Meeting documents

Return to Agenda

ITEM CH3

CHILDREN’S SERVICES SCRUTINY COMMITTEE

MINUTES of the meeting held on 31 October 2006 commencing at 10.00 am and finishing at 12.30 pm.

Present:

The Scrutiny Committee considered the matters, reports and recommendations contained or referred to in the agenda for the meeting and agreed as set out below. Copies of the agenda and reports are attached to the signed Minutes.

45/06. APOLOGIES FOR ABSENCE AND TEMPORARY APPOINTMENTS

Apologies for absence and temporary appointments were received as follows:

Apology from	Temporary Appointments
Councillor Smith	Councillor Dhesi
Councillor Viney	Councillor Lamont

46/06. MINUTES

The Minutes of the meeting of the Committee held on 26 September 2006 were approved and signed, subject to the following amendment: Minute 42/06, in the last line of the second paragraph, delete the text ‘on the’ and substitute with "whether it should include."

47/06. GREEN PAPER CARE MATTERS: TRANSFORMING THE LIVES OF CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE IN CARE

• The Council should try and encourage and support families to allow children to stay at home and not go into care – we need to provide a support network.

• A school that was a high flyer was not necessarily the right place to put a low achiever – a low achieving school could be better equipped to deal with emotional behaviour.

• Fair and traveller children should be given access to schools that were already oversubscribed.

• Who would provide money for free access for children in care to all local authority facilities including leisure centres, sports grounds and youth clubs? This would cause problems in the districts and rural areas – lot of the proposals had cost implications and details on funding would be useful.

• Think the Green Paper was stating the obvious in many cases – local authorities doing a lot of this already and would like to be doing the rest if the funding was available.

• Its going to be 10 to 15 until we see anything happening. Very long term plans.

• Lack of consistent adult – providing a consistent adult in the children in care lives is absolutely key to how we can help.

• Visitor Scheme – should monitor progress through schools – foster carers would be the best person to attend events such as parents’ evenings as they know the child best - do we have a visitor scheme in Oxford?

• Role of corporate parent and individual social worker practices – sounds like outsourcing – don’t see how consistency and permanency can be achieved with those proposals.

• The Council should do more to support families. The Paper focuses on how we could support children who were in care but we should look at keeping children out of care – more could be done. We know what brings them into care, we need to do more work around finding solutions for families.

• We need to use new children’s trust arrangement to appeal to colleges in the districts to see how they could support this in however small a way.

• The Paper had significant cost implications – we could look at raising money within our current system so funding was better spent. Do need additional funding from government.

• Go beyond paper – use words like navigator – schools were good at identifying children on the edge – should use them. Free transport was key. Grants key to improving the situation for looked after children.

• Concern about one size fits all – need to target impact of where child was at that moment. Need to think out of the box – Social workers not necessarily the right people to be the consistent adult for the child.

• Was anyone picking up that children in care could be gifted and talented.

• Need to think creatively of ways of dealing with those children.

• Think children in care should not be treated separately.

• Hope our comments to the government were robust.

• Don’t think new centre or social care practices were a good idea – no mention of NHS in the plan - should be more.

• Family group conferences would be a good way of stopping children going into care.

• Asylum seekers should be included in green paper.

• Youth custody children – need to get proper help and support when referred into our care.

• No mention of significant enhancement from government.

• National bursary should be for all training and higher education, not just for young people going to university.

• Concern expressed about consequences of children going to oversubscribed schools.

• Concern about after school activities being deliverable for children in care and achieving the same flexibility as parents.

• A buddy system for children in care in all schools would be a good idea.

48/06. SCRUTINY REVIEW OF GIFTED CHILDREN: FINAL REVIEW REPORT

• More emphasis should be given in the executive summary main findings to gifted children’s learning needs being best met by an above-age and more challenging curriculum. This might be an overriding "bullet point" at the beginning - this had been included at page 5.

• Furthermore, that the range among the gifted was not as great as among those who were not, but specific %s could not be attached to the groups - this had been addressed in the report.

• Meeting gifted children’s needs by a differentiated curriculum or an above age class or differentiated peer group, depended on the ability of the teacher; It’s more than just teaching an above age curriculum hence the recommendations about experience, training and a gifted education programme are welcome - more emphasis had been put on these issues in the report.

• There might need to be more comment in the report about abilities surrounding academic giftedness, eg being creative, lateral thinking – "creative intelligence" was a characteristic of the gifted - this had been achieved through the addition of some sentences in the report.

