UPDATE NO 203 08 July 2016

Regional Adoption Leadership Board

The South East ALB met on 27th June in Wokingham; the meeting was less well attended than usual (partly due to train issues), nonetheless, the group had a useful discussion about latest developments in the regional adoption agency projects, including the most recent email from the DfE.

Milton Keynes is involved in one of the demonstrator projects; otherwise to that, none of the South East RAAs are on the accelerated programme.  We also had a useful update from First4Adoption regarding the Adoption Register project. The group is considering it’s terms of reference and frequency of meetings in the light of the RAA agenda and national developments involving the ALB.  The next meeting is on 15th September 2016

Memorandum of Cooperation – Children’s Social Work Agency Event

Our MoC Agency event went ahead on 1July.  It was very well attended with over 60 attendees representing 29 agencies.  Julie Fisher (Deputy Chief Executive & DCS Surrey) opened the event. The second session included full discussion of the MoC.

The final session explored the potential for greater collaboration between local authorities and agencies in future, there was a strong appetite to work together to improve referencing (ensuring quality, speeding up the process and minimising duplication) and also for greater inter-regional arrangements.

Agency colleagues were generally positive about the MoC and most had some experience of working with similar arrangements in other regions.  I have attached the slides from meeting for your information. Many thanks to Julie and Surrey for hosting the event and also Hampshire, Buckinghamshire, West Berks, West Sussex and Kent colleagues for helping to facilitate the meeting.

Leadership Development

Southampton have just signed up for the Step up to Leadership course in September 2016

We continue to offer our successful portfolio of Leadership Development Courses all of which have been positively evaluated by delegates.

This year we have added a new course recently piloted in Hampshire and IoW. The senior team attended a one-dayCoaching to Improve Performance workshop to ensure the Directorate were fully conversant with the training undertaken by their three cohorts of managers on two-day programme and to develop their own coaching skills to use in their own performance management roles.

We are also offering LAs the opportunity to train their own trainers for all our courses. Our aim is to increase the capacity and capability across the region  to ensure future sustainability within LAs.

A new departure for us has been running these training courses for adult services and for schools so please contact Di Smith, details below, if this is of interest to you. 

All courses are run in-house in the LA who provides the venue. Each course is accompanied by a range of training resources for the delegates including a comprehensive handbook. The current courses on offer are as follows and details of each course and the costs for each can be found by downloading the April 2016 Leadership Development Prospectus. 

Coaching to Improve Performance

Embedding a Coaching Culture

Leading Change in Times of Austerity

Step Up to Leadership   

We can also arrange one-to-one coaching, especially to support newly appointed 2nd and 3rd tier managers

If you require further details or wish to book a course please get in touch with Di Smith (contact details below)

Workforce – Children’s Workforce Virtual Network & Social Work Health Check Benchmarking

We have our second conference call scheduled to take place shortly. The first meeting was very productive with wide ranging discussion. The agenda for our meeting next week includes:      

• Regional Workforce Round Up
• Social Work Health Check
• Return to Social Work
• Potential Development for a Regional Website  

To date we have representatives from Bracknell Forest, Brighton and Hove, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire/Isle of Wight, Kent, Milton Keynes, Oxfordshire, Portsmouth, West Berks, West Sussex and Windsor and Maidenhead. These authorities have chosen to be represented by senior leaders, principal social workers or HR Partners.   

The network has started a piece of work to explore the potential to share and benchmark use of the Social Work Health Check, we think this could be a useful addition to help understand at an authority and regional level the views of our workforce. This could be a helpful tool in workforce development and planning, it could also produce important evidence for discussion with Ofsted and others. We are starting this process by reviewing how people have used the health check with a view to identifying the feasibility of benchmarking.  We are doing this by collecting work completed by authorities to date (e.g templates, analysis, reports etc on your use of the health check). At this stage we are interested in the processes used rather then information/data at an authority level.  

If you would like to participate in the Social Work Health Check Benchmarking please forward any templates or other relevant materials to Mark Evans (contact detials below).

If you would like to participate directly or nominate some to represent you authority in the next virtual meeting (12th July 2.00-3.30), please provide Mark Evans (contact detials below) with the name and contact details.

Action research into improvement in local children’s services

Heather Wills of the LGA has written:

“I wanted to share with you the final report of the ISOS Action research into improvement in local children’s services, together with a 14-page summary which identifies the key enablers of and barriers to improvement, informed by work with councils using a range of intervention approaches and at different stages of their improvement journeys.”

LGA hopes that the report will act as a kind of ‘handbook’ for Lead Members for Children’s Services and other senior leaders involved with children’s services. It is intended that there will be regional sessions for people to consider its findings in the Autumn, facilitated by ISOS.  

Topical Peer Challenge Round 9

Topical Peer Challenge Round 9 has now closed with seven participants (some carried over from Round 8):

Bracknell Forest – LSCB; Kent (tbc); Medway (CiN); Portsmouth (CSE); Southampton (tbc) West Sussex (MASH); Windsor and Maidenhead (Corporate Parenting)

The next step is to finalise the last two topics, and then for the host and visiting DCSs to agree dates for field work (this Autumn, Winter or Spring). The planning grid shows who is visiting whom. Richard Tyndall (details below) will be sending out emails announcing the progress of these arrangements and inviting nominations in due course.

Audit Improvement Project

Kim Drake (DCS at Southampton) is the lead on a new SESLIP project designed to consider how we can work across the region to improve the quality of audit work. As part of this project Kim is looking to investigate the appetite for sharing best practice and the potential for peer auditing between authorities. 

As a starting point we are looking to identify a list of contacts to start the dialogue with. We are compiling lists of Quality Assurance/Audit Managers and Principal Social Workers. To help us build the contact list please can you advise who you would like to involve in the project and provide their contact details (name, job title, email address and phone number) to Richard Tyndall (contact details below).