Children and young people
Introduction
As a council, we share with parents, carers and the wider community a strong ambition for our children and young people. We are working in partnership across the statutory, voluntary and private sectors to improve outcomes for children and young people, with a particular focus on the greatest areas of need; where children and young people are vulnerable and/or there are inequalities in achievement and health.
In April 2005 the Council established a new Directorate for Children and Young People. This brought together the former directorates for education and culture and social care and health (children’s services) under the management of an Executive Director for Children and Young People and a unified management team.
With our partners we have agreed new approaches to the joint commissioning of services so that we can ensure that resources are targeted to where they are most needed and have the most effect on improving the lives and life chances of children, young people and their families. Central to these developments is listening to and involving children, young people, parents and carers so that they influence and share in decisions on priorities and developing and improving services.
The needs of children, young people and their families in Lewisham are diverse. Council services support approximately 64,000 children and young people with a relatively high proportion under five years of age, and the number of children in the borough is rising. For many children the issues posed by social and economic deprivation are serious as the average household income in Lewisham is well below the London average. Nearly 8,800 households, with up to 17,000 children, have no adult in employment, some 11,000 households, with up to 22,000 children, are one parent families, and 5,000 children live in step-families.
A significant proportion of children and young people have specific needs; 560 children are in the care of the Council and approximately 1,700 children have statements of special educational needs.
The Council’s aim is to continue to work with our partners and communities in Lewisham to further develop services and ways of working so as to improve the life chances and reduce inequalities for all children, young people and their families.
Strategic objectives
Underpinning our work with children, young people and their families is the Children Act 2004 and Every Child Matters – Change for Children. Our expectations and aspirations for children and young people are reflected in our first statutory Children and Young People’s Plan, published in April 2006. While the local authority has the responsibility for developing and publishing the Children and Young People’s Plan, it has been developed with partners across Lewisham who are responsible for delivering services for children, young people and their families. The Children and Young People’s Strategic Partnership Board is the main body for the oversight of the plan’s development, monitoring its implementation across partners and evaluating how the priorities, objectives and actions set out in the plan are improving outcomes for children, young people, their families and communities in Lewisham.
Our Children and Young People’s Plan (2006–2009) has not been developed in isolation, nor is it intended to stand alone. It builds on the strong record of partnership working in Lewisham, led by the Local Strategic Partnership and the priorities of the Community Strategy; the Mayor’s initiative for ‘One Council’ and improving services and outcomes for residents; and the strategic plans of partners.
The plan has been informed by the views of children, young people, parents/carers and residents of the borough.
The Children and Young People’s Plan closely matches the outcomes framework of Every Child Matters. Therefore, our strategic priorities are:
Being healthy – children and young people are emotionally and physically healthy, with healthy lifestyles and live in a good environment
Staying safe – children and young people feel and are safe everywhere in the borough from childcare and schools to the communities in which they live
Enjoy and achieve – children and young people enjoy learning and actively participate so that they achieve their full potential
Make a positive contribution – children and young people are self-confident, have a strong moral purpose, have their voices heard and contribute to life in the borough
Economic well-being – children and young people are prepared for further and higher education, training and employment.
The strategic priorities of the Children and Young People’s Plan map against the four blocks of the Local Area Agreement.
Performance against 2005/06 commitments
From January 2005 the Government introduced a new performance and assessment framework for local authority children and young people’s services. This brought together a number of inspection regimes, including OfSTED (education) and the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI).
The new framework is based on a three-year cycle of assessment. Each year the Council, with partners, has to complete a self-assessment of services provided for children and young people: an Annual Performance Assessment (APA). The self-assessment is then judged for its accuracy against evidence by OfSTED, CSCI and DfES advisers. One year in three the inspection team will carry out a Joint Area Review (JAR), where in addition to the self-assessment the inspection team will visit a local community in the borough to judge the impact of services at first hand.
