SERVICES for children and young people in East Renfrewshire are performing well, providing excellent support to families, a new report has revealed.
It follows a joint inspection led by the Care Inspectorate and carried out by teams of inspectors from the Care Inspectorate, Education Scotland, Healthcare Improvement Scotland and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary for Scotland.
They looked at services across East Renfrewshire in May and June 2014.
Across nine quality indicators, three were found by inspectors to be ‘excellent’, four were ‘very good’ and two were ‘good’.
The report notes: “There is exceptionally effective parenting support available to all families in the area which is successfully targeting more vulnerable families.
“This helps parents meet their children’s needs and promote well-being.
“East Renfrewshire’s Integrated Children’s Services Planning which involves all partners is highly effective and clearly pivotal in supporting successful joint service delivery.
“Partners within the Community Planning Partnership display outstanding joint leadership, vision and direction in setting and achieving highly ambitious and aspirational targets for their children and young people.”
The inspection report made two recommendations for further improvements.
It adds: “Services now need to work jointly to improve aspects of their processes of assessment and care planning and jointly record all initial referral discussions held between staff in social work, health and police when sharing concerns about a child or young person’s safety or wellbeing.
“There should be further exploration of the educational outcomes for the 25% of looked after young people who attend schools outwith the East Renfrewshire area with a view to ensuring that these children are provided with similar opportunities to those educated within the authority.”
Annette Bruton, the Care Inspectorate’s Chief Executive, said: "Protecting young people and ensuring that the services they and their families access are of the very highest standard is a crucial part of the work we do as Scotland’s social care regulator.
"By working with our partners we can ensure we build up an accurate picture of how services are performing.
"We want to answer the key question ‘how well are these services improving the lives of children, young people and their families?’
"When leaders across services have a clear, shared vision and work effectively together, they can make a significant impact in driving forward improvements for children and families.
“We continue to encourage community planning partnerships to work on areas that require to be strengthened further.”
Notes to Editors
The full report is available here:
http://www.careinspectorate.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=1185&Itemid=100181