Item 4 is the main event of the day. We will hear evidence on the committee's inquiry into the report by the Auditor General for Scotland entitled "Dealing with offending by young people". I welcome the witnesses: Mr Mike Ewart, head of the Scottish Executive education department, and his colleagues Mr Angus Skinner, the chief inspector for social work for Scotland, and Ms Rachel Gwyon, the head of the young people and looked-after children division. We also have with us Mr Colin Mackenzie, the convener of the criminal justice standing committee of the Association of Directors of Social Work, and his colleagues Mr Chris Hawkes, who is also on the criminal justice standing committee, and Ms Sandra Paterson, who is on the association's children and families standing committee. Also with us is Mr Alan Miller, the principal reporter to the Scottish Children's Reporter Administration.
In many ways, Sandra Paterson would be the best person to answer that question, given the experience that is being developed through the fast-track hearings.
The buck has been passed in your direction, Ms Paterson.
A document on standards has been produced by the Scottish Executive, which is trying to reduce young people's reoffending by 10 per cent by 2006. The Executive is also setting targets to reduce to 80 days the length of time that a case takes in the children's hearings system. Each part of the system has been given targets to meet. For example, the social services department has 20 days to return its report; the reporter has 28 days to consider the decision; and the police have 10 days from the point at which they have contact with the young person to get a referral to the reporter. A document has been produced that recommends that we adhere to those standards, which will be piloted through the fast-track pilot hearings system. I presume that the issues will be picked up from there.
The Executive has produced a document and set targets. Do you have any other suggestions as to what could be done to speed up the decision-making process?
Since the Audit Scotland report was published, we have completed the national roll-out of our information technology system and we now have, for the first time, clear and comprehensive national data on the children's hearings system. Our data suggest that the average time that it takes for an offence case to go from a caution from the police to a decision by a hearing is 134 calendar days, or four and a half months. I am not suggesting that the data produced by the Auditor General show that, miraculously, the system has speeded up by a month over the past six months; however, we now have a comprehensive picture and are more aware of the facts. During those four and a half months, those of us who work in the system process the case and address issues to do with the child's welfare and background.
The Executive would certainly endorse the position that our colleagues have set out. It is important that the system as a whole has clear standards to work to and that each of the agencies that is involved is committed to delivering those standards. I believe that that is now happening. In order to ensure that standards are being achieved, we need improved information about the system's performance. As Alan Miller indicated, a key part of the improved system is now in place.
We should learn from the experience of the adult criminal justice system. The Auditor General's report shows a 95 per cent achievement rate in getting reports to the adult courts on time. I think that that is the result of the introduction of standards in 1991 that included explicit performance indicators. Each performance indicator is subject to annual monitoring and evaluation. The combination of those elements means that we can recognise that the courts are receiving reports within the time scales that they specify. That addresses only one element of the process from charge to outcome, but it is significant. Things are seen to be falling behind in the children's hearings system.
We have asked for action yet we hear about documents that have been produced, targets that have been set, data that have been collected, comprehensive pictures that have been achieved, clear standards to work to, resources and performance indicators. Sarah Boyack will probe those issues further.
The main areas in which performance on time scales is poor have been focused on. I would like to discuss the multi-agency time intervals monitoring group. In September 2002, returns were received by that group from fewer areas than in the previous year. We are trying to emphasise meeting those time scales. How can performance be improved if information is not returned? It was suggested that we need performance indicators, but how will they work in practice and how will standards be delivered?
I have chaired local authority review groups in two authorities. As far as the people who attend the meetings are concerned, such groups have not been given the appropriate status and perhaps the information from them has not always been fed into the appropriate channels. Certainly, it would now be more appropriate for that information to go to the local multi-agency youth justice teams and to be reflected in the children's services plan.
Does the Executive have a perspective on that issue? Does the Executive agree with those comments?
I agree in principle with the statement that colleagues have made that each of the agencies should be committed, at the appropriately senior level, to delivering the national standards. Both ministers and officials have sought to ensure that a sufficient degree of attention is paid at a senior level. Cathy Jamieson had a meeting with conveners and chief executives of local authorities about the issues that are raised across the children's system in order to ensure that the level of commitment of the local authorities was plain. We will continue to monitor the position as closely as we can.