• There were notions of "elitism" surrounding giftedness and a view that gifted children would achieve regardless of identification and provision. However, the evidence was that one can expect to find the gifted everywhere and not in particular social groups - those issues had been elaborated on in the report.

• The main findings should state that every child stands to benefit from providing properly for the gifted in state schools - this had been made more emphatic pages 5 and 6 summary and elsewhere in the report.

• Teachers when "talent spotting" came across other talents and abilities eg leadership. Whilst aiming towards a programme for the gifted one would come across these other abilities - this was addressed by additions to the report concerning creative intelligence.

• There were uncertainties around linking giftedness with SEN - the links had been developed and explained more thoroughly in the report.

• Lots of emphasis was given in schools to talents of one kind or another but not to recognition of academic achievement - this had been drawn out as a key point now and was in the summary.

• There were concerns about the deliverability of the recommendations - the recommendations had been reviewed and re-focused.

• Several Members had questions around resource implications and said that it was too early to make recommendations - where there were resource implications to recommendations, these have been explained in more detail in the report and in terms of where the resources would come from.

• It was questioned whether there was a problem in academic achievement levels in Oxfordshire, that there was insufficient information to reach this conclusion and therefore, for the review to reach its conclusions - the review group believed that the final report provided adequate evidence to make its conclusions.

• There were concerns about the practicality of the recommendations that needed thinking through, because schools work to national requirements. The recommendations to the review needed tweaking to fall into line with realities - as previously mentioned, the recommendations had been re-focused and were now more targeted.

• There was a comment that a theme in the review was how to enable schools to meet needs across the board - the report had been adjusted to emphasise this view more.

• Post Committee, it was suggested that the Review Group should try to establish the extent of central gifted and talented co-ordinator roles across local authorities to help to support the recommendation on this point, and that there should be some more information on Oxfordshire’s current training and continuous professional development around gifted and talented - there were additional paragraphs on the former and the annexes now included more information on the latter.

• We have also asked for statistics concerning the gifted and talented co-ordinators - according to NAGTY records there was a total of 1900 recorded on its system, listed as G&T coordinators. 1754 were based at schools. The remainder are 83 at local authority centres and a further 63 who were either tagged to other organisation types or are not associated to any organisations.

1. thank Mr Hehir for his excellent work on the Review;
2. (by Consensus) submit the report with the following amended recommendations to the Cabinet for their consideration:

49/06. EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION TO PARENTS OF CHILDREN WITH SEN

(Agenda Item 7)

The Chairman and deputy Chairman had agreed to undertake an investigation into how ‘Effective Communication to Parents of Children with SEN’ is in Oxfordshire. The aim of the investigation would be to explore areas such as parent’s awareness of SEN activities and newsletters, how parents could communicate with each other on this subject and whether Council supplied services were the correct avenues for the dissemination of information. The Committee would then seek to make recommendations to the Cabinet, if necessary, in order to implement an improvement to the service.

The Committee were asked to consider whether it would wish to nominate a task group to gather background information on this topic to prepare for a Select Style Committee in February.

Mr Chard, Scrutiny Research Assistant, outlined his initial findings in relation to searching for information for parents with children with SEN on the Council’s website.

Ms Johnson reported that the parent partnership reviewed their effectiveness annually and that officers were continually looking at ways to improve the service given to parents. She urged the task group to meet with staff in her team prior to starting the piece of work, in order that they could have an insight to work in progress.

The Committee AGREED to nominate Councillor Sue Haffenden and Mr Ben Jackson to gather background information on this topic to prepare for a ‘select Committee style’ investigation at their meeting in February into how effective communication is to parents of children with SEN.

50/06. HEALTHY SCHOOLS SCRUTINY REVIEW

(Agenda Item 8)

On 27 September, this Committee had agreed as part of their work programme to undertake a scrutiny review of ‘Healthy Schools’ and appointed Councillors Mrs Anda Fitzgerald O’Connor, Keith Stone and Jean Fooks to the Lead Member Review Group.

Councillor Fitzgerald-O’Connor gave an update on the progress thus far on the Scrutiny Review of ‘Healthy Schools’. She reported that the group had drawn up and formalised questions for witnesses and were about to embark on a number of school visits to gather evidence.

The Group had also discovered that only 50% of schools in Oxfordshire were signed to the Healthy School initiative.

The Committee noted the progress of the Review thus far.

51/06. FORWARD PLAN

in the Chair

Date of signing 2006

Return to TOP