Council holds extraordinary meeting after heavy judicial criticism of children’s services

January 21, 2019

Herefordshire Council has held an extraordinary meeting in public after a Family Court judge issued two heavily critical rulings regarding its fostering and adoption services.

A report for the meeting on Friday (18 January) set out the actions taken and planned in response to the judgments issued on 7 December by Mr Justice Keehan.

In BT & GT (Children : twins - adoption) [2018] EWFC 76 Herefordshire committed serial breaches of the human rights of twins who were placed for adoption by different prospective adopters. It has agreed to pay them £20,000 each in damages. It has also agreed to pay £5,000 each to their adoptive parents.

The judge’s principal criticisms, as summarised by Hertfordshire’s report, were:

A lack of adherence to court approved care plan to pursue foster placement together for three-month period
A lack of completed and signed social work “together/apart” assessment to inform decision making to separate twins
The inappropriate paraphrasing of psychologist report in social work assessment, altering original psychologist opinion on separation
A lack of independent review officer challenge to decision to separate twins and ensure adherence to court approved care plan.
Poor, delayed case recording, in some instances up to two years out of date
A lack of management action to address delay in case recording
The apparent deletion of vital information pertaining to children, so not disclosed to prospective adopters in the child permanency report
A delay in providing all relevant paperwork to the court.

The report to the extraordinary meeting added that it was “important to note the recognition given by Mr Justice Keehan to the very high quality of care the two children received from their respective prospective adoptive parents”.

In the second case, A & B (care orders and placement orders - failures) [2018] EWFC 72, the judge described Herefordshire’s care for two young women as “woeful” and said he was “appalled” by failures of social workers and managers.

Herefordshire’s report said the judge had highlighted the following key issues in this case:

A lack of follow through on adoption plan
The failure to revoke placement orders as required
Poor standard of case recording and chronology, making case history difficult to follow
A lack of clarity in decision making, particularly decision not to place sisters together
The high number of moves of placement for each sister, detrimental to good outcomes
The high turnover of social workers, managers and Independent Review Officers involved with the sisters
The particularly poor standard of care leaver accommodation for sister 1 in October 2018.

The report said that since a change in senior management earlier in 2018, stronger supervision and decision making arrangements had been put in place across children and family services, and that Mr Justice Keehan had recognised this in his findings.

The steps taken or to be taken – as set out in Hertfordshire’s report – include:

a) The Assistant Director Safeguarding and Family Support and the Director for Children and Families has offered to meet the young people and the adopters in 2019 to offer apologies in person and also to find out what more the council could do to improve its services from their perspectives.

b) The Assistant Director Safeguarding and Family Support now chaired the Placement Panel every Tuesday that reviews individual child cases and also looks at cohorts of children, for example those placed with parents or in kinship care. This includes children who are the subject of placement orders who will be reviewed on a six-monthly basis.

c) The agenda for Adoption Reviews has been amended to reflect that the review takes place in the light of the guidance set out in section 1 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 to establish if the court approved care plan has been changed.

d) The legal department holds six-monthly legal review meetings of all children under placement orders. “This should ensure that decisions are not made without Adoption Decision Maker (ADM) consideration.”

e) A sibling separation tool is being introduced for managers to ensure the decision to recommend to separate considers all relevant matters before it is presented to the ADM and is clearly recorded on the Mosaic system. The completed sibling separation tool will be required at panel.

f) The current expected practice is not to remove any information from MOSAIC but to update information in a new font. “This means that changes are recorded as changes rather than deleting previous information.”

g) The judgments raised particular concerns about the effectiveness of the council’s independent review officers (IRO) service. “The primary task of the IRO is to ensure that the care plan for the child fully reflects the child’s current needs and that the actions set out in the plan are consistent with the local authority’s legal responsibilities towards the child. Their duty is to challenge poor corporate parenting.”

h) The council had already taken steps to strengthen the IRO service by increasing management oversight and implementing robust processes to ensure any concerns are raised. It has also arranged for an externally led review of the service as part of its work with Doncaster Council, taking place in January 2019.

i) All IROs have been provided with legal guidance for IROs on challenging decisions of the local authority. “The guidance stresses that the individual IRO is personally responsible for activating the dispute resolution process. There is now a clear expectation on IROs to record their work, including any dispute resolution concerns and activity. A more effective escalation process is in place.”

j) A learning exercise on the cases is underway, some sessions having taken place before Christmas with all involved. The wider learning will be taken to all staff. “We will adopt this approach for any cases in the future that we need to get a clear understanding on the presenting issues, what may have happened in the past and what may need to change in terms of current practice.”

The report also revealed that Herefordshire’s Cabinet had recognised the need to support the children’s and legal services with additional investment of £1.6m in 2018. “This additional investment has led to an increase in early help support, business support and family support to reduce the need for social worker involvement, and also providing additional agency social workers to fill permanent posts during a very difficult period of recruitment nationally and locally.”

In a statement Herefordshire said: “Following this meeting the council will share the actions with Ofsted and with the scrutiny task group as part of the overall improvement plan. This will provide assurance that the council had taken action to address the issues prior to the publication of the judgments, and plans had been put in place to ensure the ongoing improvement in the council’s children’s safeguarding services.

“It is important to note that there has been and is a lot of good work carried out by Herefordshire Council’s children’s services. An Ofsted inspection in June 2018, highlighted a number of areas of work where this is the case, as well as areas for improvement.”

On the commissioning of Doncaster, the council said: “We regularly invite challenge from peers through the Local Government Association, and the 2018 corporate peer challenge found that as a council we had an appetite to learn, a desire to improve, and an awareness of key areas for change. It also noted that a range of externally supported arrangements have been put in place to assist our improvement journey, including externally-led reviews.

“The council remains committed to providing high standards of service to children and young people and their families and will continue to strive for excellence and to be publically open, transparent and accountable. Where things go wrong, the council will be open about the fact, and take action to understand the causes of any problem or failure, as well as the immediate action we need to take to make things better.”