Area Coordination Management Meeting

Ashton

Minutes

Time: 10.00 - 12.00
Date: Tuesday 6th February 2007
Venue: Connexions, Stamford Street , Ashton-under-Lyne

Present:

• Julie Lord Area Co-ordinator
• Sue Garnett Area Co-ordinator
• Pam Chadwick Youth Service
• Emma McDonough PCT
• Annie O'Malley Connexions
• Catherine Matthews YOT
• Mary Clowrey Education Welfare Service
• Veronica Hyde T3SC - CYP Network
• Anne Okwei Surestart St Peter's
• Eileen Brown Children's Social Care - Ashton Team

Note Taker: Jo Cole

1. Welcome

Sue welcomed everyone to the meeting and introductions were made around the table.

2. Apologies

• Elaine Sayer - Extended Schools

3. Notes of last meeting and matter arising

The minutes were agreed as being a true record.

4. Dates and Venues for Future Meetings

Dates and venues were agreed as follows: -

• 18 April 10.00 - 12.00 Children's Social Care Family Room, Council Offices
• 21 June 10.00 - 12.00 Children's Centre, Trafalgar Square , off Stockport Road
• 19 July 10.00 - 12.00 Portland Centre, Blandford Street
• 27 Sept 10.00 - 12.00 Rosehill Children's Centre
• 22 Nov 10.00 - 12.00 Connexions, Stamford Street

Action items:	Person responsible:	Deadline:
Venue to be booked for April	Eileen Brown	Completed
Venue to be booked for June	Anne Okwei	Ongoing
Venue to be booked for July	Pam Chadwick	Ongoing
Venue to be booked for Sept	Anne Okwei	Ongoing
Venue to be booked for Nov	Annie O'Malley	Ongoing
Dates and times to be sent to members	Jo Cole	With minutes

5. Update of Membership of this Team

The Ashton Area Co-ordinator post has been advertised and the closing date is 7 th February. An appointment will have been made by the next meeting, and Sue or Julie will accompany this person at the next meeting.

At the moment, the membership is missing representation from schools. Reps should be recruited by the next meeting.

Although nothing has been finalised, there was a discussion regarding the possibility of 2 larger area co-ordination meetings per year in the form of workshops, where the invitation to attend could be opened up much wider e.g. parents; community, voluntary and faith organisations; etc.

6. Managers' Update

Eileen

• Assistant Team Manager for the Ashton Team. The team consists of Social workers and family support workers. The team are involved in all aspects of work pertaining to children and families in the Child Protection arena and Children in need. Additionally the team attend court when undertaking care proceedings both in private and public law.
• The team has recently overcome staffing issues.
• They work very closely with the Police, the YOT, Education, Health and the Probation service, and various agencies in the community.
• They also have strong links with Rosehill Surestart and West End Family Support Team.
• She recognises this meeting is an ideal opportunity to build up familiarity with key workers and put faces to names.

Veronica

• Veronica is the Community Networker for the CYP Agenda.
• Her role is to:
• build a network amongst community, voluntary and faith groups/organisations who provide a service for children and young people,
• ensure their voice is heard at the strategic partnership, area co-ordination and at themed working parties,
• to celebrate and raise the profile of the contribution made by the VCF sector to the children and young people's service provision in Tameside,
• to help the development of groups by appropriately signposting to support services and to build their capacity as a learning community. With this in mind there will be the consolidation and expansion of real partnership work between statutory services and community services.

Following Veronica's update, there was a discussion regarding what activities are available to 13 - 19 year olds through the day (NEETs), as Connexions are able to fund places for these young people and also give the young people money as an incentive.

Emma

Primary Care Trust Services Tameside & Glossop

The PCT is now split into a commissioning arm and a provider arm.

Health Visitors, School Nurses, and other Community Nurses and Allied Health Professionals like speech and language therapists, orthoptists, and community physiotherapy and occupational therapy services are based within the provider arm.

