Issue - meetings

This report provides a summary of Medway’s performance for Quarter 2 2014/15 against its priorities, which it set out in The Council Plan 2013/15. The following information against the relevant Council priority is provided for this committee:

·        Performance against Key Measures of Success

·        Updates on Key Projects 

Discussion:

The Director of Children and Adults introduced the report and focussed on the improvement journey in relation to children’s social care.  She reported that steady progress was being made with a number of external assessments to challenge the progress journey and all were consistently reporting that significant improvement is being made on work with Medway’s most vulnerable children.  In relation to specific targets she explained that: -

• NI 147 (care leavers in suitable accommodation) – this was an area that the current Support for Care Leavers Task Group had been focussing on but she explained that, although a very important indicator, it related to a small number of young people, a total of 13 for this quarter.
• A1 (average time between a child entering care and moving in with adoptive family) – the number of children being placed for adoption was relatively high but this was not always done within the timescales.  However the service were happy that they were delivering a child focussed service.  In addition, this was a rolling three year cumulative target so there was a possibility this indicator would take some time to improve.

In response to a question requesting details about kinship adoptions the Director explained that this may not be easy to provide as data was not collected in this way but offered to bring an item providing more detail about this issue at a future meeting of the committee.  The Chairman suggested that this be added to the work programme for the March meeting of the committee.

Decision:

The committee noted the report and requested that a report on permanency options for children that are looked after be brought to the March 2015 meeting of this committee. 

Background:

This report summarised the performance of the Council’s Key Measures of Success for July – September (Quarter 2) 2014/15 as set out in The Council Plan 2013/15.

The report included progress reports on performance against 51 Key Measures of Success and 24 Key projects. It also included feedback from the council’s customers using GovMetric, a customer satisfaction measurement at the point of contact (phone, web and face to face). The performance results and associated service comments were set out under each of Medway’s four key priorities and two values.

The report highlighted the following:

·        69% (29/42) of Council Plan measures were achieving target in Quarter 2.

·        58% (23/40) of Council Plan measures had an improving long trend

·        81% of residents were satisfied with the way the Council ran its services (Tracker)

·        75% of respondents were happy with their contact with the Council (GovMetric)

·        The Council had achieved Investors in People Gold award.

Reasons:

Regular monitoring of performance by management and Members is best practice and ensures achievement of corporate objectives.