness work you'd be in touch with the victim and ask them what they would want that young okay and then the young person would do a letter of apology understanding in terms of events like bringing victims to schools uh the evidence is is now we used to think it was the best thing it's not evidence in terms of reoffending or offending is very poor and it's the same we used to take our young people who were known to youth justice to prisons the visits to inmates to put them off and it was thought amazing research is actually it does okay so the the best research is around diversion from offending behavior okay education addressing mental health issues substance misuse issues you know therapists all right thank you my question is after they have come out from extension or whatever how of how do we support them to integrate into the community because remember they are still young um yeah absolutely we have very few children in custody yeah less than a handful rightly so we have some children serving lengthy sentences for serious crimes and they will be adults well into adulthood when they come out but because children are looked after when they're remanded to custody they usually stay looked after even when they're sentenced although they don't meet the legislation we usually continue to look after them and if they're older they have care leaving rights so they would have an allocated personal advisor so there would be regular visits to them in terms of young people who have been remanded or or um serving very short sentences there's resettle there's intervention whilst they're in custody in terms of what they want to do and where they want to settle and also all the risks are assessed in terms of can they settle where they lived before they need to be somewhere else are they with family are they with the local authority so there's lots of resettlement packages and programs for them um post-custody is it working that is that isn't working because some of these children even though they are yeah yeah so custody is known to not reduce the chance of reoffending it's not a rehabilitation program in this country it's a punishment um we don't and i don't think we have had for a while children who have gone to custody and because there's this child's first approach so those who are remanded are remanded for serious crimes and if they're found guilty likely to be served very long sentences i think that's right i can see victor nodding yeah yeah just to confirm that's correct yeah just a couple of questions um first question is on five dot five dot three which are the most serious safe garden instance is there anything further do you remember a year ago second question was on paragraph it's about the missing children nine is there any further information victor did you want to take the local practice safeguarding review question did you hear that well no apologies i didn't quite hear the question itself um that's okay i'll take it when you mean is there any further information counselor in what way you're saying you couldn't have reviewed it's now a year but i just wanted to know if it's any sort of question oh it's got so the scope of thematic learning review is the review would be in april 20 yes yeah sorry the thematic learning review was completed um it was actually um not completed by april 24 it was completed by about september um because it was delayed there was learning lots of learning from that review wasn't wasn't incredibly different from the national learning of safeguarding reviews and thematic reviews in the area of um criminal exploitation as far as i can recall victor was things that we've discussed before exclusions domestic violence in early childhood um discriminate discrimination more likely to be black children involved is that right victor yeah that's correct and um all the learning has been embedded in our youth safety strategy so we're taking the learning and ensure that it informs some of the actions that we're going to take to make improvements in terms of youth safety that's great and it's back the safe the four safeguarding reviews which are underway have they been completed yes majority of those have been completed yes they've got one learning review still outstanding because of um which was delayed due to information that was needed from the police and that criminal criminal investigations can delay sometimes the learning reviews but the others have been completed what was the reason for the review these reviews are public documents they're on the newham safeguarding children's partnership website so and they it it depends what the the review was on so one was on a child who died in her aunt's home and she was diabetic there's neglectful situations and there's a number of recommendations that implemented through a learning plan any other questions and on the myth the missing missing children going to number nine it's nine it's one of the nine ones nine.1.5 he's 72 did you say what was your question again counselor apologies is it update an update because this was 24 um oh i see um i think absolutely yeah um very similar number of incidents um in 24 25 as to the number of incidents here and similar numbers of missing children from care and home as far as i can recall when we looked at the data last month um so what what we want to see is a reduction in not only numbers of incidents length of time children are actually missing um and it's and uh particularly you know ages of children in newham we don't um allow for which many other local authorities do we don't allow for our children in care to be classed as absent or away from placement without authorization all our children are classed as missing there's pros and cons of that um because some of our children will be 16 and want to stay with their partner or their friend but refuse to give us their address so in effect they are missing from our care but we may not you know they may not be as at much risk as a 14 year old who's a risk of exploitation or a three-year-old who's been abducted from care for example if your child is 16 and gone missing now you will be that's right absolutely yes of course yeah but you may know where they are and this and children in care often talk about if i wasn't in care i would tell you where i am like i would tell my parent where i am because i know my parent wouldn't send the police round but you have a duty to send the police