The APA final judgements for 2005 by inspectors were:
| Areas for judgement | Final judgement |
|---|---|
| The contribution of the local authority’s social care services in maintaining and improving outcomes for children and young people | 2 |
| The contribution of the local authority’s education services in maintaining and improving outcomes for children and young people | 4 |
| The contribution of the local authority’s children’s services in maintaining and improving outcomes for children and young people | 3 |
| The Council’s overall capacity to improve its services for children and young people | 4 |
Where:
|
|
The Annual Performance Assessment in 2005 was a valuable process in enabling us to identify where we are improving outcomes for children and young people with evidence of the impact of services at a local level, and where we need to further improve outcomes and services. Further value was added by external confirmation of our self-assessment. As an annual process, self-assessment will be a key driver for improvement.
Key achievements identified in our self-assessment are detailed in the following sections using the APA judgement areas.
Capacity to improve services for children and young people
OfSTED and the Audit Commission (2004) had previously judged Lewisham to have excellent capacity to improve in regard to education. We are confident that our capacity to improve educational outcomes remains excellent, with strong support from settings, schools, parents and other partners.
In relation to social care, we are confident that we have moved through the difficult transition period reflected in the Performance Review Report (2004). The move to a unified Directorate for Children and Young People has strengthened our management capacity. This has been supported by the Council with a significant increase to the budget (approximately £7.0 million) in 2005/06. A major aspect of our improvement has been the recruitment and retention of social care staff so as to make case management more secure.
However, we are aware that despite improvements we need to ensure that our capacity is sustained with improved outcomes for children and young people.
Being healthy
In Lewisham, Healthy Lifestyles is promoted through schools, Sure Start/Children’s Centres and with other partners in a variety of initiatives and settings. Positive outcomes for children and young people include:
- good sex and relationship education in schools
- good oral health
- increased take up for immunisation and vaccinations
- decreasing infant mortality rates
- high quality children and adolescent mental health services with good access for vulnerable groups like Looked After Children (LAC) and Youth Offending Team (YOT) juveniles
- good participation in sports or physical activities amongst primary schools.
Staying safe
We have a good record on pupil care, welfare, health and safety in schools. We work with schools and our partners in the community, including the police, YOT, faith communities etc. to provide children with a safe environment. We have been able to make a difference to the safety and well-being of children through:
- monitoring of racial incidents and harassment, and tackling disruptions and bullying in schools
- promoting safer routes to schools and safety on the road
- introducing a non-exclusion policy for vulnerable groups such as children on the child protection register (CPR), Looked After Children and children with special educational needs (SEN)
- sustaining the reduction in the proportion of children who have been on the CPR for more than 2 years and close monitoring of CPR cases including monitoring children’s attendance
- rolling out of the Lewisham Information Sharing and Assessment (LISA) system in the borough
- development of protocols for monitoring ‘missing’ pupils
- increased proportions of Looked After Children in family-based type placements i.e. fostering or adoption.
Enjoying and achieving
We know our schools and the issues facing our children and young people well. We have been robust in our identification of underachievement and exclusion and implemented targeted intervention to raise achievement, including for vulnerable children and young people. We have developed an Early Years Strategy, Primary Strategy and Secondary Strategy to support schools and settings in providing curricula and assessments which meet the needs of individual learners by developing the skills of staff, strong leadership and management, self-evaluation and improvement planning.
As a consequence, standards in Lewisham schools and settings have improved significantly over the last five years.
Our overall strategy for continuing improvement is based on:
- rigorous monitoring, challenge and support of schools with a focus on the achievement and progress of individual pupils
- targeted support and/or intervention for schools or the child/young person
- increasing the capacity of each school to be responsible and accountable for its improvement
- supporting schools to work together to share resources and increase choice and diversity of offer, building on each other’s strengths through collaborative working.
