Your first ten days as a portfolio holder for children's services

It will also be helpful to identify who are your eyes and ears in the community – foster carers, school governors and youth leaders, for example, who can give you an informed perspective on how things are going.

Meet with the leader and/or mayor to discuss their own aims and aspirations for children and young people in the area. This will help you to frame your own vision and establish a good working partnership from the beginning. Speaking to scrutiny and corporate parenting colleagues to work out how you want to work together will be useful; they will be able to provide a vital independent perspective, and you may be able to give them a steer on where they could most usefully support and inform your work.  Going forward, have regular conversations with your leader and cabinet colleagues or fellow committee chairs, as well as scrutiny colleagues, both to keep them engaged in your portfolio and to look at how children and young people are being considered in wider plans. Potholes might spark more debate, but children’s services can bust the budget when things go wrong.

When you meet with the director of children’s services, find out what structures are in place both within the council and externally to discuss children’s issues. This can include things like regional adoption agencies and school improvement structures. As you spend time in the portfolio holder role, consider whether these are functioning and aligned as they should be, and whether they give you a clear view of what is going on. Does everyone involved in these structures have a shared view of how things are operating?

You should be fully briefed and receive reports on any critical incidents affecting children’s services, and have briefings and pre-meetings (where required) before key meetings. Make sure your support staff and the director of children’s services know how you wish to receive this information and how they can reach you quickly if they need to.

It is helpful to know the basic steps of child protection, from referrals and assessments through to child protection plans and taking children into the care of the local authority. Go through this alongside relevant data with the director or another appropriate officer and later, have a frontline social worker talk you through it so that you understand it as it happens “on the ground”. Fully understanding both the data and the process will give you a fuller picture and allow you to provide more effective and constructive challenge.

Ask your director to talk you through the local education landscape and the council’s role in this. What is the council’s relationship with local academies like? Are there enough spaces to meet demand and how is this being managed? Are there any issues with alternative provision or specialist SEND provision?

• Speak to your director of children's services
  • Agree how often you will meet.
  • Agree how you will receive updates between meetings where required, including for urgent situations.
  • Clarify your responsibilities.
  • Find out the strengths of the department, what the challenges are and what's being done about these.
  • Understand the local landscape for children and young people - how effective are relevant partnerships, what is the relationship like with local schools, what are the key challenges facing young people?

• Go through your budget with the finance team and director of children’s services.




• Arrange to sit down with a frontline social worker or relevant department lead to go through the child safeguarding process.

• Read your most recent Ofsted report and associated action plan and self-assessments.

• Book onto the LGA’s children’s leadership essentials course.

• Make contact with a peer mentor (via the LGA’s Principal Advisers if needed).

• Set up meetings in the future with:
  • service managers
  • frontline staff
  • children, young people and families
  • key partners.

The following are terms you are likely to hear a lot in your role; a more detailed glossary about children in care in particular is available in our “Corporate Parenting” resource pack.

Academy school

A state-funded school directly funded by the Department for Education and independent of local authority control. They are run by an academy trust and may have a sponsor, such as a business or university. Trusts may run a single academy or a group of academies.

ADCS

Association of Directors of Children’s Services, a membership organisation for directors of children’s services and their leadership teams.

Child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS)

Services that work with children and young people experiencing emotional, behavioural or mental health difficulties.

Cafcass

The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service looks after the interests of children involved in family court proceedings.

Care order

A court order approving the case for a child to be taken into care.

Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG)

These commission most hospital and community NHS services in their area, including mental health and learning disability services.

Child exploitation (CE)

A term used in some authorities to cover both criminal (CCE) and sexual (CSE) exploitation of children, to acknowledge that they may be interconnected, and a child may be experiencing both at the same time, and to reinforce the importance of services working together to address complex threats and needs.

Child criminal exploitation (CCE)

A process by which children are trafficked, exploited or coerced into committing crimes. County lines (see below) is a form of CCE.

Child sexual exploitation (CSE)

Child sexual exploitation is a form of child sexual abuse. It occurs where an individual or group takes advantage of an imbalance of power to coerce, manipulate or deceive a child or young person under the age of 18 into sexual activity (a) in exchange for something the victim needs or wants, and/or (b) for the financial advantage or increased status of the perpetrator or facilitator. The victim may have been sexually exploited even if the sexual activity appears consensual. Child sexual exploitation does not always involve physical contact; it can also occur through the use of technology.

Children’s home

A residential facility where one or more children are cared for by qualified workers, not in a family setting.

Children in need

Under Section 17 of the Children Act 1989, a child is classified as “in need” if they are unlikely to achieve or maintain a reasonable standard of health or development without support from the council, or if they are disabled. The council has a responsibility to provide services to safeguard and promote the welfare of these children.

County lines

A tactic used by groups or gangs (often in urban areas) to facilitate the selling of drugs in another area (often suburban or rural), reducing their risk of detection. This usually involves the exploitation of young people or vulnerable adults.

Dedicated schools grant (DSG)

The DSG is ring-fenced funding from the Government to provide education locally. It is made up of the schools block, the central school services block, the early years block and the high needs block.

EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan)

A legally binding plan for those between 0 and 25 in education who have additional needs. The plan coordinates a child’s educational, health and social needs and sets out any additional support they need.

Family and friends foster care

This is where a child is looked-after by a relative or a friend, but the local authority still has legal responsibility for them.

Foster care

Care in a family, that has been approved for this task, for a child whose own family is unable to care for them. It is considered temporary in that there is no legal split from the birth family (as with adoption), but can be long term where this is in the best interests of the child.

Free school

A state-funded school directly funded by the Department for Education and independent of local authority control. They can be set up and run by groups including charities, universities, community groups and parents.