round to my friend's house and i don't want or in actual fact laura when we've talked to some of our children in care and they say like i want to go and have a sleepover with a friend they don't it's the fact that this has to be all these checks and balances with the friends before they can go whereas you and i might you you and i probably would know the parent so therefore and you would check that this was happening that they weren't just going off somewhere but actually for a child in care go and have a sleepover is a really big long drawn out thing it can't be it cannot be spontaneous and i think you know it's it's very tricky as a as a child yeah growing up in care shantu oh sorry did you want to come in victor yeah if you don't mind if that's okay um just adds to what's been already said importantly we always review when a child's gone missing what may have happened so we undertake a return home in in the interview just to check if the child's okay and you know if there's anything they want to share and it's any support they might need so that's kind of really important so yeah there are many occasions when um a child may be staying at a friend's house and we can verify that and it's like that's okay but in terms of corporate parenting responsibilities we make sure that children are safe and sometimes we have to make sure and kind of do some further work with our partner colleagues just to double check but we are working together with partners to look at those children that we're most worried about and where we can help work together to kind of reduce the numbers of missing episodes and kind of reduce the risk and potential harm that those children may come to okay yes as lead member uh the service after reports a child missing to me if they've been missing for longer than seven days it goes up in escalation so yeah so better checks and balances yeah okay so from page number 58 say again why are the black boys more likely to be victim of criminal explore exploitations and of or serious youth balance charged with the knife positions to be stopped and searched by the police receive custodial sentences as well as less likely to be long-term foster placement and wait longer to be adopted how are you going to help them yeah that's a very good question the reason is we are hearing such a long time on our issues yeah yeah it's a it's a really good question there's lots of research out there around why do um black and global majority but particularly black caribbean black african white british and um black caribbean children um are over represented in the criminal justice systems and the social care system um there's a lot of research out there i would always start with structural and systemic racism and discrimination in our society don't think we should shy away from that um there's also a number of of different reasons so when you analyze referrals referrals from partner agencies about the same thing for different children it's known that black caribbean children for example are more likely to be referred for their behavior and why they're more likely to be referred for their parents behavior so in terms of addressing that how you do is understand the data so you've got to understand what the data is telling you so you can hold up and grab partners and say this is the difference in the referral have you analyzed what you're doing you have to have a diverse workforce you have to train them in to be more culturally competent and then you have to take part in national projects so the reason why very young black children spend longer waiting for adoption is you know a multi-factorial that includes less black adopters in less black people who who put themselves forward to adopt because of cultural factors it might be or because of poverty factors or where they live etc so it's multifaceted it's really difficult for me to answer that question but because there are societal issues as well as that we can get underneath i understand laura just additional supplementary so you know there are manufacturers involved i understand but how are you going to help them is there anything has been placed by lvn yeah so sorry so you you the first stage is and the service has done this and victor pointed to it in his introduction is to analyze the data and understand where the disproportionality and disparity lies chair through chair yeah go on so is there any way in in the future when you have relevant agenda can you know more about can you see the figures so how new home so this scrutiny chose two specific figures in relation to disproportionality i don't know if you remember we presented a huge amount of array of figures and you decided to choose the re-referral rate and suspensions in terms to monitor your disproportionality figures so i would always recommend that to a children's and education scrutiny picking some just disproportionality figures so you can see them getting better one of the one of the practical when i can talk about fostering and adoption because that in actual fact what we try and do is encourage more families from global majorities to to actually become foster carers because nine times out of ten they may well go on to be adopters so you know it's it's actually encouraging and it's incumbent on all of it i mean i talk about fostering all the time to people i meet you know who are interested in posturing because actually they can make a real difference to our children but if we are you know we have an aging population of our foster carers so we are actively recruiting foster carers recruit foster carers that match our diverse community then actually that gives our children a better chance so not only do i want you to become a governor but how many kids can you say well depends on the pain because it's not paid it is not paid isn't it no because it's you get an allowance okay as we do as counselors okay so i think it's a very generous allowance yeah okay but do they use that money towards the child's expenses some of it will be okay the child's expenses and as some of us will know children become very expensive yes yes any other questions um yeah i had one um i'll bring jemmy in and then jay knew thank you jim my question was in regards to the missing children and it appears to me that it's like is there none that a child would decide we're going to do sleep over whether or not fostering or at parents house but then it