Agenda item

One Reading Partnership

A presentation on the One Reading Partnership

Minutes:

Vicky Rhodes, Strategic Early Help Lead, Brighter Futures for Children (BFfC), gave a presentation on the ONE Reading Partnership.

Just over a year ago there had been agreement to disband the Children’s Trust Board and re-create the ONE Reading Partnership.  The Partnership was supported by, but not led by, BFfC and was a partnership that had come together to deliver the Early Intervention and Prevention Strategy for children.  The partnership had first met in March 2019 and had met three times since then.  Rather than having a traditional set of terms of reference the partnership had adopted a consensus which had embedded the principles of the partnership and the way work was carried out together with partners.  The Board was well attended by senior system leaders who could release resources and respond to challenges from the delivery group.  The focus of the partnership was to sustain early intervention services and reduce demand on high cost specialist services.

The Strategy was delivered through a delivery model of working groups that had been born out of the priorities of the Strategy and there were a number of groups of children and young people that would be prioritised including under-five’s, adolescents and those children and young people with emotional and wellbeing needs.  Systems priorities had also been developed that set out how all those involved worked together to use data, how there was a clear pathway in and out of specialist services and early help and wherever possible children, young people and families had been involved in the design of systems.

It had been acknowledged that across the Borough traditional child protection systems did not work well for adolescent young people and therefore the partnership wanted to develop a different approach to work with young people aged thirteen and over.  There were now six/seven sub-groups addressing adolescent risk all of whom were coordinating activity and thinking.  The groups helped track young people from the earliest intervention right through to specialist provision.  A Community Adolescent Support Team had been set up which brought together youth workers, family workers and systemic therapists and was currently working with 19 young people with the aim of stopping them entering the care system.  A Youth Diversion Hub had also been established, meeting on a six weekly basis, with the aim of being more preventative and young people were identified that the data was showing that there should be concerns about but who had not entered statutory services.  The hub also looked at young people who had been subject to multiple arrests by the police but who hadn’t met the threshold for the youth offending service.  Work had also been carried out with colleagues in Education to coordinate the prevention activity that was taking place in schools.

Another partnership group was the Graduated Responses Group that was chaired by BFfC and focused on trying to reduce the demand on children’s social care.  There had been 12,000 contacts at the children’s services front door in the previous financial year but less than 20% had met the threshold for statutory intervention.  When schools had been contacted they had asked that systems and processes should not be changed unless absolutely necessary and during summer 2019 there had been multi agency discussions with schools about families with the aim of looking at other ways to support them to make sure their needs were met outside of statutory services.

Department for Education transformation money had been used for 0 to 5 year olds and work was being carried out with 24 cases with the aim of taking them out of the care system.  Work was also focusing on emotional wellbeing and adoption of strength based approaches to working with families and wherever possible being trauma informed.

Measuring the impact of early intervention was particularly challenging and a hybrid approach was being taken.  A lot of data was available from the Troubled Families Programme and 1,500 families were being tracked and would continue to be monitored against the Troubled Families outcomes.

Spreading the ONE Reading message was a priority, a website had been set up and a newsletter had been produced.  The launch had taken place in September 2018 and a follow-up conference would take place in November 2019 to see what progress had been made and what still needed to be done.  The conference would be for families to find out how they wanted to influence the service.

Resolved –    That the presentation be noted.

 

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