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Children’s Services in Tameside

Tony Griffin

Assistant Executive Director, Children’s Services

December 2013

Developments being planned and the impact of these on the structure and

function of our services

Purpose of the session

• To provide an overview of proposed developments across Children’s Services.

• To describe proposed changes within the Children’s Social Care Service and the Safeguarding and Quality Assurance Service.

• To consult staff and their representatives about these changes and the timeline for consultation and recruitment.

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History – 2012/13

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• Required to find savings of £11m over two years.

• Structural and other changes were implemented in the Summer of 2013.

• Some changes were phase 1 of longer term developments, all driven by a need to reduce the demand on specialist and expensive services, such as those for looked after children.

• The number of full time equivalent posts was reduced by over 50 and achieved through a combination of redeployment, general turnover and exit options.

• Savings to date have amounted to approximately £3m.

Context for 2013/14

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• Direction of travel is as before, i.e. preventing need rather than just responding to cases when interventions become high end

• Learning from and development of last year’s changes (e.g. the nature of the Hub)

• Continuing the need to make significant savings with plans to achieve this by considering other options alongside service redesign (e.g. reducing use of external placements estimating a saving of over £2m per year)

• Any failure to meet savings target is doubled in the following year

• Recognition that the service could not yet withstand further significant reduction in staffing

Headline of planned changes

• The MASH (formerly HUB) to be a multi-agency point of entry to services led by Early Help

• Having a single Head of Service for Children’s Social Care

• Establishing two Service Managers within Children’s Social Care

• Merger of Looked After Children’s Team and The Leaving Care Team.

• Commissioning resource to be transferred to Planning and Commissioning Services

• Virtual School has moved to School Performance and Standards Service within Education Services

• LADO has moved to Education Services

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Children’s Social Care 1

• Reduces number of posts by 6.5 FTE (and saves £211k pa)

• Brings Social Work and Looked After Children Services under one Head of Service, with two Service Managers, one for Social Work and one for Corporate Parenting

• Transfer of the HUB to MASH will consist of 1 Practice Manager, 1 Social Worker and 2 Customer Care Officers in addition to our Multi-Agency partners.

• Continuing with four Social Work locality teams. Each team will have a Team Manager, a Senior Practitioner, 6 Social Workers - introducing 2.5 Family Intervention Workers and duty responsibilities to the teams.

• Builds in capacity for supervised contact

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Children’s Social Care 2

• Creation of a “Through Care Team” with the merger of the Looked After Children’s Team and the Leaving Care Team. The Through Care Team will comprise 1 Team Manager, 2 Practice Managers, 10 Social Workers and 6.5 Support Workers

• Introduction of a new model to Fostering with fewer Social Workers (down from 11.5 to 9.5), removing the Support Worker post but creating a 0.5 FTE Recruitment Officer post. The team will also deal with private fostering.

• The adoption team remains as now except that the Support Worker post will specialise in life story work

• Placement Commissioner role to be deleted and the commissioning resource to transfer to the Planning and Commissioning Service

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Current Children’s Social Care Structure

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Proposed Children’s Social Care Structure

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Safeguarding & Quality Assurance

• Children’s Services will no longer provide in-house CAMHS support and existing posts in the CAMHS team will be deleted.

• The dedicated Family Group Conferencing resource will be one FGC Coordinator role reducing the team by 0.83 FTE FGC Practice Manager, 0.5 Social Worker and 1 Support Worker.

• Involvement and Participation function to be incorporated into roles across the service and the dedicated resource of the Participation Officer to be deleted.

• The total reduction in the number of posts (not people) is 5.93 FTE

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Additional resources

• A Consultant Social Worker role will be created to lead a team of four “Frontline” participants (a special form of trainee social worker)

• CSE team

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Proposed Safeguarding and Quality Assurance Structure

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Overall reductions of staff

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Grade Current Structure

Proposed Structure

Net Change

Actual change to posts compared to current establishment

SUM3 2 1 -1 0

SUM1 0 2 +2 +2

Grade J 9.6 7 -2.6 -2.6 (-1.6 including Frontline Consultant)

Grade I 12.83 10 -1.83 -1.83

Grade H 58.5 (incl. 3 OOH)

56 (incl. 3 OOH)

-2.5 +0.37

Grade G 1 0 -1 -1

Grade F 23.5 17.5 -6 -6

Grade E 0 0.5 +0.5 +0.5

Grade D 0 2 +2 +2

Early Help, including the Hub

• Multi-disciplinary approach to the Hub and moving the management of it to Early Help

• Multi-disciplinary approach to Early Help teams and Troubled Families

• Joining-up of Adults and Children's Prevention and Early Intervention services

• Children’s Centre Review

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Future proposals to achieve savings required

• Consideration being given to expanding our in-house residential provision

• Out of Hours Social Work service merging with Adults Services

• Work to be completed on preparation for the reforms to SEN may lead to changes for ISCAN from September 2014

• Back office review

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Recruitment to posts

• Stage 1– Slot In – Automatic slot in where posts have only minor changes i.e.

job title, location, reporting lines etc, existing post holders will automatically transfer across to posts in the new structure. For this to happen the numbers of such posts have not reduced.

• Stage 2– Limited competition recruitment – Recruitment done in hierarchical

order starting with the most senior positions working downwards hierarchically.

– Applies where more than 1 person is potentially eligible to apply based on previous duties/responsibilities or displacement from a higher level role and have relevant transferrable skills, providing the post is graded no higher than the identified employee’s current grade

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Recruitment to posts continued

• Stage 3– Consideration of vacant posts.

• May mean a significant change to current role, contracted hours of work/grade.

• Staff could voluntarily accept a different job role if they choose to or they would become at risk and the councils Options process would commence with a package of support offered to the individual

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Redeployment / Voluntary Exit Packages

• One to One Meetings• Priority Recruitment• Suitable Alternative Employment• Additional Support• Salary protection• Voluntary exit options – targetted approach

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Service redesign consultation process

• The proposed staffing structure will be open to consultation from 9 – 20 December 2013

• We will be asking for your initial comments at staff briefings

• 1 : 1 appointments are to be arranged with management and HR – dates are 13 , 17 and 19 December 2013

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Key dates – Timescales and Next Steps

Activity Commencement Completion

Redesign consultation 19 November 2013 - ECG 20 December 2013

Formal consultation with staff 10 December 2013 20 December 2013

Staff 1:1 meetings 13 December 2013 19 December 2013

Feedback to staff w/c 6 January 2014 w/c 6 January 2014

Recruitment and Selection 13 January 2014 14 February 2014

Implementation of final structure 17 February 2014 17 February 2014

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