At its meeting today, Thursday 19 December 2024, Herefordshire Council’s Cabinet received two reports from Children’s Services.
Corporate Parenting Strategy
Cabinet endorsed the Corporate Parenting Strategy 2025-2027 which sets out the ambition, actions and outcomes the council needs to achieve for our children and young people as a Corporate Parent.
Leader of Herefordshire Council, Councillor Jonathan Lester, said:
“Today Cabinet has endorsed an extremely important strategy that reinforces our responsibilities as corporate parents of Herefordshire children. This key document will now be imbedded in the council’s consciousness and will be continually referenced when striving to deliver the best for our children and young people.
“This strategy is a multi-agency document and working with our partners we will do all we can to ensure the children in our care, and those leaving our care, have the best of life chances we can create for them. We will support all children to have the best start in life and help them to achieve their aspirations.”
Ofsted Monitoring Visit Feedback
Cabinet also received the feedback letter from Ofsted following their fifth monitoring visit in October which had a focus on the protection of children at risk of extra familial harm.
Inspectors reported a wide range of positive findings, including effective and timely multi-agency working to identify, support and protect children at risk from experiencing extra familial harm and exploitation.
Feedback included:
Get Safe specialist team – Ofsted found that “Children at risk of extra familial harm in Herefordshire benefit from a committed specialist team, which reduces risk for many of these vulnerable children”. They found the Get Safe team to “work effectively to reduce risks for children and young people and their work to be “timely and well structured”.
Early Help, support, and identification of risk – Ofsted found that a range of early help services were available to support children at risk of exploitation and that for most children who come to the attention of children services their needs and risks are promptly identified though effective systems in place in MASH (Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub).
Partnership Working – Ofsted found the external partnership collaboration is helping to protect vulnerable children through targeted interventions and or disruption activity and that this collaboration and information sharing between partners was improved since previous visits.
Quality of practice – Ofsted found that the child and family assessments that they had reviewed in other parts of the service, from front door to children in care and care leavers and completed in recent months, were “an improved quality” to those they have historically observed. Ofsted found these assessments as being “detailed and reflecting overarching needs, with an exploration of risks to the child”.
Councillor Ivan Powell, Cabinet Member for Children and Young People said:
“We’re pleased that the report acknowledges positive signs of improvement. We recognise that we have some work to do but we are in a considerably better place than we were two years ago.
“We have a refreshed and more focused Improvement Plan and we are determined to continue our work at pace to provide our children and families with the best services possible.