Free school meals (FSM)

Children whose parents receive certain benefits are eligible for free meals at school. All children in reception and years 1 and 2 in state funded schools are entitled to universal infant free school meals.

Home to school transport

Councils have duties to promote the use of sustainable travel and transport for children travelling to school, and to make transport arrangements without charge for all eligible children.

Independent fostering agency (IFA)

IFAs provide fostering services to local authorities. They recruit, train and support their own foster carers who the council can then place a child with on payment of a fee. IFAs can be charities, not-for-profit or profit-making.

Inspection of Local Authority Children’s Services (ILACS)

ILACS is the current framework used by Ofsted to inspect children’s services.

Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA)

JSNAs, usually developed by the local authority’s public health team and health partners, identify the current and future health needs of the local population to inform and guide commissioning of health, wellbeing and social care services within local authority areas.

Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy (JHWS)

The JHWS outlines how local partners will work to improve health in the local population and reduce health inequalities.

Joint targeted area inspection (JTAI)

Joint assessments by the relevant inspectorates of how local authorities, the police, health, probation and youth offending services are working together in an area to identify, support and protect vulnerable children and young people. Each JTAI has a ‘deep dive’ element, for example child exploitation, mental health or children living with domestic abuse.

Kinship care

The care of a child by relatives or close friends. This can be formal (e.g. family and friends foster care) or informal.

Looked-after child

A child in the care of the local authority. The abbreviation LAC is often used as short-hand but children in care have raised concerns about the connotations of this, so consider whether you can use “CLA” (child looked-after) or similar instead.

Maintained school

A state-funded school that is funded through and accountable to the local authority. These must follow the national curriculum and national teacher pay and conditions apply.

Modern slavery

Modern slavery encompasses slavery, servitude, and forced or compulsory labour and human trafficking. A person is trafficked if they are brought to (or moved around) a country by others who threaten, frighten, hurt and force them to do work or other things they don’t want to do.

Multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH)

A MASH is a single point of contact for safeguarding concerns in an area, bringing together partners such as the police and health with the council to consider safeguarding referrals.

No recourse to public funds (NRPF)

This refers to people who are subject to immigration control and have no entitlement to welfare benefits or public housing. This does not affect councils’ responsibilities towards children.

Pupil premium

Additional funding for publicly-funded schools to help them improve the attainment of disadvantage pupils. Eligible pupils are those on free school meals, looked-after children and some previously looked-after children.

Regional adoption agency (RAA)

Regional arrangements for providing adoption services, which can include councils working together and joining with voluntary adoption agencies.

Regional Improvement and Innovation Alliance (RIIA)

Regional partnerships between the LGA, ADCS and the Department for Education set up to promote improvement in children’s services at a regional level.

Regional schools commissioner (RSC)

RSCs oversee academies and free schools. They are responsible for taking action where there is underperformance in these schools or by academy sponsors.

Schools forum

A local forum made up of representatives from all forms of state funded schools, nurseries and 16-19 provision. The forum must be consulted on changes to the local schools funding formula, and must agree how much of the DSG can be retained by the council for central services.

Section 47

Section 47 of the Children Act 1989 places children’s services under a duty to investigate if they are informed that a child in their area:

• is subject of an Emergency Protection Order;
• is in police protection; or
• is suffering, or is likely to suffer significant harm

They must then decide whether any action is needed to safeguard that child’s welfare.

Secure children’s home

Secure children’s homes offer specialist care and intensive support in a secure setting to young people detained for their own welfare (for example, if they are likely to place themselves in risky situations and cannot otherwise be kept safe), or to those sentenced by the courts. These are referred to as welfare beds and youth justice beds respectively.

Solace

The representative body for chief executives and senior managers working in the public sector in the UK.

Special educational needs and disability (SEND)

A child or young person is considered to have SEND if they have significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of others of the same age, or have a disability which prevents or hinders them from making use of mainstream educational facilities.

Special guardianship and SGOs

A legal arrangement in which a child lives with carers who have parental responsibility for them until they turn 18, but legal ties with the parents are not cut as they would be with adoption. The child is no longer the responsibility of the local authority, and is looked after under a Special Guardianship Order (SGO).

Troubled Families

This may have a different local name that your director of children’s services can advise you of. It is programme of targeted intervention for families with multiple problems, for example crime, anti-social behaviour, truancy, unemployment, mental health problems and domestic abuse.

Unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC)

The definition of an unaccompanied asylum seeking child is set out in the Immigration Rules as someone who:

• is under 18 years of age when the claim is submitted;
• is claiming in their own right; and
• is separated from both parents and is not being cared for by an adult who in law or by custom has responsibility to do so.

Virtual school head

All local authorities must have a virtual school head (VSH) in charge of promoting the educational achievement of the children looked-after by that authority, or who has left care via adoption or a special guardianship order. Their role is to know how the looked-after children are doing, and help school staff and social workers to find out about the extra needs of these children and plan any additional support available to them. They must also provide advice and information to adoptive parents and special guardians. Pupil premium for looked-after children is controlled by the VSH. VSHs also work with the children’s services department and all schools in the area on initiatives to promote the education of children in care.

Voluntary aided school

A maintained school (see above), however a foundation or trust (usually a religious organisation) employs the staff, inputs a small proportion of the capital costs for the school and forms a majority on the governing body.

Voluntary controlled school

A maintained school (see above) where a foundation or trust (usually a religious organisation) forms a majority on the governing body.

Youth Offending Team (YOT)

A YOT brings together the council with partners including the police, education, probation and health, and carries out the council’s responsibilities for local youth crime prevention, supporting young people at the police station and in court, and supervising young people serving a community sentence.