The provider arm is currently undergoing a restructure.

Under the Director of Nursing and Operations will sit Associate Director Posts, and under these each area will have a Care Coordinator for children's services, who will line manage frontline staff.

Health Visiting Service

The focus of the Health Visiting (HV) Service is to provide a service to children and their families which promotes good health and aims to prevent ill health and protect health, with a focus of meeting the needs of the most disadvantaged within communities. The key priorities for the service currently are promotion of breast feeding initiation, sustaining feeding and preventing childhood obesity, promote smoking cessation particularly in families where there is an expected baby or a child, promotion of safety and safeguarding children, supporting families with young children who live with domestic abuse, promoting good attachment between parents and their babies, promoting positive parenting, and supporting women with postnatal depression. The team provide a Child Health Promotion Programme which offers assessment of family need at key points, and health improvement activity for children aged 0-5.

The HV Service has undergone a review and currently key recommendations from that review are being implemented, including review and rewriting of key policies, partnership working, corporate caseload working, and identifying key performance indicators for the service, and a service directory.

Each Health Visiting Team is geographically based in 5 areas (4 Tameside areas and Glossopdale). Teams are made up of Health Visitors, Community Nursery Nurses and Generic Support Workers.

Partners

Health Visiting teams work with a wide range of statutory and voluntary agencies including social care, education welfare, Homestart, Sure Start Children's Centres, housing, regeneration, as well as close working with midwives, GPs, Paediatricians, community nursing teams, allied health professionals and CAMHS.

Geographical areas

Within Ashton there are 3 HV teams:

Rosehill / Hurst Team: Based at Rosehill Children's Centre

St Peter's Team: Based at Guide Lane Clinic Audenshaw

Ashton Corporate Team: Based at Crickets Lane Clinic (cover Waterloo and St Michaels area).

Anne Okwei

SureStart/Children's Centres Ashton Area

Sure Starts were launched as a Government funded initiative in 1999 delivering additional Health, Early Years Educational and Family Support Services to children under 4 years and the families' resident in disadvantaged areas.

Sure Start Ashton Rosehill Programme, which serves Hurst area, was established 2001 with Sure Start St Peter's Programme being developed in 2003. Government further expanded on the Sure Start concept to develop “Children's Centres” offering a network of integrated services to families with children 0-5. These services include wrap around care “dawn to dusk”. Whilst Government's ambitious programme will develop 3,500 Centres across Britain by 2010, Ashton area is more modest. The two Sure Starts will both have become Children's Centres by this summer, alongside Waterloo . Waterloo whilst not boasting of the same large building as the two SureStarts, is equally as ambitious in its aspirations for the Waterloo Ward. It is planned that by April 2008 these three Centres will be fully integrated with Extended Schools and other statutory and voluntary agencies to offer services across Ashton. Likewise, this process is going on in the other three zones to ensure fully accessible services to all children and families across Tameside.

Partners:

• Families
• Community Groups
• Schools
• Health Services - Health Visiting, Midwifery, Speech and Language Therapy
• SPY (St Peter's Youth) Service
• Regeneration Teams
• Housing Associations
• Job Centre Plus
• Faith Organisations

The Structure

Lucy Davies - Head of Access and Equality (Services for Children and Young People)

Geraldine Smith - Children's Centres and Extended Schools Manager

Area Manager - Ashton

• Rosehill - Lynn Barber
• St Peter's - Anne Okwei
• Waterloo - Sue Higginson

Area Manager - Denton, Droylsden, Audenshaw

• Greenside - Vicky Sharman
• Haughton Green - Helen Molloy

Area Manager - Dukinfield, Stalybridge, Mossley

• Dukinfield - Ginny Casey
• Ridge Hill - Rachel McHugh

Area Manager - Hyde, Hattersley, Longdendale

• Hattersley - Pauline Daniels
• Hyde - Vicky Cuddy

7. Where are Area Co-ordination Management Teams and where are we heading?

Julie gave a presentation to make it clear where the ACMTs fit into ECM.