also appears to be that all these 200 missing children uh that's no no that's very that's that's rare i was just pointing out some local authorities would say that they're absent or actually away from placement without authorization in newham we count the children as missing if we don't know where they are they're officially missing most of the children who go missing are their push and pull factors so either they're unhappy at home or the pull factors are the extra familial harm factors criminal exploitation exploitation and serious youth violence are pulling them to be missing they're the majority we have eight children last the last year's figures um we have eight children who are in our care who have been missing over 50 times each so those eight children account for 400 i've got my maths right 400 missing incidents out of the 1300 they will go missing each night all of them have exploitation factors do we have updates or what are we doing to yeah absolutely yeah so we work as victor was saying we work with our partner agencies so if a child goes missing you have what's called a child protection strategy discussion between police health and education the most important thing is to find that child there and then so it usually goes over to to the police to do that activity so we give if they're in our care even if they're not in our care we ask their parents we'll track their phone we'll track their oyster card we'll track their bank card we will be phoning them every day their independent reviewing officer phones them every day the return home worker who they may know because of missing from last time we'll contact them and we a lot of children do keep in contact with their workers but sometimes aren't willing to say where they are the last question the same thing has there been any fatality in these figures that a child has passed on me these are missing based on being actually missing at the time i no not to my knowledge however there have been fatalities of children from serious youth violence and serious incidents against children where part of their factors are that they are known for being missing or known for being exploited what are we doing to prevent that to prevent that from happening because we are we are looking at it as a pattern yeah we refer to the police yeah bring them back they go again in it in the in the extreme where you feel that a child is could be at such risk obviously you could never predict it but if you feel a child could be at such risk the police have options serving threats threats to life to young people or we can contain young people in secure accommodation without them having to commit a crime you have to go to court i mean i can give permission to do that for 72 hours and then you go to courts for secure welfare secure accommodation it's not something you would want to do regularly because you are effectively locking up a child who's not committed an event but their own way for about that yes jane um not a real question that she was just asking for a bit of an update on the corporate parenting board and how it's working and how children in care are involved in it no so there was um we had a bit of a relook at it and we felt um at one stage every meeting was fairly formal like business meetings and to encourage more young people to attend every other meeting they completely do the agenda and they do the invitations and that was working for quite a while if i'm honest a little reboot i think that um and it's something that i've discussed with the with various people because we're not necessarily getting the attendance of young people the corporate parenting board is not for my benefit you know i mean i i can sit and talk to officers anytime um so we're having a refresh of that but also interestingly um and you all understand this is that for some reason the um democratic services do not include corporate parenting board as one of the committees all right so now for this year because it didn't happen last year when when we as elected members are asked what committees we would like to go on corporate parenting will be one of those but it's not as it's not a it's not a committee that you'll get points we're going to to make up your attendance all right let's get your punches but actually yeah and i think it's yet to be decided how many we would have but i would say no more than three because i think else you know that can be a bit intimidating but it we do need that those those meetings that are completely um organized by the young people can be really interesting because they decide on the topics and they decide who gets invited they chair the meeting i mean so it's like it's a lot of fun it is a lot of fun but the imbalance i think is fair to say is that they tend to be the children in care council who are very proactive in these meetings and we need to get more of the care leavers because else you know i thought that they would want to discuss housing and their lack of housing and all of it but of course our children in care haven't got to that housing site yet you know you know so housing their housing isn't as important it would be if you were a care leaver yes yes well thank you for that jane thank you quick comment very quick thing um i saw something recently from a fellow counselor that implied that corporate parenting board covered all of the children in newham it doesn't it just covers those children under local authority care because the rest of the children have parents okay uh if there aren't any questions from colleagues i've got a few questions i'll be very quick because i'm mindful of the time yep so um laura you being one else laura you mentioned that um there are young people who go to prison but come out as adults um do you do a case review on those children when they go in or when they come out to see whether that could have been stopped or when they go to prison that's it some no sometimes we have done learning reviews haven't we victor on those who have perpetrated serious crimes yes but we wouldn't necessarily do it on everyone it's not it's not a sorry it's not a criteria that we have to notify the national panel okay but if we feel there's learning okay we will delve into the young person's history and we've done a few of those haven't we victor yes um yeah when we think it would be useful whether maybe new information or new uh learning we could uh ascertain then