Issue - meetings

The Panel review the Annual Report so as to ensure members are appraised on the care provided to children for whom the Local Authority are responsible.

The Head of Service for Children’s Quality Assurance and Safeguarding (Children and Young People) introduced this report to the Panel.

She said that the capacity of the IRO Service is challenging as there is a real demand for it and that this has had an effect on the timeliness of the reviews that have been carried out.

She stated that it has been a challenging 12 months for all concerned, but stressed that the team are committed the care of children and young people within B&NES.

She informed the Panel that the steps taken to strengthen the service and improve recruitment have been positive and have led to three posts being permanently recruited to. She added though that the IRO service will likely have further difficulties in meeting statutory requirements if the number of children in care continues to rise.

She explained that since the summer of 2021, IRO’s have returned to seeing children in person, visiting them where they live and spending time with them within their local community. Some children and young people however have expressed a wish for their reviews to continue to be held virtually and where IRO’s feel this is appropriate and in the child’s best interests they will accommodate this request.

She stated that the number of children and young people in care in this reporting period had increased by 9%, with there being 197 children in care at the year end. Once again, the number of children coming into care was higher than the number of children leaving care.

She said that due to the challenges with recruitment and retention the service has had some difficulty in allocating children based on their needs with allocation primarily being led by an IRO’s capacity. She added that whilst the average caseload of an IRO remains fairly consistent, there were more children

coming into care in Q2 and Q4 than leaving and for a small IRO service which is often working at capacity, this creates additional pressure on IRO’s and in turn impacts on IRO’s being able to review care plans within 20 working days of the child coming into care.

She informed the Panel that the IRO service was instrumental in supporting children to participate in the Bright Spots ‘Your Life, Your Care’ 2020-2021 survey which was undertaken between February and April 2021. She said that this saw 40 children in care aged between 4-18 years old taking part in the survey.

She stated that in this reporting period there were eight formal escalations and thirty-nine informal escalations made by IRO’s. She added that themed audits are to be undertaken with these being identified by the themes emerging from the quality assurance activity within the service and the data reports.

She said that she was proud of the service for continuing to provide support in such a challenging environment.

Councillor Michelle O’Doherty said that she felt the challenges that were being faced by the service. She asked how much of a factor was  ...  view the full minutes text for item 62