The DfES ‘onion' diagram and the Capability Maturity Model were looked at in great detail.

Job descriptions will be reviewed to fit in with integrated services.

There was a discussion regarding low cost / high volume and high cost / low volume services and how there needs to be more intervention and early prevention in order to avoid young people reaching Level 4 / 5 on the Children's Needs Framework.

Action items:	Person responsible:	Deadline:
Slides to be emailed out	Jo Cole	With minutes

8. Drafting an area action plan

Julie briefly went through the sections of the action plan.

It has been developed from the Area Co-ordination Terms of Reference and links into the CYP plan, Change for Children Agenda, and the Children's Workforce Development Plan.

It was explained that the draft version will be going to the CYPSP meeting in February and, once passed, it will come back to the ACMTs for consultation.

9. Integrated processes - emerging issues

This part of the meeting was used as an open forum for members to express their views on JASPER and CAF.

Children's Social Care

Some people are struggling to complete a CAF when they have not been trained to do assessments.

There needs to be ongoing training - maybe school based mini sessions.

People need more training to gain confidence to complete a CAF. They need a ‘walk through'.

How will a CAF apply to practice?

We need to see a completed CAF to know how it should look.

How are CAFs logged?

Who takes the lead on a CAF?

How does somebody know when to pass it on to another professional? - is there a threshold?

PCT

The training does not cover all the aspects.

EWS

Very time consuming when taking into consideration existing work loads.

Connexions

We have our own assessment tool - APIR profile. This is a working, ongoing form.

How can we get young people to sit down so we can fill in a CAF when we have no right to ask them to stay?

The CAF is not user friendly - young people do not feel comfortable having forms filled in about them.

We are looking at ways of getting the CAF as an electronic form - this will tie in with our APIR Profile and means we can transfer information easily between the two. We are experiencing a lot of difficulties with CAF being a paper-based process.

We are asking all senior practitioners to complete a CAF by a certain time and then report back. This way we can review the process.

T3SC

The CAF training is inappropriate for the community groups. Not aimed at the right audience.

YOT

The YOT have their own assessment tool which does not tie in with the CAF.

Julie is meeting with Jane Forrest (8 th February) and will take these concerns / questions to her, and will report back.

Julie and Sue asked if people could email either of them with any concerns or issues regarding CAFs.

10. Development of an Area Contact Directory

Each member is to complete a list of key workers within their service.

Julie is developing a template and this will be emailed out with the next minutes.

Action items:	Person responsible:	Deadline:
Template to be emailed out.	Jo Cole	With minutes, if possible

 
11. AOB

There was a discussion about the usefulness of an area structure, detailing key services and contacts, and how they link to each other.

Julie and Sue have recently put in a bid to the Children's Workforce Development Council and have been successful. The bid was for a 12 month secondment post to deliver therapeutic work to children who are witnesses to / perpetrators/victims of domestic violence. The post will also deliver awareness-raising in schools in the form of drama. There is also funding for an admin post to collect data to generate statistics.

Concerns were raised as to the number of organisations delivering parenting courses, all in a slightly different way. A Multi - Agency Group is being set up to develop a Multi-Agency Parent Support Strategy. One of the things they will include in the strategy is a way of integrating the delivery of these courses. The plan is to have a Children's Centre in each of the 4 areas, each with a parenting specialism.

The meeting closed at 12.10pm.

Glossary

• CAF Common Assessment Framework
• YOT Youth Offending Team
• T3SC Tameside Third Sector Coalition
• EWS Education Welfare Service
• PCT Primary Care Trust
• APIR (profile) Assessment, Planning, Implement and Review
• ACMT Area Co-ordination Management Team
• CYP Children and Young People
• ECM Every Child Matters
• CYPSP Children and Young People Strategic Partnership
• DfES Department for Education and Skills
• NEET Not in Education, Employment or Training
• VCF Voluntary, Community, Faith