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Children’s Services Improvement Plan Update – March 2021

The Improvement Partnership met the morning of 16 March.

This was a really key meeting in terms of reviewing progress across our core priorities a year into improvement, coming out of lockdown, Eleanor ending her involvement with us and handing over to a Department for Education Improvement Adviser in April and Melissa setting her direction of travel. The Improvement Partnership considered a detailed review across our four key priorities (care leavers, children in care, neglect and leadership and management) focusing on work to date (how much?) evidence about current performance and the quality of practice (how well?) and whether this was impacting on outcomes for children (so what?). In addition we heard the voice of young people, of staff and initial findings from Practice Week. This enabled some priorities for the next phase to be proposed and agreed.

I’m sure you’ll be really glad to see workforce stability, workforce development based on restorative practice and values leading to improved work to create behaviour change with families and informing our leadership and management, being a learning organisation and focusing more clearly on achieving our core priority outcomes for children and young people at the heart of this next phase.

I think this is a really critical and exciting moment for us where we are shifting our focus to not just fixing the things that Ofsted found but to the fundamental aspects that impact on how we listen to and work with children, young people and families, our partners and each other to achieve priority outcomes.

Eleanor challenged us to set a fifth priority which more clearly emphasises our ambition for supporting families through strong locality based partnerships. I’m sure you’d welcome this too.

Looking forward to working with you to develop and implement the more detailed plan for the next phase and making the improvements needed.

We will be developing materials to communicate key messages about the next phase within teams. As ever, please do contact me in the meantime if you have questions or thoughts.

All of the papers from the meeting are available here.

Vivien Lines 
Improvement Director

If you think that the child is at risk of significant harm, contact our Front Door directly by calling 0345 155 1071. In an emergency call 999.


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