Increasing the efficient use of transport so that more pupils can share transport should not have to be a problem in itself, although autistic children can find change and uncertainty very hard to cope with. But at the start of this term, disastrously bad implementation of new routes, with children arriving late or even, in some cases, not being picked up at all, was very distressing for them and for their parents.

There was an  ‘unacceptable failure by ATM [Atkins Transport Management] at Linden Bridge over the first two days of service’ at the start of this Autumn term. Ten new routes for school vehicles had been put together using the ’Trapeze’ software recently installed at Surrey’s Transport Co-ordination Centre, but very badly implemented.

The details were in a paper brought to the Children and Families Committee yesterday, and I don’t think I can do better than to quote from it:‘

‘It was apparent within the first hour of service i.e. by 08.30 on school day one that many ATM drivers had no idea of the route and had made no adjustments for the additional traffic found on day one of the new school term. One ATM driver resigned before 07.00 and by the time a replacement driver was found the route was 2 hours late. On a different route another driver failed to find the first pick up address after a 2.5 hour drive from Epsom to Blindley Heath at no time attempting to contact either ATM or the County Council. That driver decided unilaterally to move on to the next and subsequent children and deliver them to school. When informed by parents that no-one had arrived to collect their child, the TCC telephoned ATM to be informed that the driver had moved on ‘because there was no reply at the home address’. It was later admitted by ATM that the driver never found the address despite it being on the main A22 trunk road. It must be remembered that these routes do not just affect one child, and when a bus is late at the first pick up all parents become concerned and frustrated. 

‘Most routes arrived late at school on day one. Several routes were between 1 and 2 hours overdue. Neither Linden Bridge staff nor parents were contacted by ATM and advised of the late running. In most cases it was left to the TCC to inform parents and the school, once TCC became aware of the problems on the ground.

‘Parental hostility towards Atkins on the first morning of service was ferocious, the TCC having never experienced such a volume of calls from anxious, angry and frustrated parents in any preceding year. The call rate was such that there were not sufficient resources left to record the calls as the entire team was dealing with immediate issues, all officers being diverted from other duties to staff telephones. The ATM Linden Bridge operation carried some 60 students on school day one, and as every ATM route failed to operate on time, in some cases over 2 hours late, all 60 parents will have called at least once, many making multiple calls to the TCC and ATM in attempts to understand what was happening to the transport for their children. Each call to the TCC generated two more - one to ATM seeking an update, and another to the parent with the response. By lunchtime on school day one it is estimated that the 8 TCC Officers had taken / made over 300 telephone calls between them. ‘

The written reports to the Comittee were backed up by an unusually open and critical verbal acoount of Surrey’s seven-year contract with ATM (going back to the year 2,000 but with a 3-year extension in April 2006) given by Christopher Butler, the Transport Co-ordination Centre manager. (You can read the formal full account, quoted above on the SCC website here ; and there is also a paper on the implementation of SEN transport planning software here.)

Mr. Butler had been with Atkins when the contract started, and was one of the staff later transferred to the SCC. He said ‘Out-sourcing to Atkins’ had been ‘a very brave step’. If the company had enjoyed consistent management they ‘would have been leaders … we were at the cutting edge’ but later ‘managers couldn’t even see why we were doing this work’ and ‘the thrust to take this forward withered on the vine.’

On the situation with the Atkins contract now, he said: ‘ … there is no incentive for Atkins to do anything … we can’t do any more, they do what they like … it’s a ridiculous contract, whoever wrote it should be shot …’

 Contracts with other transport companies are now shorter and tighter: ‘no other authority is doing what Surrey did in 2,000 … [but] then was then, today is a different market place.’

He went on to explain that block arrangements, where only one company provides transport to any one school, can be helpful if they are well administered and allow close liaison with the school. Where this can be achieved, a 3 year contract with 2 additional years is possible - but the number of companies in Surrey willing and capable of taking on these relatively large and demanding contracts are limited. 

As a result only three schools are moving to this sort of arrangement: [we] ‘can only do three schools … with present Surrey contractors… it needs time to see how it actually moves forward … It is complicated, it is new, in this form we are the only local authority doing it.’ 

