The Datamonger
Etazo Performance Data's newsletter
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Dear <<First Name>>
Welcome to issue 5 of The Datamonger, Etazo's regular newsletter investigating data related to children's services. We are starting the year with a look at a couple of the data returns recently published by the DfE; Fostering in England and Children Looked After. We've updated our review of recently published inspection reports and included a piece about CAMHS from one of our literature reviews. Do get in touch if you have feedback on The Datamonger or if we can support your authority's performance; we're always happy to come to you for a conversation about how we can help.
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In this issue
~ DfE publication schedule
~ Ofsted Fostering Return 2014/15
~ Children Looked After Return
2014/15
~ Our ethics
~ Issues in recent inspection reports
~ Etazo researches
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Fostering in England 1 April 2014 to 31 March 2015
The Fostering Dataset is submitted by local authorities and independent fostering agencies at the end of July each year.
The return covers the majority of children looked after – 75% of children looked after were in foster care at the end of 2014/15 – and allows a focus on the wellbeing of those children: school attendance, children going missing, siblings placed together, allegations against carers and Staying Put rates, for instance.
The return also allows organisations to scrutinise and benchmark their fostering capacity: how well the ethnicity of carers matches that of children, carers’ training, number of available and filled placements and recruitment rates, for instance.
The data for 2014/15 were published on 10/12/15 here. There is a useful analysis of the figures by Ofsted, looking mostly at trends over time.
The easiest way to explore local capacity is to look at available places as a percentage of children looked after. Overall, at the end of 2014/15 there were just over 80 thousand places in foster care, and 69,540 children looked after. The number of CLA was 86% of the number of available foster placements. For individual local authorities, however, only 15 LAs had fewer children looked after than available places. Overall, the number of CLA as a percentage of available LA foster placements was 141%, or about 1.4 children per place. Some LAs had considerably higher demand or lower resource, with 19 authorities having two or more children per place.
School attendance deteriorated slightly between 2013/14 and 2014/15, with the proportion of children who were persistently absent increasing from 4% to 5%. IFAs perform better on this measure, with 2% persistently absent compared to 6% for LAs. Again, the range is wide, with 10 LAs reporting no children persistently absent and four LAs reporting a quarter or more. Variation is much greater than for all children for 2013/14, where the range is 2% to 6% (Pupil absence in schools in England: 2013 to 2014), and there is no obvious link between LAs with a higher CLA persistent absence figure and LAs with overall higher persistent absence for all children.
Ofsted notes a significant increase in the figures for children going missing – 19% more children going missing than in 2013/14, and 29% more occurrences of missing. They believe this reflects better recording and reporting. The children looked after return gives a lower figure, at 6% of all children looked after during the year having had a missing episode.
This is likely still to be an area of development for LAs, as indicated by the variation in the proportion of children going missing, from 1% to 30%. There is some variation by region, with higher figures in the South. IFA figures are also higher, which perhaps reflects higher levels of need of children placed through IFAs.
The data also allow LAs and IFAs to look at their recruitment rates. LAs have seen a fall in the proportion of Enquiries progressing to Applications, from 19% in 2014/15 to 15%. The proportion for IFAs has remained static for three years, at 11%. LAs where the proportion proceeding to Application is low – there are 44 LAs with rates under 10% - may want to look at their processes. We worked with one authority which used this information to remove “bottlenecks” in the recruitment process. Similarly, LAs with very high proportions proceeding to Application may want to consider the other information available about their rates of Enquiries per 10,000 people, and what proportion of their Applications lead to Approval.
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Children looked after in England including adoption: 2014 to 2015
We discussed the initial release of data from the Children Looked After (CLA) return in the October issue of The Datamonger, and looked at children returning home planned or unplanned, children going missing, poverty levels (IDACI) and CLA numbers and whether there is a link between inspection judgement and rate of CLA.
The DfE has now published additional tables and two reports. The second report is especially interesting as it discusses both the newly-published tables and further breakdowns of the national tables.
There is a striking table presenting average Strengths and Difficulties scores by gender and age, showing that until age 16 boys score more highly than girls – where a higher score may represent less good emotional health – but at age 16 girls’ emotional wellbeing appears to fall and boys’ to rise, so that the average score for girls is the same as that for boys.
The definitions and ways of submitting the outcome measures have been relatively stable for several years now, so it is possible to review trends over time.
The overall figure for CLA who offended in 2009/10 was 7.9%, and this has fallen to 5.2% for 2014/15. Looking at the data at LA level, offending increased over these five years in 16 LAs but decreased in 70 LAs (data for both years are not available for all LAs), with some striking success stories such as North Tyneside’s decrease from 18% to 4%. Nationally, the decrease is likely to represent increased use of Restorative Justice and alternative sentencing options.
The proportion of CLA with an identified substance misuse problem who were offered an intervention for it declined slightly between 2009/10 and 2014/15, from 88% to 86%. There are significant regional variations in this, from 81% in Inner London, the North-West and Yorkshire and the Humber to 95% in the West Midlands. In 2009/10 girls who were identified as having SM problems were much more likely than boys to receive an intervention for this (60% of girls with SM compared to 52% of boys), and were also less likely to be recorded as refusing an intervention than boys (27% of girls refused an intervention and 31% of boys). By 2014/15 the rates of receiving interventions had equalised so that 48% of both boys and girls received interventions and 38% of boys, 37% of girls, refused interventions.