I have a follow-up question on time scales. I want to explore who falls outside the average range—obviously, some people are outside that range. Do we have information about cases in which young people are not dealt with in that average time? Do we have a sense of how many young people are significantly outwith that range? Do we know why some young people are not dealt with speedily? Are there trends? Can we explain that?
Having brought before the committee the advert for the SCRA referral database, I have to acknowledge that it is my responsibility to produce that information. I do not have the detailed information with me today, but I could certainly have it forwarded to the committee. You are right that the average tells us only part of the story. The reality is that time scales will vary from a few days to, in some cases, many months or even more than a year. Almost inevitably, when a case takes so long the reason will be serious problems in obtaining information or in scheduling formal proceedings, in particular lengthy court hearings, which in some cases form part of the children's hearings process.
How are local authorities monitored? Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education will inspect the performance of local authorities in relation to education. Who inspects local authorities in relation to the performance of the children's hearings system?
The social work services inspectorate of the Scottish Executive inspects all local authorities once a year. It produces an annual report on those inspections, which is presented to all members of the Scottish Parliament and to others. In addition, the inspectorate conducts thematic inspections; it takes a slice of different activities. It recently led the work on the child protection audit and review. In addition, there is a wide raft of evaluation and research reports and reports back from the time intervals working group and the youth justice teams.
Overall, the SWSI has responsibility. Does it report to the Scottish Executive about the overall performance at local authority level and Scotland-wide?
It reports for each local authority and for Scotland as a whole.
Does that also cover multi-agency work and the police performance? How is the police performance monitored? Does one agency monitor the whole lot or are different component parts monitored by different bodies?
On the time intervals work specifically, we co-ordinate information from all agencies including the police, local authorities and the SCRA. That forms the basis for each part of the targets on time intervals. We circulate that information to all partners and are committed to making it public.
Mr Skinner, could you explain what you mean by "thematic inspections"?
We take a theme, such as child protection, youth justice, sex offenders, female offenders or residential care—a slice of social work or disciplinary activity. Most of our thematic inspections are conducted with Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education or some aspect of the health service.
Thank you for that clarification.
I will add to Mr Skinner's response and then deal with your question. Local authorities and social work services submit a raft of key performance indicators to the Executive against which we are held to account. In addition to that, to answer your question, each year we produce, on an individual and a corporate partnership basis, a range of plans that set out what our task is, how we plan to achieve it and how we will measure our success. For example, we work on children's services with the health service and, increasingly, with the police, through the youth justice schemes that you have heard of. The plans that we submit to the Executive contain partnership working and, invariably, the Executive comes back to us for the clarification of various issues.
Since the publication of the "It's a Criminal Waste: Stop Youth Crime Now" report in June 2000, all the agencies have been working extremely hard to address youth offending issues within the hearings system and more has probably been done in that regard over the past two years than in the previous 20.
I see that our witnesses are nodding in agreement.
I would like to repeat in this context a point that I made at the outset of the session. We have to ensure that multi-agency working is effective. There is clearly no possibility within the system in which we are working of having a unified system driven by one agency. The process is necessarily a multi-agency one that involves a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. The key to effective working is therefore to agree stretching and demanding common standards for all the partners and to ensure that there is a common commitment to delivering them. That means working together to produce and deliver the standards.
There are three things that the committee might want to know in relation to co-ordination. First, all the national inspectorates—Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education, the social work services inspectorate and others, such as the benefit fraud inspectorate—operate under the same charter and so have a common theme. The charter is publicly available and is agreed across the inspectorates.
That sounds like a complex system of co-ordinating the co-ordinators of the co-ordinators. Is it too complex?
The joint scrutiny forum is not an organisation. It is a meeting of the inspectorates.
Which involves organisation.
Leadership is relatively easy to provide, Mr Ewart, but the issue is resources. Mr Miller made the point that additional resources have been provided, but there is a severe shortage of social workers. We do not know whether the two match up.
We have a commitment in place that thematic inspections will almost always be multidisciplinary. They will look at an issue such as child protection or youth justice that cuts across the important work of several different agencies.
I am in danger of disobeying my own strictures, but I will also let Mr Miller and Ms Paterson respond to Mr Raffan's question.
