Issue - meetings

The Children’s Health and Wellbeing 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 began by acknowledging that there had been some real challenges within the service between 2023 and 2024.

She said that she was really passionate about our children in care and making sure that they have a really good quality IRO service and that they are able to build really safe and secure relationships with their IRO. 

She wished to acknowledge that during this period there was the sudden death of one of our children in care who was 17, approaching 18 years old. She added that there was a Child Safeguarding Practice Review report done as a result of the child's death.

She stated that there were two key, core areas for the IRO service to think about and that was about how we escalate and challenge some of our colleagues across Health, Education and Children's Social Care when an Independent Reviewing Officer isn't satisfied that the areas of a child's care planning is progressing adequately that they are following a robust escalation process.

She explained that within the report there is reference to a Dispute Resolution Protocol which was a recommendation of the IRO handbook which has not been updated since 2010 and that she thought many IRO managers and the IRO themselves would advocate that that does need to be looked at in more detail and revised.

She said that there was a real challenge in the IRO service because your remit is to ensure that care planning for children in care is progressing, but equally you have to take on board some of the challenges that we may face within services. She added that nationally they were seeing significant changes in terms of being able to access services from the Social Work practice.

She said that one of the areas that they have reflected upon as a service is what are the barriers to IROs in making formal escalations and challenges and then trying to find that balance around working with colleagues in a respectful and courteous way whilst also championing for our children in care and what they need.

She stated that they had relaunched the Dispute Resolution Protocol in September to be able to generate a greater sense of what the themes and challenges were for our children in care that IROs were identifying. She added that they were then looking with colleagues within Children's Social Care about how we can take some of those themes forward, learn from them and have strengthened our reporting and how we collect that data.

She informed the Panel that there were 359 Children in the service at the end of 2023 / 2024 which was quite a significant number of children for a service that has only 6.4 full-time equivalent members of staff. She said that children can be placed locally within B&NES, but could also live in other areas of the country, such as London and Birmingham for example.

She explained that this presents a significant  ...  view the full minutes text for item 67