Management Information Sheet
New approach in Children's Social Care to the recording of meetings
Message sent on behalf of Phil Watson (Director of Children's Social Care)
I wanted to write to you to explain our new approach in Children's Social Care to the recording of meetings.
As many of you will know and dating back to Eileen Munro's national review of the child protection system (2011), Social Workers, and those supporting them otherwise, are spending far too much time documenting their work and case recording, and far too little forming relationships and undertaking direct work with families that we know will affect the positive change and outcomes we all want to see for children in the county.
It is the same in Children's Services nationally, but in Norfolk we want to tackle this, and alongside considerable investment in additional frontline services and capacity, significantly reduce the unnecessary bureaucracy that frees up our practitioners to practice. We know this will also have a positive effect on recruitment and retention of our Social Workers, which still remains a challenge.
As such,
Children Social Care will no longer take verbatim minutes of meetings, but instead take a record of attendees, agreed actions and any specific rationale for decisions made, and use a format of 'What's working well', 'What are we worried about' and 'What needs to happen', which in a much more live and dynamic way centrally and collaboratively captures views and agreements. These will of course be circulated following the meeting.
In addition, individual agencies will maintain a right or choice to capture and maintain their own account of any given meeting and was a similar approach we took when implementing CADS and ceasing written referrals. For certain meetings, partners may be expected to provide written reports as before, or may indeed want to provide written information that helps inform discussion on the day.
Specifically, for Strategy Meetings, given short notice of these meetings, there is no expectation of written reports per se, but if there is significant history to share then that is summarised verbally to cover most relevant elements, and then an electronic/printed version shared by the agency to attach with notes of the meeting.
For any questions or queries please contact the Education Safeguarding Team by emailing cs.pdcsafeguardingadministration@norfolk.gov.uk
It is crucial that Designated Safeguarding Leads make their own record of all multi-agency meetings attended and keep these on the child's individual safeguarding file. For a meeting record template please see the Safeguarding pages of the Norfolk Schools and Learning Providers website. For Signs of Safety templates, please see the Norfolk Safeguarding Children Partnership website.