A report providing an overview of complaints activity and performance for Children’s Services for the period from 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2020.

The Executive Director of Children’s Services – Education, Early Help and Social Care, BFfC, submitted a report providing the Committee with an overview of complaints activity and performance for Children’s Services for the period from 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2020.  A copy of the BFfC Customer Services Annual Report 2019-20 was appended to the report.

The report stated that during the period 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2020, the service had received 92 statutory complaints, which was a decrease of 4 (4.17%) compared to the 96 that had been received in 2018/19.  In the same period, 74 compliments had been received an increase of 51 compared to the previous year when 23 had been received.  Of the 92 complaints that had been received, 16 had been resolved through alternative dispute resolution by the social care teams and the remaining 76 had been progressed to a formal investigation, although nine of these had subsequently been withdrawn by the complainant once the investigation had commenced.

During the period, nine complaints had progressed to Stage 2 investigation and a further two had progressed to a Stage 3 investigation, although these had not all been progressions of Stage 1 complaints that had been received in the same period, as some had related to Stage 1 and 2 investigations that had been carried out in 2018/19.

The report explained that the Customer Relations Team had continued to raise awareness of the complaints process and in line with recommendations from Ofsted had worked with operational teams to encourage children and young people to submit complaints where they were dissatisfied with the service they had received.  The Council and BFfC had worked closely to drive improvement in the service for children.

The report included the intended actions for further improvement which were as follows:

·         The Council’s Customer Relations Team and BFfC would conduct a review of complaints, with specific emphasis on identifying learning points;

·         Learnings points would be more widely shared with BFfC staff through a dedicated section of BFfC’s intranet knowledge hub;

·         Complaints training for BFfC team and assistant manager would become mandatory;

·         An improved BFfC process for capturing learning from complaints would be mapped and embedded, so learning was more visible in future annual reports;

·         There would be improved Customer Relation Team recording, and BFfC oversight, of complaints which were reported to the Ombudsman and visible learning from outcomes would be reported in quarterly internal reports and externally in the annual report;

·         There would be greater oversight of Subject Access Requests (SARs) completed by the Customer Relations Team on behalf of BFfC, with more frequent reporting by the Team on open SARs status so that any issues with completing these within timescale were addressed at an earlier stage.

The Committee discussed the report and in answer to questions raised, Deborah Glassbrook, Executive Director of Children’s Services – Education, Early Help and Social Care, BFfC, explained that a resource on learning from complaints was imbedded in BFfC quality assurance activities and was used for practice improvements.

Resolved –

(1)     That the contents of the report and intended actions to further improve the management of representations, particularly complaints in children’s services in Reading, be noted;

(2)     That the continuing work to raise awareness of all conflict resolution processes including the statutory complaints process and encourage appropriate use by children, young people and their families be noted.