Mr. Butler was clear that in Surrey ‘we expect a first class service’ from contractors, and he and his staff are very aware of the needs of vulnerable children. He is intending to go and speak to the parents at Linden Bridge in person. One Councillor expressed what several of us may have thought, wishing him luck. I hope the parents will not eat him. 

An aside on Pegasus: 

A member of the Committee asked Mr. Butler whether he could say ‘anything about taking on [the] Pegasus idea’;  - Pegasus being the fleet of yellow school buses operating out of Guildford, often to be seen sitting idle in between times, although the intention has been that the Transport Co-ordination Centre would schedule community use during the daytime.

Mr. Butler said: ‘ … one of the options available [is that ] … Pegasus as a brand might go on [using an] MPV / taxi  style vehicle … and wouldn’t we love to do that? - yes, we would, but it depends on a drive from the Executive … on the back of accessibility proposals. … At the moment it has the dead hand of bureaucracy on it.’

Quote of the day came earlier in the meeting during item 7, ‘Interim service arrangements’  (ie, re-organisation of high-level management.) It came from Conservative Laurie Burrell:

‘Three years ago [we] went through BDR - and we’re back here today and we’re back to square one.’  

Wednesday’s ‘Children and Familes’ Select Committee meeting was the first since Surrey’s Joint Area Review. This was the highly critical inspection of Children’s services in Surrey that came out in July, which showed Surrey service to be ’inadequate’ in too many ways.  (See posts 22nd July and 29th July)

There is a lot of work going on around the required post-JAR action plan, but that hasn’t come to the Committee as yet. Instead we had the Performance Figures for the first quarter, ie May, June and July.

They were better presented than sometimes in the past - in large enough print that I didn’t have to get out my magnifying glass (you think I’m joking?), extra information for the indicators on ’red’ and ‘amber’ and some clear explanations in the ‘analysis’ column.  

Officers and Politics

One of the problems with select committees is getting enough information to carry out any useful scrutiny or contribute to policy development. This is certainly the case in Surrey, where the Conservatives have such an overwhelmingly large majority that they can fit several factions the size of our 12-person Liberal Democrat group comfortably within their numbers, so that it sometimes feels as if Committees can be easily side-lined. The Chair’s opening remarks on this item included the view that one of our problems in scrutinising is was how we could ’get good information into this committee.’

Jim Leivers, who has been Interim Head of Children’s Service since taking over as the headline JAR became known within the higher levels of the organisation, said:

‘One of my worries about being very frank and very open is that this [committee] will be [used] politically’ and was concerned that the information provided by is Officers should be used ‘not to pursue a political aim or ambition’.  

I felt obliged to point out that this was a public meeting, and anything said could be reported freely. I report it now as a small example of the tension between accepting the existing balance of power in order to work co-operatively within a democratic framework to influence outcomes, and using every legitimate means to show what is wrong with those outcomes and change the balance of power. 

I generally find Mr. Leivers frankness about the real politics and genuine political choices underlying the work of this Committee refreshing, and will continue to quote his insights when they are made in public. Should he read this, I hope he will be pleased to see some of his more positive statements included below. (For convenience, I’ll attribute them ‘JL’)

There were questions about whether the all the ‘reds’ showing a significant failure to meet targets would be eliminated, with the answer ‘You will not see a removal of all your reds … [there is] a very, very difficult agenda for us all … there is a focus that we’ve not had before on ensuring that our performance improves … within two years you will be able to say your indicators are not on red and you are moving into good … ‘ (JL) 

What was happening this spring    

When you look at the figures, there is an awful lot of red around - only just over half the indicators are green, and a third are red. For example, the number of children in care went up; the proportion of them placed more than twenty miles from their home has nearly doubled; none of the children who left care aged 16 or over during that 3 months had as many as five A*-C GCSEs. 

The emergency review of cases that was carried out pre-publication of the JAR but when the results were known to a number of senior Officers and politicians saw more children being brought into the care system, which accounts to some extent for the first two indicators, while some of the young people leaving care in that first quarter took exams but the results were not yet out.

