To consider the Business Plan.

The Panel received a presentation on the Adult, Children and Health Services Business Plan 2016-2017, as it was a new combined directorate the Panel were informed that the presentation would be concentrating on Children’s Services.

The presentation showed the Council’s and thus the Directorates vision and the core business of education, prevention and safeguarding.  The new Directorate structure chart was also shown.

The presentation went on to show the priorities for each of the core business functions starting with health, early help and safeguarding which were:

·         Integrate early help hub and early help processes so that all enquirers are directed to the most appropriate support.

·         Review and deliver an effective Corporate Parenting Strategy.

·         Deliver effective services under the Special Educational Needs and Disability reforms.

·         Review the Sufficiency Strategy to ensure sufficient placement capacity.

·         Review permanence planning processes.

With regards to education the priorities shown were:

·         Continue to raise attainment standards across Key Stages 2 and 4.

·         Narrow the achievement gap for Free School Meals pupils.

·         Work with currently Requires Improvement schools to secure Good or Outstanding judgements.

·         Secure sufficient good school places and achieve a high proportion of parents receiving a school of their preference.

And the priorities for commissioning were shown to be:

·         Robust commissioning – to secure sufficiency of provision for residents.

·         Robust performance and quality assurance framework across the directorate.

·         Efficient and effective systems and support across the directorate.

·         Ensure the voice of residents is heard and positively influences the design, commissioning and delivery of services.

·         Deliver the Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy.

The Panel were also informed that the Business Plan also highlighted the directorate risks and for Children’s services these were:

·         Non-delivery of statutory Children’s Services functions.

·         Needs escalate resulting in budget overspend.

·         Insufficient school places to meet the changing children's population needs in the borough.

·         Educational attainment at all key stages does not meet at least national levels.

·         Non-delivery of high quality, safe educational establishments.

·         Lack of cost effective placements.

The Chairman mentioned that with regards to the three years comparative budget shown in table 3 it would have been helpful to know the number of young people so a true budget comparison could be made.

The Chairman also questioned the speed of diagnosis for young people needing a Education and Health Care Plan and was informed that a new application would take about 26 weeks whist those on existing SEN plans needed to be assessed by next year and this equated to about 700 plans.  It was noted that to get a medical diagnosis there was still a significant wait.

Cllr Story asked for clarification on sections 2.4 where it mentions that a third of young people were leaving school without the requisite qualifications yet section 2.5 goes on to say that 81% of our schools are rated as Good or Outstanding.  The Panel were informed that 64% of pupils achieved 5 GCSEs rated A to C that included English and mathematics, the figures in the report were borough and no national results.  With regards to Ofsted ratings 54% of secondary schools were rated as Good or Outstanding. 

Cllr Story also mentioned that section 4.2 showed the level of sickness per FTE and for 2015/16 having nearly 12 days lost against a target of 6 was poor. 

With regards to families not wishing to use borough schools Cllr Jones mentioned that in Windsor unless your child went to a single sex upper school parents had no choice regarding co-ed schools and thus had to send their children out of borough.   The Chairman mentioned that a lot of work had been done with Churchmead School and this had a direct rail link with Windsor; it provided co-ed choice but this was not at the level parents had in Maidenhead. Cllr Jones agreed that Churchmead had improved but when the admissions criteria was applied Windsor pupils would miss out due to distance.

Cllr E Wilson mentioned that a number of residents were educating their children out of borough not because our schools were bad but because they offered nothing special. It was also questioned if the Panel could review attainment levels of those on pupil premium and it was agreed that when the attainment data was presented to Panel that this would be included.

The business plan was noted.