Mr Raffan is right that it is certainly possible to have a plethora of standards that confuse and perplex everybody. However, I think that we are increasingly clear that the objectives that matter for the children's hearings system are simple and clear and should be stated simply and clearly. For example, there are really only two measurements that count for the fast-track hearing pilots that are about to begin. The two things against which those pilots should be measured are whether they cut reoffending by young people who are persistent offenders and whether they cut the time scales for dealing with those cases.
You mean outcomes, in other words.
Exactly.
I agree with Alan Miller. Local authorities want standards and targets to meet. As I have responsibility for criminal justice social work and children and families social work, it is clear to me that work has moved on in the criminal justice system because clear targets and standards were set for it and they were backed by resources. One issue is the amount of resources that will be available to help us to attain the standards and meet the targets.
In his recent report called "How government works in Scotland", the Auditor General drew attention to some of the difficulties in delivering cross-cutting policies in the Executive. I would like to hear an assurance that you are satisfied that lines of accountability to a department and to a minister are clear for the delivery of the system for cross-cutting work such as the work in the children's hearings system that has been described.
The lines of accountability are clear. An exemplar of that clarity is the fact that the committee has been able to draw a distinction between the two systems and call a distinct pattern of witnesses from the Executive. Nevertheless, organisations need to work effectively together externally and in the Executive. The political and official structures, such as the joint ministerial and joint official groups, are in place to do that. We have clarity and effective cross-cutting working.
I will comment on the allocation of resources and funding streams. There is no doubt that the way in which money has come down from the Executive in the past three years has been criticised for being short-termist and directed towards projects, but the general view is that the situation is changing. People are considering how we can be properly resourced. The Auditor General's report refers to the need to examine grant-aided expenditure.
I want a clear understanding of how all the information will be gathered and processed. One key point from the Auditor General's report is that, although there are time standards and new guidance is being prepared, it is not clear who exactly will provide the information or how it will be processed. Will it all go through your new IT system? In a year's time, will we have universal information across the whole of Scotland that will allow us to analyse data more effectively than we can at present, because data are not currently being reported back to the centre?
All the required time scale information, from caution and charge to final disposal of a case, will be available through the SCRA system. Every case is logged and all key dates are automatically tracked. There are obviously some key time scales that are outwith our direct control; for example, the time between a children's hearing deciding that a child should be under supervision and that decision taking effect.
My counterpart on the ADSW criminal justice standing committee, Mairi Brackenridge, who is responsible for a youth court pilot in South Lanarkshire, and I have requested that the children and families standing committee and the criminal justice standing committee consider the information that should be collected. We have arranged a meeting for local authorities and have requested that they send a professional member of staff and an IT member of staff to examine information that is already being collected on performance and other information that we think that we should have as baseline information. That may include other information about young people such as whether they are in full-time education and whether they fall into the definition of young people who are persistent offenders. We are taking steps to do that and will involve officials from the Executive.
There is a very important role for the Executive to play in that work. In the adult criminal justice system, there is a more advanced set of computerised information systems. However, in the past, local authorities developed bespoke systems and other systems around certain suppliers, so to a certain extent the systems did not fit. It is important for the youth justice agenda that the systems that we are developing interrelate and communicate with one another from the start. That is why the ADSW has taken the initiative to bring representatives from councils across Scotland together. There is an important role for the Executive in ensuring that any funding is targeted on systems that work together.
Mr Mackenzie is absolutely right. That initiative fits within the overarching initiative of the modernising government fund, which funds quite a few of those systems within local government. That activity is co-ordinated within the Executive, which we are leading through the secondment of director of social work to the Executive to help with the co-ordination of those tailored packages as they are rolled out.
I wonder whether Ms Paterson or Mr Mackenzie could give an indication of the extent to which the amount of time that individual social workers spend on providing all that information has increased over the past 10 years. What percentage of their working week does that take up? I know that those are difficult questions to answer.
The amount of time has certainly increased as part of the quality assurance systems that we have in place for social work and other staff. Introducing those systems has meant moving from paper systems, which the staff used 10 years ago—not always in an effective way—to computerised systems. Those new systems initially cause more work, as they involve running two systems in tandem; then they begin to make things easier.
I agree with that. We have moved to a computerised system. Within the area of children and families, we are in a period of transition. Although staff are finding the new system a burden at the moment, that should not be the case in the future. It should be possible to collect the necessary information much more easily using computerised systems. There will also be proper feedback of that information. That element has been missing. People will not invest in a system unless they see some kind of payback. The fact that the development of our services shows them what that payback is makes people more committed to the new system.