All children in care should have a Personal Education Plan, but the proportion fell from a peak of 79% in February to 61% in April, recovering only to 66.9% in June. (’ … the excuses really aren’t there’ J.L.)

However there are positive steps in hand to resolve this particular problem, with the appointment of a ‘Virtual Head’ supervising the education of Looked After Children, and an additional PEP co-ordinator. We’ll be hearing from the new ‘Virtual Head’ in a later Committee meeting, and no-one could disagree with Chairman Yvonna Lay’s comment: ‘I would like to see the PEPs sorted out by the next quarter.’ 

The Risk Register

On the ‘risk register’ for the service, the big areas of red are no surprise: we are depending on improving and unifying multiple computer systems, some of which are ‘dysfunctional’, and which en masse prevent the effective introduction of better record keeping. Poor record keeping and processing of information is a major issue. The continued high use of agency staff is another long-standing problem.

The ‘continued growth in population of Children with a disability because of better medical care’ is also a long-standing risk, and the ‘mitigation actions’ to ‘develop a long-term strategy  … as part of overall corporate Business Delivery Planning process’ is repeating what has been said many times before, with its underlying political implications: the ‘key issues’ section of the paper says ‘This cannot be addressed through existing resources in Children’s Services’.

Money 

Not surprisingly, given that the Inspection and the Government response to it has forced Surrey to take action to bring services up to an acceptable level, there are significant overspends. A £5.1 million shortfall is currently projected on the current year’s budget.  The overspends I think are most irritating are the ones that were predictable and/or should have been prevented. For example:

SEN transport in the ‘best case scenario’ faces an overspend of £1.6m. Previous budgets had assumed efficiency savings of £0.9m from reorganisation around the Transport Co-odination Centre.  This is a complex story, with situation-normal-all-fouled-up software problems, and also organisational ones.

‘Core establishment’ staffing has an overspend of £0.2 million, but it would have been £1.2m if there hadn’t been an underspend on staff in residential services, mainly because of the failure to open Ruth House for respite care. This £1m overspend is because of an ‘unachievable vacancy factor’  - empty posts that were reckoned not to be filled, but had to be filled to do the essential work of the service, and so were filled by expensive agency staff. There was supposed tobe a reduction of agency staff from 40 to ten by the end of this financial year, but at the end of June there were 94 of them, covering posts which include ’social care, education officers, and business support.’  

 It was confirmed in committee that the ‘vacancy factor’ that is one root of these problems goes back to the BDR, but as Jim Leivers also said, as an Officer: ‘We really can’t comment on why it was set in the first place.’ But as a Liberal Democrat, I can have the pleasure of saying to the Conservative Executive, ‘we told you so’.

Ruth House - an adequately full story at last

Ruth House is the residential facility linked with Freemantles School in Mayford Green, Woking. It’s intended to offer week-day boarding to some pupils at the school, which is for children on the autistic spectrum, and respite care for for children with complex needs at weekends and in the school holidays.

I became aware of it a year ago, when visiting Freemantles School with the Committee, but in spite of asking questions both in Committee and in Full Council have not until now got an adequately full account of why it was not open, saving the County money, and making life better for children and families.

This year’s budget assumed that opening just one of the four units at Ruth House would save £0.4m by offering respite care for children with complex needs in a Surrey-provided home. Multiply this up by four, and you’re more than compensating for the £0.8m saved on residential staff costs this year.

Building it has been a complex project, staring in 2001 which has suffered many delays and set-backs, and is only partially open now. In those seven years, among other things it fell foul of the BDR. Hazel Buxton, from Estates Planning and Management, explained that there had been one person in charge of managing the project until April 2006, but after he left he was not directly replaced. There have been problems with construction, with understanding and providing exactly what was needed by way of kitchens, bathrooms and laundry areas, with making sure the money was available to recruit staff, and then with recruiting them and training them on the right time-scale to fit with the readyness of the building.

