Issue - meetings

(a)          That the Committee endorsed the work to safely reduce the numbers of children in need of care through the provision of intensive targeted MST support for families.

(b)          That the Committee supported the establishment of a local authority Children’s Residential Care as part of an approach to rebalance care provision for children, with a focus on ensuring an affordable and sufficient range of local high quality placements.

The report was presented by the Chief Officer (Social Services) and Deputy Leader of the Council (Partnerships) and Cabinet Member for Social Services and Senior Manager (Children and Workforce). The report included an update on the multi-agency service to provide intensive therapeutic support to young people.  He congratulated the North East Wales Multisystemic Therapy Team (MST)  who had received an award for “Whatever it takes” which went above and beyond what was recognised throughout the MST Programme and was given to individuals within the MST community who had demonstrated outstanding and meritorious service.   He explained that this team was planned, initiated, delivered and succeeded throughout the pandemic from scratch.

            The Senior Manager introduced the report which provided an overview of the team’s partnership approach and that North Wales had secured WG funding to look at creating partnership projects to transform the way Children’s Services worked.   The money was regional but came in via a local Health Board footprint for Wrexham, Flintshire and BCUHB.   The project had just received an interim evaluation from Oxford Brooks University in terms of an evidence base about this service. What had shone through was the positive partnership working with Education, Social Services and Schools to provide intensive support for children and families who were on the edge of care.  This enabled intensive, preventative support to avoid the need for children to become looked after and ensured that they could safely remain with their families. 

 The presentation included detailed information on:-

• Baseline Assessment - What works? - Common features - Objectives
• Why MST?  - About MST - MST Therapist aim to:
• Implementation
• Support to date
• Evaluation  - Evaluation Findings
• Key Findings
• Phase 2

            The Chair found this so refreshing in particular the staff who were working 24/7 and asked the Senior Manager to take back the committee’s praise to them for their work stepping in to support the parents.

            Councillor Mackie commented that if these families were supported to achieve real change as regards parenting this would hopefully filter through into the next generation and so on which was so important.   He was very pleased to note 1.08 regarding the team “Whatever it takes” which was very positive.

            He referred to page 34 the Analysis the last paragraph on Family History and asked if the authority had got it right in the past when working with these families as regards interventions and would moving to this new system break the cycle. 

             In response the Senior Manager explained that the behaviour of some of the families they were working was entrenched and generational and that with the child protection work it focused the mind of families to bring around change.  Once the children came off the Child Protection Register working with Social Services became voluntary and could not be enforced.  This service would provide a more therapeutic model from CAMHS colleagues to address the underlying issues for the parents and children and show how they could achieve change themselves.  He said issues such as substance misuse and  ...  view the full minutes text for item 7