we would undertake a review but we do that in agreement with partners okay um so just gonna add there yeah um this isn't part of children young people services or even education but i'm aware that there are some secondary schools in the borough who keep track of um those former students who may now be in detention okay one kind or another actually have cavities to supply those young people with basic necessities okay that's really good yeah that's those catholics again yeah yeah i know i know the sectioning though he's mentioning you might know yeah i knew yeah and um child child in need plans are 1217 child protection plans are 304 what's the difference between a child in need plan and a protection plan so do you want to explain the difference between child in need and child protection um if a child reaches a threshold so once we've had the strategy discussion or there's been incidents taking place and we're concerned that the child may be suffering significant harm then we may hold a child protection conference and it might be that the multi-agency department makes a decision for that child to be made subject to a child protection plan alternatively we may work with the family and the child may be subject to a child in need plan so they're in need of protection but don't meet that higher threshold and so this is a different threshold for us working with families effectively and working with children okay so if a young so if a young person who's got child protection plan is it because of domestic violence they're going to neglect substance misuse yes hang on right it there's four categories of uh where children could be supported by a child protection plan sexual abuse emotional abuse physical abuse or neglect domestic violence depending on the violence the child protection chair and the multi-agency partnership could could decide that a child being a victim of domestic violence is physical in case they're at risk of being injured emotional or neglect is usually emotional abuse or neglect okay so when a child has a protection plan um are they're not necessarily in care they can be at home and have a child protection yes a child on a child protection plan would be at home okay and not in care the legislation and guidance doesn't allow you to have children in care and on a child protection plan because they don't allow for dual planning that being said children on a child protection plan you could have as part of that plan that that child needs to go and stay with their grandmother their aunt or their cousin while a parent goes into rehab is in a mental health institution under a section for example in a supportive way okay and is it likely a child who's had a child protection plan are they likely to end up in care victor did you hear that yeah many children that we work with and families that we work with um we have alternative arrangements than care so we can work with the family to to sort of increase the protection and safety for that child and they remain at home um so there are some children that do come into our care but it's not um it's not in all cases and our aim would be to actually keep our children at home yeah yeah having said that most children who come into care would have been on a child protection plan unless the other way around in the community that we did because we'd want to do everything we can to support them at home so i'm just going to ask about um newham safeguarding children uh partnership board um did i say that yeah um so as their strategic priorities um they're looking into child sexual abuse and child mental health in newham and also they're talking about the impacts that a child could have through racism is is it a problem that we have in newham about child sexual exploitation csc is there is the evidence that we have issues with it are there children yeah who was being sexually exploited or risk of yes okay and are they individually or is there a group like i'm talking about the rogerom case oh victor um we haven't we haven't got um evidence that we've got um sort of groups or gangs that are sexually exploiting newham children okay there have been there have been cases where the police have been involved in operations and have uncovered um groups that have operated in newham or across borders um but we have not had many situations like that um so it's not necessarily a model that's been used that's kind of used across newham however we're alert to all types of exploitation um and uh grooming of children uh in newham okay so yeah i mean that's something that we kind of keep our eye out for yeah okay meaning can i just say that the majority if i'm correcting this historically the majority of children that suffer sexual abuse it's within the home or the home family and community context it's very rare for it to be an external group no unless unless it's that's why because i the reason i asked is it's a strategic priority for the nscp so i thought is there something going on yeah in newham um so coming back to child mental health um we know it's quite high amongst our young people and children as a local authority is there much we can do or do we pass it on to camp so how does it work we work as a partnership all the agencies work as a partnership victor was around in the time where child mental health got um yeah stages as a priority and do you want to just say the reasons for that yeah i mean the the sort of rationale around the time we made it a priority was post post-pandemic so there were the children affected by the lockdown um and i think there was an increase and there has been sort of impacts of um the lockdown on some children and people um and we've seen that rise in sort of um children coming forward with with mental health um challenges and difficulties um so we made that a priority and there was there was a challenge in terms of the resources to respond within the nhs um so we've been working um to develop alternatives um to support children and people so for it for example we've strengthened our front door for children's services where the where children are kind of um requiring sort of additional support around the mental health um to sort of seek alternatives to cams for example so kind of early response early identification of issues and kind of early support so there's a range of things that we've been doing and it's something that we can we'll continue to work as a partnership