We were given a long and serious paper explaining the history of Freemantles’ move to Woking and the  building of Ruth House in detail, how lessons have been learned, and how the County’s new organisational structure would prevent this happening again. You can read it on the SCC website - it’s in the committee papers at item 8.  There’s also been a good Ofsted report on the one open residential unit out of the final four.

Of the four units, the first was working fully in July; the second will be fully open from October; the third by the end of the year; and the fourth early in 2009. We were assured by Mr. Leivers that the staff was now in place, and the project was now on line, on target, and would open on the time-frames in the report.

I was still not entirely reassured, and asked about Chetwode House, another new facility for respite care at risk of delay.  But the Tories can’t be blamed for this one - the site is the home of Great Crested Newts and agreement has to be arrived at with English nature for their ‘humane removal’.

Corporate Assessment 

The Inspectors from the Audit Commission point out in their Corporate Assessment that overall satisfaction with the Council has only fallen from 53% to 52% since 2003/4, and it’s still above ‘the country council average of 50%’. Which does not seem a great endorsement of local government as a whole.

The Corporate Assessment came to the conclusion that ‘Surrey County Council is performing well’. I don’t like having to point out that the CA and JAR do not together paint as rosy a picture as this suggests. The Surrey staff I have had contact with, in Transport, Libraries, Schools, Social Services, and so on, have been caring and as far as I could tell conscientious in the work they are doing, not just to keep the County and its services going, but in wanting to improve them.

Nevertheless I find it quite surprising that the Inspectors say Surrey gives good value for money, given what in a common-sense way I would consider inefficiencies in the use of contractors. You only have to look at our long-unfinished Road Crossings in Knaphill (written about below). Also, I have never been convinced that the ‘efficiency savings’ the Government demands year on year and the Inspectors write about are entirely genuine efficiencies, doing the same with fewer resources. They too often end up as cuts.

The ‘areas for improvement’ identified for Surrey County Council by the Inspectors are quite soft -  not at all the things many residents might think most need remedying, such as mending pot-holes in the roads, or providing more youth services for young people.

They write in terms of clarifying long-term vision; ‘maximising the potential of all councillors’; improving Surrey County Council’s ’approach to equalities and diversity’. The first and third I think actually hold the key to what has happened on the ground, the faults that have shown up in the JAR.

When it comes to scores, Surrey gets a 3 for performing well on ‘Ambition’, ‘Prioritisation’ and ‘Capacity’. It only gets a 2, ( ‘at minimum requirements - adequate performance’) for Performance Management and for ’Achievement’.

Never mind meeting ‘only minimum requirement’ on Achievement - it’s the score on the five themes that counts, and it is on that basis Surrey comes out as ‘performing well’. 

The Joint Area Review (JAR)

One of the CA comments is that ’scrutiny is highly effective’. But in Full Council on the 22nd part of the shock felt at the result of the Joint Area Review was that even the most relevant committee (Children and Families, which I am a member of) had either not identified or not managed to convey to the Executive and the rest of the Council the seriousness of the situation. 

The JAR looked at services provided by Surrey County Council and its partners for children. It looked in depth at four areas: children at risk, or requiring safeguarding; Looked After Children; children with learning difficulties and/or disabilities; what is being done to reduce teenage pregnancy in Surrey.

There have been shocking failures in these. These are direct quotations from the report’s main findings: 

• “ … safeguarding is inadequate”

• “There is an inadequate range of services for those children and young people who have a high level of need but who do not meet thresholds for child protection.”

• “There are inadequate arrangements to ensure safe staffing.”

• “The contribution of local services to improving outcomes for children and young people with learning difficulties and/or disabilities is inadequate”

• “Services to meet health needs are inadequate.”

• “ Surrey is not on target to halve the rate of teenage pregnancy by 2010 and the overall impact of the strategy is inadequate.”

• “… targeted service delivery for vulnerable groups is inadequate.”

• “Capacity to improve is inadequate.”

The details are appalling:    “Although the council state in their self-assessment that all staff are robustly CRB checked, this information is false, with high numbers of staff identified by the human resources database as either not having had CRB checks or three yearly re-checks” 

“Poor quality and poor timeliness of initial and core assessments.” 

