Joint inspection of services to protect children and young
people in the South Lanarkshire Council area
2 December 2010
The inspection of services to protect children1 in the South
Lanarkshire Council area was carried out in August and
September 2010. We looked at the services provided by health,
the police, the council and the Children’s Reporter. We also
looked at the services provided by voluntary and independent
organisations. Our report describes how good they are at
protecting children and keeping them safe. To find this out we
read a sample of children’s files which were held by these
services. We talked to a number of children and their parents
and carers to listen to their views about the services they had
received. We also spoke to staff in these services who worked
with children, parents and carers and to senior managers who
were responsible for these staff and the services they provided.
What we found and tell you about in this report is based on a
sample of children and families. We cannot promise that this will
be the same for every child in the area who might need help.
A team of inspectors gathered all the information and helped to
write this report. These inspectors have experience of working
across the range of services involved in protecting children.
Inspection teams include professional staff who work in council
areas elsewhere in Scotland.
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When we refer to children in this report we mean children and young people
under the age of 18 years.
Contents
1. The area
2. Particular strengths that make a difference to children and families
3. Examples of good practice
4. How well are the needs of children and families met?
5. How good is the management and delivery of services?
6. How good is leadership and direction?
7. How are services improving?
8. What happens next?
1. The area
South Lanarkshire is situated in the central belt of Scotland. It covers
an area of 1,772 square kilometres and is made up of various urban
and rural communities. The main centres of population include East
Kilbride, Hamilton, Cambuslang, Rutherglen and Lanark. The Council
area has a population of 310,930 with 20.9% under the age of 18
years which is broadly in line with the Scottish average of 20.1%.
The number of children referred to the council for child protection
enquiries increased between 2007 and 2010. The level of referrals is
consistently lower than for Scotland as a whole. The proportion of
children on the Child Protection Register (CPR) in South Lanarkshire
is 2.4 per 1000 which is lower than the national average of 2.8 per
1000.
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2. Particular strengths that made a difference to children and
families
•
Staff working well together to provide help and support at an
early stage.
•
Support provided by the Emergency Social Work Service staff
to help keep children safe.
•
Joint working by staff to identify and meet the longer-term
needs of children who have experienced abuse or neglect.
•
Consistent contact with staff helping to build trusting
relationships.
•
Effective partnership working led by Chief Officers and senior
managers.
3. Examples of good practice
•
Practical help and support provided by staff to improve the skills
and confidence of new mothers through the First steps
programme.
•
The Street, an innovative drama project helping children and
young people to address their risky behaviour and keep
themselves safe.
•
Social work staff carefully recording their observations of
parents’ contact with children to help make assessments.
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4. How well are the needs of children and families met?
Children are benefiting from a wide range of imaginative activities in
schools to support their personal safety. Social workers help individual
children to recognise risky situations and keep themselves safe.
Children and families receive helpful and up-to-date advice about
keeping safe when using the internet through projects such as Safe
and Sound. They benefit from earlier and better coordinated help and
support to prevent difficulties arising or increasing. Practical support
provided to parents through programmes such as the First Steps
increases their skills and confidence in caring for their children.
Vulnerable unborn babies are identified early and help is provided to
reduce risks before they are born. Children and families affected by
domestic abuse and substance misuse get timely and helpful support.
Staff are very alert to children who may be at risk and take prompt and
effective action to make sure they are kept safe. The Emergency
Social Work Service responds quickly and effectively to concerns
about children. Children and families are kept fully informed during
child protection investigations.
Staff use legal measures well to protect children. When it is no longer
safe for children to remain at home, staff take positive steps to find an
alternative place for them to be cared for with relatives, friends, foster
carers or in residential children’s houses. Staff usually carry out
checks on carers to ensure children’s safety, but do not always record
these well.
Children’s needs are met very well by staff working effectively
together. Staff now pay closer attention to identifying children’s
longer-term needs and their lives are improving as a result. Children
are often helped to achieve at school, enjoy good health and have
safe, caring places to live. Most children who need specialist services
to recover from the effects of abuse get appropriate help quickly.
Staff are alert to risks to children who go missing. Services have
robust procedures for tracking and tracing those who go missing from
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education. Staff know what action to take if children run away from
home, residential or foster care and offer appropriate support on their
safe return. Staff have helpful guidance on identifying and responding
to children who may have been brought into or moved around the
country illegally. Staff are helpfully raising awareness of the needs of
gay and lesbian young people and making sure they have access to
relevant information and support.
Children and families benefit from regular and meaningful contact with
staff and are helped to build very positive and trusting relationships.
Staff respond very well to the needs of children and families who
require additional support to communicate effectively. Children and
families are successfully involved in meetings where decisions are
made about them and helped to express their views. Staff listen
carefully to children and observe changes in their behaviour to
understand their needs and feelings. Most parents are helped to
understand what is expected of them to keep their children safe.
Some parents and children are helped to express their views through
an independent support person, but this is not always available to all
those who could benefit from it.
5. How good is the management and delivery of services?
Staff are improving how they assess risks and needs. Public health
nurses now assess these routinely for all children and use the
assessments to help meet children’s needs. They now provide
information to the Children’s Reporter when concerns arise. This is
helping the Reporter identify vulnerable children more quickly to
ensure they get the help they need. There has been improvement in
the quality of social workers’ reports. More of these now analyse risks
thoroughly and identify what is helping to protect children. When
training and support from managers is provided the skills and
confidence of social workers in making assessments are improved.
Further work is needed to achieve a consistently high quality of
assessments.