We have been talking about the children's panel. I want to move on to discuss 16 to 21-year-olds. Exhibit 16 shows that, on average, it takes eight months to reach a court decision on a case involving a 16 to 21-year-old. What can be done to speed up decision making for young offenders in the criminal justice system? There are pressures in relation to young people knowing what will happen to them when. If young people are not being picked up, that raises reoffending issues. I think that that question is for Mr Mackenzie.
Mr Hawkes might want to answer it.
My question paper says that the question is for Mr Mackenzie.
We will hear from Mr Hawkes first, then from Mr Mackenzie.
The report shows that the main constraint within the process from charge through to conviction occurs at the procurator fiscal stage. We are aware of the work-load pressures that our colleagues within the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service are under. It would be for the procurators fiscal to comment on the specific difficulties that they are experiencing.
One of the main reasons for the ability of the adult criminal justice service to produce such a high level of information is the fact that the funding streams for that service are based on a different formula from the funding stream that local authorities receive under the GAE mechanism. The adult service has a work-load indicator built into it, which ensures that if the amount of work that is undertaken increases over time, the amount of money that is received increases. The converse is also true.
That is appreciated. Let us move to the next issue, which is variations in the treatment of offenders.
The report clearly shows wide variations in the treatment of young offenders. Some variation is appropriate—even expected—but it appears that the way in which a young offender is treated depends as much on where they live as on the circumstances of their case.
Reporters' decisions are made on a case-by-case basis—that is driven by the terms of the legislation under which we work. There are, therefore, no quotas: no one level is more appropriate than another. The decisions are highly contextual and there may be significant differences from one area to another not just in the pattern of offending in the community, but in the way in which the police force responds to that. Some police forces make much greater use of police warnings so that, when a child offender is referred to us, they are already at a more serious stage in the pattern of offending and we are more likely to respond in a different way. There are also differences between the services, interventions and resources that are available in different areas, although those differences are being addressed by local authorities and their partners. To some extent, there will always be differences.
Paragraph 77 of the main report shows that the proportion of offence grounds discharged by hearings varies from 9 per cent to 55 per cent. That seems an extravagant range. Do you have any comments to make about that?
I am particularly cautious about commenting on decisions that are made by children's hearings. It is rather like asking fiscals to comment on sheriffs' decisions. The decisions are contextual. Quite often, if a child is brought to a hearing following a number of alleged offences and admits to committing some but denies committing others, the hearing may feel that it is more important to deal quickly with the offences that have been accepted. Those that have been denied may be discharged at that point. That allows a quick decision to be made about intervention. Again, the range may reflect differences in patterns of offending from one area to another.
In other words, using the flexibility that you have just described, people find it more important to get the child into the process than to tick all the boxes for all the offences. Is that what you are saying?
We recognise, and hearings recognise, the importance of the speed of response. Decisions have to be made on the basis of the facts of the day. If a child accepts two offences under the Litter Act 1983 but denies a serious assault, I would expect the hearing to want to find out whether the assault allegation was correct and not to base intervention on a plan to address the child's littering tendency. The important matter would have to be investigated, tested before the sheriff and brought back. On the other hand, if the child accepted the serious assault but denied the litter offence, I expect that the hearing would want to address the reasons for the violent behaviour without delaying the process for a couple of months to investigate the other matters.
It is difficult to generalise. There is bound to be flexibility and variation, but there are huge variations in the cases that are sent to children's hearings. What work has been done in correlating the variations in different parts of the country with outcomes, reoffending rates and reduction in offending? The outcomes are crucial. Is there any correlation between the way in which young offenders are treated and outcomes? I would have thought that that is fairly important in determining effectiveness.
Very much so. My sense from the evidence to date is that the key factor is the availability of effective programmes of intervention. That is the factor that the Auditor General's report identifies and I support that finding.
I agree with that absolutely. The report flags up the important dilemma that the reporters and the hearings appear to be reluctant to divert children out of the hearings system or to place them on voluntary supervision, because they feel that those children would not be the priority of hard-pressed social work staff that they deserve to be, given their situation. On the other hand, we know from research that the most effective way of dealing with offending is to target our services on persistent offenders, because those who commit one-off or two-off offences do not need such intensive support.