“Too limited access to physiotherapists, and occupational, speech and language therapists, disadvantages children severely at all stages …” 

“CAMHS thresholds are too high …Referral procedures for this service are complex. Very troubled teenagers wait over a year for treatment.” 

“Too many children with learning difficulties and/or disabilities are excluded from school. In 2006, nearly half (47.69%) of statemented children in mainstream secondary schools had fixed term exclusions …” 

Liberal Democrats have consistently campaigned for more services to support families and keep children from needing to be brought into care; for more effective recruitment and retention of key staff; and to ensure that schools are helped to keep children with Special Educational Needs in school. But it has taken a Government Inspection to bring out the lack of CRB checks, the failure to respond to children’s needs early enough in the care process, and the failure to keep proper records.

 The Inspectors said the Conservatives’ 2006 Business Delivery Review harmed ‘important service developments… in children’s social care’, and it left  ‘overall capacity … too limited for an adequate pace of change’.

One small, bright-ish spot was the establishment of Surrey’s Contact Centre (08456 009009) which the Inspectors said handled new enquiries and referrals efficiently.

The Joint Area Review Report made tough reading. Reading it at speed in order to debate it does not make for a balanced, temperate view.

So I will return later with comment, analysis, and also news from the rest of the meeting, for tonight restricting myself to quotations from the report itself: 

The contribution of local services to improving outcomes for children and young people at risk, or requiring safeguarding is inadequate

§                There is an inadequate range of services for those children and young people who have a high level of need but who do not meet thresholds for child protection. The quality and timeliness of completion of assessments is poor. There are inadequate arrangements to ensure safe staffing across a range of agencies.

The contribution of local services to improving outcomes for children and young people with learning difficulties and/or disabilities is inadequate. Services to meet health needs are inadequate

. Capacity to improve is inadequate

targeted service delivery for vulnerable groups is inadequate. Capacity and performance management are inadequate to provide sustainable, consistent and effective services.  

Grades4: outstanding; 3: good; 2: adequate; 1: inadequate

The above are from the main findings. Below are three of the statements that hit home hardest for me. Some relate to the Health Service rather than being solely the SCCs responsibility:

Children with learning difficulties and/or disabilities are badly affected by key shortages in the health service. There are insufficient health visitors to complete all two-year checks, delaying possible diagnosis until children start school. Too limited access to physiotherapists, and occupational, speech and language therapists, disadvantages children severely at all stages, especially during transitions between settings. Waiting lists are long and children are sometimes removed from the list without explanation

. CAMHS thresholds are too high, with access for children with learning difficulties and/or disabilities being limited to those at the very high level of need. Referral procedures for this service are complex. Very troubled teenagers wait over a year for treatment

Too many children with learning difficulties and/or disabilities are excluded from school. In 2006, nearly half (47.69%) of statemented children in mainstream secondary schools had fixed term exclusions and, in 2005, 23.7% in special schools had fixed-term exclusions.

The heading is here because Andrew Crisp, Executive Member for Schools, Children and Youth Services, put forward a ‘motherhood-and-apple-pie’ motion. It welcomed Surrey’s new Children’s Trust and progress in the performance of Looked After Children, thanked staff for good work, recognised the importance of partnership working, and called on the Government to give us enough money, while reducing bureaucracy, so that everything gets better.

What’s not to like? 

I had a go at reminding Council of a few salient facts:

• National Childrens Homes worked in partnership with Surrey to keep chidren out of care until its funding was suddenly discontinued during the BDR.
• Staff in Childrens’ Services have been coping with the bureaucratic aftermath of rushing in ‘SAP’ systems that required unecessarily high level agreement for small purchases.
• It’s only relatively recently that mechanisms were put into place to make sure that Looked After Children either had or were offered regular medical and dental checks.
• Looked After Children on the whole do much worse in school than their peers. Although a lot of excellent work has been done to improve the situation, the gap is not narrowing enough.