4
The approach to gathering information from health staff is still
inconsistent. Police and social work staff do not always investigate
concerns about children together when they should. Health staff
should be involved more regularly by police and social work staff when
decisions are made about the need for children to be medically
examined. Medical staff are available at all times to carry these out in
a child friendly environment. However, police and social work staff
sometimes encounter difficulties arranging medical examinations of
children. They need to be clearer about who they should contact.
Staff planning together to meet children’s needs has improved
significantly. Delays between child protection investigations and initial
decision-making meetings have reduced. Actions to be taken by staff
agreed at these meetings are taken forward quicker and more
effectively. Staff are working together better and meeting more
regularly. They are focussing more clearly on implementing child
protection plans. Planning for some vulnerable children not on the
CPR could be improved by taking a similar approach. In a few cases,
child protection plans are still not clear enough about what needs to
happen to reduce risks to children. Staff across services understand
what they want to improve for children. However, they need more help
from their managers to understand the purpose of different plans and
write these so that progress can be measured better. Revised
paperwork is helping staff to focus more on good outcomes for
children and how these can be achieved.
Staff work well together to share information about sex offenders who
may be a risk to children.
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Chief Officers and senior managers across services recognise the
importance of reviewing and reflecting on their work to improve
services and outcomes for children. They give this a very high priority
and usefully involve managers and staff at all levels. A wide range of
review activities have been undertaken. In a few of these the views of
service users have been gathered to help identify strengths and areas
for improvement. Senior managers are aware that self-evaluation
should focus more on outcomes for children. It could also be more
strongly linked to making improvements.
6. How good is leadership and direction?
Chief Officers and senior managers have successfully established a
shared vision for child protection which they have communicated well
to staff. The vision, values and aims are outlined in key high level
council and service plans. These link well and reflect both national
and local priorities for child protection. Chief Officers and senior
managers are providing strong and effective leadership to staff in
developing and delivering child protection services. They support staff
well and successfully promote a culture of learning from experience.
Local priorities for child protection have been set with clear targets for
staff to meet. The Child Protection Committee monitors and reviews
progress against a variety of action plans. Chief Officers and senior
managers are very effective at promoting, leading and directing
partnership working. They make resources available and share them
where appropriate. They now need to give clearer direction on
information-sharing, joint investigations and involving health staff in
decisions about medical examinations of children. This could help
achieve a more consistent approach by staff. Joint approaches to
ensuring all children get the help they need when they need it is
strengthening partnership working. Staff have a clearer understanding
of each other’s roles and responsibilities.
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7. How are services improving?
The Integrated Children’s Services Plan sets out key priorities for child
protection. Progress in achieving these is monitored and reviewed
regularly by senior managers. Working together, managers and staff
have made important and worthwhile improvements to key child
protection processes. These have led to better outcomes for
vulnerable children and their families. Significant improvements have
been made in giving social work reports to the Children’s Reporter
earlier. Improved monitoring arrangements by senior managers has
helped to achieve this and other improvements. Working together,
police and social work staff have recently set up a process to consider
police reports about children affected by domestic abuse. This is
improving information-sharing with health and education staff and
providing better early support to vulnerable children. Senior managers
now need to give greater priority to making improvements in a few
important areas, including how investigations are jointly planned and in
decision-making on medical examinations.
8. What happens next?
We are confident that services will be able to make the necessary
improvements in light of the inspection findings. As a result, we will
make no more visits in connection with this report. Our link inspector
will maintain contact with services to support improvement.
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We have agreed the following areas for improvement with services in
the South Lanarkshire Council area.
•
Lead and direct improvements in joint investigations ensuring the
early involvement of health staff.
•
Further strengthen links between services reviewing their work and
making improvements.
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Quality indicators help services and inspectors to judge what is good
and what needs to be improved in the work to protect children and
meet their needs. You can find these quality indicators in the HMIE
publication How well do we protect children and meet their needs?
Following the inspection of each local authority area, the Scottish
Government gathers evaluations of four important quality indicators to
keep track of how well services across Scotland are doing to protect
children and meet their needs.
Here are the evaluations of these for the South Lanarkshire Council
area.
Children are listened to and respected
Children are helped to keep safe
Response to immediate concerns
Meeting needs and reducing long term harm
very good
very good
very good
very good
We also evaluated the following aspects of the work within the local
authority area.
Self-evaluation
Improvements in performance
good
good
Managing Inspector: Kevin Mitchell
December 2010
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To find out more about inspections or get an electronic copy of this
report go to www.hmie.gov.uk. Please contact the Business
Management and Communications Team (BMCT) if you wish to
enquire about our arrangements for translated or other appropriate
versions.
If you wish to comment about any of our inspections, contact us
at HMIEenquiries@hmie.gsi.gov.uk or alternatively you should write in
the first instance to BMCT, HM Inspectorate of Education, Denholm
House, Almondvale Business Park, Almondvale Way,
Livingston EH54 6GA.
Our complaints procedure is available from our website
www.hmie.gov.uk or alternatively you can write to our Complaints
Manager, at the address above or by telephoning 01506 600259.
If you are not satisfied with the action we have taken at the end of our
complaints procedure, you can raise your complaint with the Scottish
Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO). The SPSO is fully independent
and has powers to investigate complaints about Government
departments and agencies. You should write to SPSO, Freepost
EH641, Edinburgh EH3 0BR. You can also telephone 0800 377 7330,
fax 0800 377 7331 or e-mail: ask@spso.org.uk. More information
about the Ombudsman’s office can be obtained from the website
at www.spso.org.uk.
This report uses the following word scale to make clear
judgements made by inspectors.
excellent
very good
good
satisfactory
weak
unsatisfactory
outstanding, sector leading
major strengths
important strengths with some areas for
improvement
strengths just outweigh weaknesses
important weaknesses
major weaknesses
Crown Copyright 2010
HM Inspectorate of Education