I would like to broaden the discussion, because we have a fair bit of expertise before us this afternoon. What needs to change to ensure that young people are treated more consistently across the country?
We need to ensure that the information is available both locally and nationally to allow us to understand variations in types of offending and patterns of offending. We also need to ensure that the services that are available match local needs. One of our initiatives in 2001 and 2002 was to ask the youth justice teams to undertake a mapping exercise locally using the kind of information that Alan Miller indicated is now becoming available. That sort of initiative will ensure that the kinds of offending and the patterns of offending are understood locally and that the services that are coming on stream now, as the range of responses is developed, are appropriate to local needs. It will ensure that there is a match, rather than a sort of cookie-cutter approach, as it were, which does not address particular issues.
Is that intended to be a one-off mapping exercise or will it be a rolling review?
It will be a continuous process. The information from the mapping exercise will be published so that the outcomes can be shared among the various partners.
When do you expect the initial work to be completed?
The 2001 audit has been completed and a refresh was done in 2002.
The initial information was published in September last year. We were able to draw out examples of best practice from that, which has been shared with the teams and fed back into, for example, service planning in the fast-track hearings implementation group, which Sandra Paterson mentioned. A refresh is planned for later this year to update the information with which the local youth justice teams supply us.
I assume that the information relates to local authority boundaries, but is it broken down below that level? Some local authority areas are quite different in the north, south, east or west.
We publish the information that is sent back. Different teams take a different approach to identifying crime. For example, the presentations at the Executive-led national network meetings for front-line practitioners showed how some teams break down the information and identify the pattern of crime in individual communities. That has flagged up variations—both between areas and between communities within an area—in patterns of offending and in the most prevalent types of offending.
How can you interact with local authorities? Some members have real concerns about how local authorities disburse GAE. We are concerned about how much goes to social work and how that money is disbursed within the various sections of social work. How can you influence local authorities on that issue? Where there is a particular problem with youth offending, significant pressure might come from MSPs, but we find that there is nowhere to go. When we track the matter back, we find that insufficient funds are being put into children's services and that the social work budget is not as near to the GAE level as we would like. How can you square that circle?
There are a couple of questions there. I will discuss how we have tried to introduce service developments and perhaps my colleagues will answer the wider funding question.
Witnesses have already mentioned the different forms and applications of GAE and the issue that we are discussing seems to have stirred the matter up again. As Mr Ewart is closest to home on the matter, I want to ask him whether the Executive's work and the Auditor General's report are likely to result in a review of the GAE system for children's services.
There have been a number of reviews of the detail of the GAE formula. The situation is not fixed; that detail is regularly considered in the context of discussions with local authorities. The particular issue raised in the Auditor General's report is the distinction between local authorities' actual expenditure and the amounts that are included in the revenue support grant and distributed through the GAE formula. Those patterns vary across the country. However, it would be foolish to ignore the fact that such a difference exists at national and—in varying degrees—at local level. We will have to discuss the issue with local authorities.
Does current funding have any influence on the variation that the report has highlighted?
There appears to be no direct correlation of that kind, just as there appears to be no direct correlation between numbers of social work vacancies and actual performance in time intervals issues. Nevertheless, an issue has been raised across the piece, which we will consider with local authorities in the usual discussions.
I do not want to pursue the issue of GAE just now, because we will return to it later. However, others have made numerous vague references to additional resources. Have all those additional resources been allocated through GAE or have any been ring fenced or hypothecated for specific use to ensure that they are not spent on other things?
Some of the substantial resources that have been allocated to the youth justice system—which we have outlined in our written submission in order to save the committee's time—are indeed ring fenced instead of being distributed through the GAE system. Others are distributed across the piece through the GAE system.
Local authorities hate ring fencing, but surely there is a strong argument for that sort of approach in multi-agency work, both on a wide scale and in relation to specific projects. After all, if one agency lets the side down, that might weigh down performance or indeed cause the whole structure to collapse.
One could make such an argument for ring fencing resources for specific functions within the local authority settlement. However, one could also strongly argue that such ring fencing would increase the number of funding streams, which is no help in the development of effective multi-agency working. On balance, I think that the partner agencies would have a strong view on the matter. Despite all its imperfections, the current balance is nearly right.