A lot of progress is being made; I have met some remarkable people employed by Surrey to look after our chidren (for all Surrey County Councillors, jointly, have parental responsibility for Surrey’s Looked After Children); and while there is no room for complacency, I have a considerable amount of admiration and respect for the determination of fellow Councillors on the Committees concerned to make Surrey work better place for children, especially those in difficulties.

It would have been a hard motion to oppose, so we decided not to, and it went through nem.con..   

But am I being unduly cynical in thinking it would probably never have been brought at all, were it not for the fact that Surrey is currently undergoing a tough ‘CA / JAR’ Government inspection, with a high concentration on services for young people?

Youth Service 

It would be wrong to say the Schools and Learning Committee meeting last Thursday was anticlimactic, because there was a lot of interesting information. But as indicated in the ‘Noises Off’ posting below, as far as the Youth Service is concerned the Committee appears genuinely to be being brought into the process before it has reached its end point (even if we suspect that quite a lot of ground has been covered without us) which means much of the thinking at this stage will remain outside the public domain.

 Anthony Durno, Principal Youth Officer of the Youth Development Service, brought no further papers or presentation beyond the scant two sides of A4 in the published papers. He spoke about the ‘roots of the process of the way forward’  and said that the Youth Service ‘had been debated over a number of years’ but in recent months it had been ‘brought into focus’.  There is a ‘clear steer around [the] £500,000′ allocated in the recent budget, that its giving the space to ‘answer three fundamental questions’: ie the three questions in Conservative Leader Nick Skellett’s budget statement that:

 ’In the coming year we will need to decide what kind of youth service we need, who will provide it and how much we can afford. During this period of decision I believe there is the need for a cushion so I propose next year to add £500,000 to their budget.’

We learned from Anthony Durno that ‘A project has been set up … there’s a project intiation document that scopes that out.’ The next steps are for ’stakeholders [to] scope the project with us … we need to set up appropriate milestones.’ 

One stakeholder group is members of the Council, through a task group set up by the Schools and learning Committee, but including other interested Councillors as well. This has been a cross-party issue, and with concern shown by more Councillors other than those on the Schools and Learning Committee.

So ‘the next phase is to establish that task group and use it [for consultation, working] … behind the scenes.’

The gap between the expectations of the public and the role the youth service is given by Government and sets itself was acknowledged: ‘if there is a vacuum, how is it to be looked at in the round … there is a number of stakeholders … [we] don’t at this point wnat to exclude.’

The extent of the project, who it would include - Connexions? The Youth Justice service? - was one on the next questions asked by the Committee.  ‘You’ve got the  nub of it there,’ Anthony Durno said, but we had to start with the ‘envelope of what is available’ and then ‘look wider … to the voluntary sector’, but ‘but we have to get that core right … ‘.

Naturally I have asked to be on that task group.

How Surrey is Doing at GCSE Level

The recent press release from SCC suggests everything is wonderful. The whole statistical story is more complicated. We’ve had a very good series of papers under the banner ‘School and Pupil Performance’ presented to us going through the key stages, now reaching Key Stage Four. Surrey is a ‘high-performing’ county, but so it should be, since school performance correlates so strongly with socio-economic class. Work has been done in decreasing the gap between girls and boys results, with some success. It’s hard to draw conclusions about the small cohort of Looked After Children, but while results are improving, they are not catching up with their contemporaries.

The weak points are ’Contextual Value Added’, and the wide range of outcomes between different schools. ‘In the middle there is some coasting going on,’ we were told. 

Metaphorically, of course. At the meeting of the Schools and Learning Committee this Thursday, the delayed paper on the future of the Youth Development Service turned out to be a two-page document about setting up a member task group to ‘assist with the review’.

 I can’t complain, because they’re doing pretty much what I called for: stopped the recruitment freeze, found £500,000 for this year to keep staffing levels up, and withdrawn the requirement for 3% ‘efficiency cuts’; while now, I hope, the mechanism is being set up for the County to take a radical look at how the different demands for youth services can be met. 

But there were ‘noises off’ earlier this year showing that some alternative scenarios are currently being developed, even though they were not brought to the Committee this week.

 No time to write more now - meetings and such like end to end this week and weekend - but I will come back asap to report more fully on this meeting.