Local authorities will not be able to benchmark themselves against Statistical Neighbours for the detailed breakdowns of these outcome measures, but can look at their performance against national figures and local trends over time.
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About Etazo: our ethics
Etazo Performance Data works with local authorities and other agencies on children’s data. We believe that statistics are essential to understanding children’s journeys through services and the impact of services on outcomes for children and families. Working with us helps you to investigate your own performance, identifying strengths and challenges.
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Our code of ethics
- Our primary aim is to support improving outcomes for children. We keep this at the forefront of all our work.
- We keep all data you share with us confidential and manage its retention or disposal in line with the Data Protection Act.
- We keep confidential the names of authorities and organisations with which we work, unless we have agreed otherwise with the organisation.
- If there is a potential conflict of interest between work we are doing for you and for other organisations, we will discuss this with you.
- We are aware of shrinking budgets for local authorities and other organisations, and therefore keep our charges fair and aim to add value in everything we do for you.
- We will be transparent in how we work with you and keep you informed about what we are doing and how we have done it, aiming to leave your staff with increased skills and insight.
- We are clear about our areas of expertise and will not misrepresent the ways in which we can support you or what falls outside our skills.
- We work in line with best practice and ensure we keep up to date with research and developments in children's services.
- We have worked with freelance staff ourselves as local authority staff, and we know it can be a challenge for LA staff. We work in solidarity with your organisation, respect your staff's knowledge and skills and understand that they are the experts about their services.
We can support you in
- Analysing end of year returns;
- Creating or revising a performance framework;
- Preparing for inspection;
- Submitting DfE and Ofsted data returns;
- Providing bespoke analysis.
Do contact us on the telephone numbers or email addresses below to discuss how we can support your service. We'd be happy to come and meet you.
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Issues in recent inspection reports
In our September issue we reviewed the ten inspection reports published from 22/06/15 to 01/09/15 and examined the issues of concern listed for each LA. We have now done the same for the ten inspection reports published from 15/09/2015 to 05/01/2016.
We were interested to see some themes in this batch which have changed from the first batch. SDQs and recording of Core Groups came up frequently in the first group but were rarely mentioned in the second group. For children looked after, common themes in the second group which were less apparent in the first group were support to children returning home, contingency / concurrent / parallel planning, timescales for initial Health Assessments, and, in particular, children waiting too long before becoming looked after, mentioned for six of the ten LAs in the second group.
See our LinkedIn page for a list of issues noted for seven to ten of the LAs, and for a discussion of Ofsted's inspection comments around return interviews for children going missing.
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Etazo researches CAMHS – a brief literature review
One of the things we do at Etazo is carry out literature reviews for Serious Case Reviews. We thought you might be interested in some of our findings. These findings are based on the national context and do not contain any information about specific cases or Local Authorities.
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CAMHS
A survey by YoungMinds (2012) found that 77% of CAMHS staff reported that budgets were being cut, and 74% that staff numbers had reduced. The Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition (2014) describe CAMHS as
"a system under siege, with cuts to local authority funded services, pressures on tier 3 services, cuts to early intervention in psychosis services, pressures on voluntary sector services, and pressures on inpatient beds."
The Children and Young People’s Mental Health Taskforce (2015) similarly found “many local and specialist services struggling to cope with what benchmark surveys demonstrate is increasing demand in a very tight financial environment” and conclude that “there is currently a lack of capacity in the system to meet the needs of all children and young people with diagnosable mental health problems. There is no doubt that increased capacity and resources are needed”.
The British Psychological Society report that, although children and young people aged 0 to 19 make up 24% of the population, only 6% of the entire mental health budget is spent on CAMHS services (Law, Faulconbridge and Laffan, 2015).
As well as funding issues, there are concerns about the way in which CAMHS services are commissioned. The Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition identify “a lack of clear leadership and accountability arrangements for children’s mental health across agencies including CCGs and local authorities, with the potential for children and young people to fall though the net”, and the House of Commons Health Committee (2014) found
"serious and deeply ingrained problems with the commissioning and provision of Children's and adolescents' Mental Health Services. These run through the whole system from prevention and early intervention through to inpatient services for the most vulnerable young people."
There are concerns about the priority that individual LAs and CCGs are putting on children’s mental health. These have been raised especially by the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition (2013, 2014). They reviewed LAs’ Joint Strategic Needs Assessments (JSNAs) and found that two-thirds did not address children’s mental health needs, and that “data about the mental health needs of young people aged 16-25 was especially limited in the JSNAs”. They summarise this as “evidence that local areas are not prioritising children and young people’s mental health”.
If you would like more information about the references in this report please contact us.
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Children's Social Care Data Google Group
We adminster the email group for local authorities to discuss children's social care data. Membership is recommended by the DfE and Ofsted as a good resource for performance staff to discuss interpretation of data, definition of indicators and year-end returns, and is of course completely free.
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