As our witnesses probably realise, we have been having problems with the microphones this afternoon. As a result, I propose to suspend the meeting for five minutes. However, I ask Mr Mackenzie to finish off this section for us.
I will be brief, convener.
I will now suspend the meeting for five minutes to allow the microphones to be adjusted.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
We will now consider the effectiveness and efficiency of services to tackle offending behaviour.
Earlier, I asked a couple of questions about inspections and evaluation, which I would like to go into in a little more detail. Paragraphs 186 and 187 in the main report point out that there is no systematic inspection of community-based services for children with offending problems, whereas there is inspection of residential custodial services and of police, fire and education services. Why is there that seeming inconsistency?
The development of community-based services is fairly new. Further development is planned, and research shows that such services are the most effective way of dealing with a substantial number of types of offending behaviour. We accept the general principle that there should be more systematic inspection and evaluation. Provision for evaluation is being built into each of the programmes that are currently under development and money is being made available to assist evaluation of existing services. We are also moving towards the formation of the national accreditation panel, and appointments to that panel were announced just a few days ago, on 16 January.
Given multidisciplinary working and the various cogs in the wheel in relation to accountability, is not there a need for a multidisciplinary inspection team?
We expect the process of evaluation and accreditation to reflect that multi-agency approach. In evaluations that have been conducted, that has been a characteristic of the reporting.
Is the Scottish Children's Reporter Administration currently inspected?
No, it is not. There is a suggestion in the report that an independent inspectorate should be set up in parallel with the proposed inspectorate for the Procurator Fiscal Service. We would certainly welcome that as a clarification of external accountability.
It is all very well getting all the statutory agencies inspected and accredited, but determining the disposal is in the hands of lay individuals. How do we ensure that we have individuals who are appropriately trained and the appropriate leadership, instead of the situation that exists in some systems in Scotland?
Members of children's hearings carry out a quasi-judicial function, because they make decisions about statutory intervention. A comprehensive programme of pre-service selection and training and in-service training is already in place for children's panel members. That programme is delivered consistently throughout the country. Panel members are subject to monitoring and evaluation and to regular consideration for reappointment by local children's panel advisory committees. From April, the advisory committees themselves will benefit from a national training programme.
I have particular concerns in relation to my constituency, where the chair of the children's panel considers it to be her personal fiefdom. If a view is not hers, then it is nobody's, and that causes all sorts of problems. In such instances, one individual's influence can destroy morale and affect the way in which other panel members wish to work, particularly in partnership with others. Can you assure me that the advisory committees are as independent as they should be, and that their views are considered appropriately, without the intervention of the chair of the children's panel?
I think that we can offer you that assurance. The advisory councils are independent.
Paragraph 166 of the report describes the difficulties in providing consistent, high-quality mental health services to residential schools and secure units. Those institutions look after young people with the greatest need for help and support. How does the Scottish Executive propose to guarantee a service for them?
We currently have information on looked-after children with diagnosed psychiatric needs, but the data on young offenders with more general mental health issues are not as good. We recognise the need to provide additional services, and we are working jointly with existing service providers and through the recently introduced intensive support fund to provide enhanced psychological services in existing secure units.
How far off guaranteeing a service are you?
I think that, within the context of diagnosed needs, that guarantee exists at present. I would not like to give you a response in relation to a wider specific commitment at the moment.
But the attempt is to provide consistent, quality mental health services. How far do you have to go to achieve that?
We are well on the way to achieving that, but the evidence in the report is clear: we are not there yet.
To say that there is work to do in that area is the greatest understatement of all time. There is a huge amount to be done. Specifically, there is the question of contracting work to Cranstoun Drug Services Scotland, which deals with drug offenders in prisons. How much research has been done on work involving group therapy, psychotherapy, psychiatrists and so on, which is crucial to breaking the pattern of offending? Such research requires huge investment, and it may require outside organisations such as Cranstoun Drug Services Scotland that work in the Scottish Prison Service to be brought in to help to break patterns of drug offending. Of those in residential care, 60 per cent reoffend within two years of release. We want to break that pattern. What specifically is being done?
As I hope I made clear, within the scope of secure and residential accommodation, services are being provided for those with specific, identified needs. We are trying to enhance the availability of services across the range of provision. Admittedly, we have work yet to do.
