Agenda item

11.10 am

This is an opportunity for the Committee to feed any advice/comment to Cabinet in relation to the draft Plan , prior to its submission for approval to the 15 December Cabinet.

The draft Plan can be found at CH7.

Members had before them a copy of the draft Oxfordshire Children & Young People’s Plan 2010-13. This was an opportunity for the Committee to feed any advice/comment to Cabinet in relation to the draft Plan, prior to its submission for approval to the 15 December Cabinet and to full Council in January.

Sian Rodway, Councillor Louise Chapman and Councillor Michael Waine were present in order to introduce the report and to answer any questions that the Committee had. The Committee had a number of questions, some of which are detailed below along with the response received:

Q         Play is very important to a child’s development as it enhances trust and self confidence. There does not appear to be much emphasis placed on play in the document?

R         (Cllr Chapman) The local authority has a Play Strategy which various people and organisations have signed up to . There is quite a significant amount of information on play on the website. We will have a look at it and maybe strengthen the language in the Delivery Plan.

Q         Is there anything extra in the Plan to alleviate the problems Young Carers sometimes experience in school, such a bullying?

R         Young Carers are mentioned in the Plan and there will be clear links within the Strategy. We have not started from scratch and we are linking into other Strategies extending into 2010 which are focussed on these young people, such as the Anti Bullying Strategy.

Q         This is a very well written, plausible and exciting document – but have you been ambitious enough with some of the targets and milestones? For example, the secondary school absence rate targets? Also some of the statistics are not clear enough – for example those relating to entrants to criminal justice. How measurable are these targets?

R         The priorities are the business of all the partners who have signed up to it and everybody will be held to account. The priorities also have to line up with legislative requirements so that we can then extricate funding against them. Some will show a very definite achievement by the end of the first year and some will take much longer. Every year they are reviewed formally, as is the Delivery Plan. LAA targets are set with GOSE and reviewed on an annual basis. It is recognised that the outcomes of some targets by their very nature cannot be predicted as they are set a long time in advance. With regard to the external targets in particular, we need to be very clear as to whose target it is, when it was set, what ability we have to revise it etc and whether we are in a position to move on. The Children’s Trust will be monitoring the Plan and of course, scrutiny. We welcome any form of monitoring.

Q         Oxford City Council’s own response was to direct attention to the neglectful environments which some children were having to live in and proposing that they have a safe place to go to if bullying occurred. The Council also raised concern about patchy youth service facilities in some parts of the City.

R         The points you raise are embedded in what we are trying to do with this Plan. We are working with our City Council colleagues on housing issues, with Health Visitors and with the Home/School Link. One challenge we have is that of communication and to ensure that all the links are in place. With regard to your concern about youth service provision in the City area we will be developing three area plans for the northern, central and southern areas of Oxfordshire, via three local area Trust Boards, to address the different priorities and challenges prevalent in those areas. We have already visited one area committee to speak on this area.

The Committee thanked Sian Rodway and Cllr Chapman for their attendance and for responding to the questions from members. It was AGREED to ADVISE Cabinet on 15 December that this Committee approved the priorities contained in the Plan, subject to clarification being given of some of the statistics contained within the document and an annotation added to some of the milestones and targets.