Children looked after with 3 or more placements within a year.
This measure looks at how many changes of placements happen for each child who is looked after in West Sussex during the year.
Children needs stable placements in order to maintain healthy relationships and achieve at school. Sometimes it is necessary to move placement to better meet their needs but achieving a permanent placement is the goal for all our children who are looked after.
March 2021 performance
Children within care proceedings continue to experience more
placement moves. This area will also be impacted by the introduction of the
entry to care panel which is aimed at ensuring children are in the right
placement to meet their needs from the earliest possible point.
A quantity of new in-house carers are scheduled
to join West Sussex following recruitment activity which will also allow for
greater placement stability.
Work is being undertaken to increase our own in-house capacity of placements both in terms of foster care and residential placements which we believe will provide children with greater stability.
Our performance remains in line with both our local and national data.
Actions
The disruption policy has been agreed and should allow for learning to now be gathered in respect of placements ending in an unplanned way
We will be working with Hampshire to learn from their expertise and they have a well embedded quarterly reporting system to analyse placement disruptions.
A task and finish group is being set up to review current work on placement stability and disruption, as whilst there have been various workstreams there needs to be a clear plan around embedding new processes and this is an area where we need to reduce the number of children experiencing multiple moves as these have a cumulative effect on children and ultimately can lead to the requirement of expensive or distant provisions for children out of necessity instead of need.
Working groups are being established to enable improvement in the assessment, referral and matching process to ensure children are well matched to prospective placements within their timescales.
The ‘Access to Resources’ panel going forward will review children considered at risk of disruption or where notice is given to establish if additional/ creative support packages can be put in place to re-stabilise placements.
The placement disruption policy has now been completed and signed off and disruption meetings will take place in response to placement endings to inform future learning and trends, practice guidance a training package also needs to be implemented around this (May/ June 2020)
New Service Lead for Children Looked After to implement placement stability meetings for children identified as at risk of placement disruption to prevent this happening.
Where unplanned placement changes occur meetings (focusing on disruption) will be held to establish future learning.
Service Lead to establish process for data collection on reasons why placements have disrupted to identify learning/ training needs to enable a service wide awareness of any trends.
Ofsted identified a number of systemic and practice issues which need to be addressed and which will help us meet our target. The Practice Improvement Plan identified a need to secure permanence at an earlier stage and ensure children are placed in suitable arrangements. This will introduce disruption and stability meetings to oversee placements of children.
We ensure that our foster carers are supported and we are getting our matching process right. This can be challenging with a shortage of foster placements and a competitive independent market. Our own success on increased staying put arrangements has meant less foster placements available for other children.