Just as we acknowledged that there is a severe shortage of social work staff, we must acknowledge that there is a severe shortage of medical staff working in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry. Although health providers have the resources available, they find it extremely difficult to fill both medical and nursing specialist posts.
I must come back on that. Psychiatrists do not have to be trained for six to eight years or whatever in areas such as cognitive therapy. I agree that there is a major staff shortage problem, but if we consider the work that Cranstoun has done on changing behaviour by using short-term cognitive therapy, we see that kids are particularly impressionable and are liable to be influenced. Cognitive therapy could be introduced. Cranstoun was brought into the Scottish Prison Service virtually overnight. Why cannot something similar be achieved for young offenders institutions?
Your point is well made. I was simply giving the perspective of members of children's panels who are often looking for psychiatric assessment of and input to the treatment of young people who offend. In practice, it is often difficult to find such input. I entirely accept Mr Raffan's point that there is scope for further service development.
There are two related points. One is about the availability of psychiatric and psychological input in secure and residential care. There are clearly problems and shortages in some areas. The second point is about the skills of care staff, social work staff and education staff in secure and residential care establishments and their training in cognitive and behavioural therapy, which Mr Raffan mentioned. The Executive has invested substantially in such training. Through the Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care, it is currently investing several million pounds a year in the training and upskilling of care staff. We are starting from a low base, so there is a long way to go, but Scotland is undoubtedly in the lead internationally when it comes to investing in residential care staff to equip them to work with fully qualified professional psychologists, social workers and others.
You said that there was a shortage in some areas. Can you quantify or clarify that?
There are some excellent examples of psychiatrists and psychologists working closely with social work services in residential and community settings. We have highlighted those in East Dunbartonshire and elsewhere in previous years. Such examples of the specialist skills of psychiatrists and psychologists shine out against the lack of provision in some areas of secure care. Residential child care staff who work in secure care are increasingly attracted to working with children and other professionals in therapeutic ways, including cognitive behavioural therapy, as a skilled occupation. The Executive's investment in that area over three or four years is beginning to pay off.
The Association of Directors of Social Work certainly shares Mr Raffan's concern that young offenders who enter secure accommodation and young offenders institutions should not spend up to a year or two without their offending behaviour and underlying emotional and psychological needs being addressed. Programmes in secure accommodation and young offenders institutions must be linked to what is happening in communities. There must be a confluence of the two. A lot of work needs to be done in that respect. I agree that it does not all have to be done by psychologists or psychiatrists—there can be skilling of other staff.
I want to discuss how we can identify the right number of community services in the right places. The Auditor General's report mentioned a lack of facilities, particularly for the under-12s. We have mainly focused on older children.
I agree. We need to ensure appropriate provision across the range of services. The mapping exercise by the youth justice teams and the national co-ordination of information to which I referred are the appropriate mechanisms for producing the relevant information.
The youth justice strategic teams in local authorities are now considering the under-12s. When information was requested, we considered providing information in respect of eight-year-olds to 12-year-olds. I think that the youth justice teams thought that they should deal primarily with 12-year-olds and those who are older than that, but it is now clear that we require to consider the younger age range and so we will need to make clearer links—even for children who are younger than eight—with our early years education colleagues. We need to know what they are doing in respect of the childcare partnership and with sure start and home start moneys. In many respects, we should deal with the matter through the children's services planning arena to ensure that our services are joined up and that we provide different programmes for children who are under 12.
One of the key in-built strengths of the Scottish system is that we deal with both youth crime and the causes of youth crime. Increasingly, a network of resources is being put in place—for example, from the sure start programme—that targets the pre-school years, early support in schools and the programmes and interventions that Sandra Paterson mentioned.
The matter that we are discussing takes us into the territory of the work done by the "For Scotland's children" report team and the broader integration of children's services that the report deals with.
We have talked about the importance of providing mental health services for young people in residential schools, secure units and young offenders institutions. The development of more inclusive practice in mainstream schools has resulted in many youngsters who exhibit offending behaviour attending those schools. I accept that the report talks about prioritising the development of such services. Is there a recognition that we also need to do preventive work and to investigate the possibility of providing services in mainstream schools?