to address okay could i just give the next yeah part the answer that um many parents will go to the school first with regards to children suffering mental health um uh troubles at home or at school and the schools can use their pupil premium they can also use their um sem budgets for those students with social emotional mental health issues where they've got them on this school action criteria which gets under extra funding from government they can put that towards therapeutic approaches in school in primary school that may be group approaches it may be class well-being approaches the hse and also even as low down as uh children in say key stage one or two may have the opportunity to have either 10 20 or 30 sessions a year with a school therapist which is paid for through the school those therapists may and the parents working with them may then choose to do or may themselves go straight to the gp or get the school to do a referral to cams cams depending on what the need is in terms of therapeutic services it's a lot quicker than some of the other referrals to the things like the adhd or the um asd team so children can be seen quite quickly within six weeks sometimes in different parts of the power okay my final question is um about the circles of support practice framework um if you can just say what it is and then why is this what is different in this framework than what we had before okay yeah we didn't have in newham we didn't have a practice model before okay it's um i would say it's fairly new over the last 10 years evidence shows that authorities which have a practice model they are all relational but call different things restorative justice systemic practice science of safety motivational practice those types of things they're all relational at the heart of it um and they are a way for work with families that is known to make sustained change so not just change for the moment but to make longer term change to improve children's outcomes and so it we've called ours circles of support because it works around a circle goes around the family goes around the child it goes around the staff member formers around the professionals all with the aim of supporting each other collaborate collaborating with each other to make improvements to outcomes for children and that model has been further developed and we've now launched its next iteration which is still the same circle and still the same six c's collaboration clarity compassion for example and but we've gone much more specific in terms of our what we are obsessed with addressing which is anti-discriminatory in our practice keeping families together domestic abuse and family shared decision making thank you yeah is it you okay shanta that's the last question okay so you just discussed i'm going to bring something broadly quickly many children have been waiting to be seen by martian camps experts children are children had experienced multiple and interrelated needs with domestic violence identified in hundred percent of cases emotional sexual and physical abuse as well as neglect were present in 25 of the cases how are you going to improve these services are you going to work with energies or are you going to hire by lvn to improve these services how are you going how are you going to work as a partnership yeah so we can't improve camera services we can assist as a partnership they do so for example we know that the waiting list for cams is children will wait too long so we have an integrated front door we have mental health professionals in our front door who will provide early intervention and prevention to stop needs escalating and we have new mac which is you a multi-agency collaboration of different charities and different services around the borough so the children's society has just opened a lovely service called time and locally here and we get those charities together or agencies together to intervene early in children's lives cams is yes professional therapy but also is a diagnosis around mental health and actually it's not about the diagnosis in itself it's about what intervention you're putting in place to help children it won't change from one day to the other and so we work in a partnership rather than we would start employing clinicians having said that we do have clinical experts in our service and that's part of our systemic model we have a team of clinicians who do go out and see families alongside social workers or early health practitioners to to try to assist in what the issues are and and then we also are hoping to pilot a team in newham that will then eventually become for the whole of northeast london to work with children with mental health needs who are at risk of going into hospital or at risk of going into care or those who are already in hospital to ensure their discharge so we're trying to do all we can but we can't take over from the services to be provided by health thank you okay so in that case can we agree the report thank you and item number six is our work plan we've got one more meeting left which is next week so the meeting we're having today was supposed to be held on the 20th 18th of february and to unforeseen circumstances it got changed many times my apologies for that apologies for that but that's why we're having two meetings back to back and the performance dashboard won't have it today it will come next week and it is the the work plan is at the in the last page of your pack so i'm not going to go into it will be all any safeguarding update i think you said beginning it at the end so what a bit like me there asked if there was any update yeah the answer was no okay is that okay so you can note it's at the last page and i want to thank officers colleagues and um the scrutiny commission and officers here thanks and and micta yes yes and happy is everybody yes i just grabbed you for two minutes i've got to go to the airport now do you mind not the corporate parents for our young people i'm picking up my daughter i was going to paint she's going to describe them liability do you mind if i take this out and just put we want to ensure the children receive the best young people receive the best support regardless we're not they're corporate parents corporate parenting is a legal term no we're not when children unless you're talking about our children in care we've got the same shoulder pads unless you're talking about children in