Making a positive contribution
We have a strong strategy for facilitating and encouraging children and young people’s participation and citizenship in local democratic processes, and have recently been short listed for a Beacon Award for Children’s Participation. Our track record is good; we are the first local authority in the country with a democratically elected Young Mayor and we have a vibrant Young Citizens’ Panel with over 270 children represented. We also have well-established School Councils and a good children and young people’s participation project in the borough.
We believe children and young people must have a say in the services provided to them and we continue to involve them in service planning and service provision consultations. Recent consultations include:
- consultation with children and young people with disabilities on respite services and transportation
- evaluation of the Family Support Assessment system for children with disabilities
- young carers consultation on the Carer’s Strategy
- Youth Matters – young people’s consultation
- London Challenge – pupil and teacher survey.
We continue to focus on how we can support children and young people at risk of alienation, social exclusion and underachievement so that they are helped to achieve all that they are capable of and are able to make a positive contribution. Targeted initiatives have been put in place including:
- supporting young carers in primary schools
- supporting children with SEN across childcare settings
- re-integration strategies for young offenders into school, further education, training or employment
- a strong rights and participation forum for Looked After Children
- good transition pathways for care leavers into employment, education and training at 19
- key working scheme to help children and young people participate in education, training or employment.
Economic well-being
Lewisham’s innovative 14–19 strategy, with lead Pathfinder status in London, continues to deliver diversity, choice and tailored provision for our young people. Strategies to equip young people in Lewisham with appropriate and relevant skills are increasingly successful. Levels of participation are now above national norms post-16 and are expanding rapidly at A level and equivalent courses.
There is good and improving performance in schools post-16, and the range and accessibility of progression pathways have expanded significantly over the last five years as a result of our strategy to forge greater collaboration with federations of schools and curriculum diversification. Increasingly effective partnerships with our two beacon further education providers, Lewisham College and Christ the King Sixth Form College, and other providers are extending the range of options available to meet the varying needs of young people aged 14–19 in Lewisham.
The resulting benefits for children and young people have been:
- a greater choice of curriculum pathways
- increased numbers of 16 year olds staying in education
- a reduction in the numbers of young people not in education, employment or training
- improved higher education progression rates.
Key priorities for 2006/07
While the Council recognises that for a significant number of children and young people in Lewisham there have been improved outcomes, we also acknowledge that we need to continue to help them overcome the barriers they face to improve their opportunities and life chances. Our emerging priorities are:
Being healthy
- reduce the incidence of low birth weight
- reduce teenage pregnancy rates
- improve the care of children with asthma
- reduce the rate of sexually transmitted infections among young people
- improve immunisation and vaccination rates
- promote mental and physical well-being, particularly among vulnerable groups
- improve the nutrition and levels of physical activity of children and young people
- reduce the level of substance misuse
Staying safe
- increase placement stability for Looked After Children
- move more of our Looked After Children closer to Lewisham
- support families in crisis to enable more children to stay safely at home
- reduce the incidence of bullying
- reduce the number of childhood accidents
Enjoying and achieving
- secure sufficient high-quality early years provision for the needs of our communities
- raise standards at all Key Stages, with a focus on underachieving groups
- improve attendance, with a focus on Looked After Children and unauthorised absence
- increase the capacity of mainstream schools to meet the needs of children and young people with special educational needs
- increase access to safe and enjoyable leisure, recreational and voluntary activities
Making a positive contribution
- promote and develop opportunities for young people to actively participate in citizenship activities and policy/service development
- promote pro-social behaviour and reduce the incidence of bullying by and of young people
- reduce the number of young people entering the youth justice system, particularly from black and minority ethnic communities
- improve care planning arrangements for transition from children’s to adult services
Economic well-being
- increase the number of young people who are in education, employment and training
- increase the attainment, retention and progression routes for young people aged 14–19
- secure appropriate childcare to enable access to employment and training so as to increase household incomes, particularly for single parents
- reduce the numbers of children and young people living in non-decent/overcrowded housing.