I will use the situation in the Scottish Borders as an example. We have recognised that, more often than not, young people's dysfunctional behaviour will first appear at school. One of the mechanisms that we have put in place to recognise that is a joint team of workers to co-ordinate education and social work and the children's reporter and the police. That is called a local liaison group. Its task is to identify young people who are beginning to show disruptive behaviour in their educational facility. We have moved from that to an attempt to put together a joint resource that will enable such young people to have a period out of their ordinary school. They come into an educational environment that is specifically adapted to meet their broader range of needs, including their offending behaviour.
I am aware of such models, but I am getting at the issue of the scarcity of mental health services. From my experience of working in an interdisciplinary way with youngsters, I am aware that that scarcity is a problem in mainstream schools.
I can only concur with that.
I ask Rhona Brankin to lead the questioning on the 16 to 21-year-old group.
Paragraph 139 deals with the lack of aftercare for young offenders who leave young offenders institutions after having served sentences of fewer than four years. Mr Mackenzie has referred to that. The Scottish Executive is proposing that young offenders should be a priority group for voluntary aftercare. Given the staffing pressures that we have heard about, how can we ensure that the service is made available in practice? Is there a case for making that a statutory requirement?
The solution is a bit of both. As we know, voluntary aftercare does not always work, particularly for the most challenging young people, and the reconviction rate among young offenders leads us to suggest that there needs to be a system that differentiates, using a wider range of factors than simply the length of sentence.
A working group known as the tripartite group, which is headed by the Scottish Executive and includes COSLA and the Scottish Prison Service, has been working for the past 12 months on the provision of transitional services for people who come out of custody, including young offenders. The proposal is to take that forward, to try to formalise the process by which young persons come out of custody, and to ensure that appropriate services are available for them within the community to provide transitional care. The problem is that we already have a statutory requirement within the adult criminal justice service to provide voluntary aftercare for up to 12 months after a young person comes out of custody. Unfortunately, the take-up is low, so we are now beginning to discuss how we can build in an element of compulsion, and we are discussing the tricky issue of what happens to young people if they breach the compulsion. We have not yet got answers to that question.
Does anyone else wish to respond?
I do not think that there is much to add to the comments that colleagues have made, other than to reaffirm the importance that we place on ensuring that aftercare is provided.
I may have missed it, but did somebody refer to staffing shortages being a potential barrier to the implementation of aftercare programmes?
I certainly did not raise that issue, nor would I wish to. I would like to return to the matter when we come to the vexed question of the shortage of social workers, which has been referred to a number of times.
We shall come to that.
I want to follow on from Rhona Brankin's last point, because it leads into this issue. We hear all the time about pilots and models, but my concern is that they are not being rolled out. Preventive work, such as the truancy pilot scheme at Alloa Academy, has been successful. Today's truants are tomorrow's young offenders. Organisations such as The Corner in Dundee and Off the Record in Stirling are one-stop shops for young people that could provide a forum for throughcare. I just wish that we had more imagination in addressing the issues.
Those were not short questions, but they were important.
I am reminded of the analogy of the rowing boat and the number of steerers and the number of rowers. The diagram graphically shows that the balance is not quite right. Whether we have the right number of steerers is not for me to comment on, but we certainly need many more rowers. I disagree with Mr Raffan that all truants become offenders, because that is not borne out by research or experience.
I said that they can be tomorrow's offenders.
You did not say that.
Well, I should have done.
Is anyone else brave enough to take on this issue?
I will not get into the choppy waters of truancy with or without rowers and steerers. I do not disagree that substantially more needs to be invested in services—indeed, new resources are going into the provision and evaluation of services—but it is important that the processes of decision making in the systems for adults and children are right and thorough. I do not think that anybody would disagree with that.
I really do not know whether I am a rower or a steerer, but one of the key functions of the hearings system is to decide which children need intense intervention to turn around their difficulties. Many children who offend once or twice, or who encounter other minor difficulties, do not need intensive intervention. A fair part of the cost of the process is about enabling good decisions to be made about the prioritisation of front-line service resources.
We have discussed the need for more resources for services. The way in which those resources are spent brings us back to the question of residential services and secure units, as opposed to community-based services. Residential services do not have a good record—60 per cent of people reoffend within two years. If a service does not work, we should not use it.
The thrust of the fast-track hearing pilots is to pump prime additional intensive resources in the community. Research evidence shows that we need intensive services in place, on an every-night and all-weekend basis, to work with some of the young people who offend persistently. There is no doubt that if, with such input, we could stabilise those young people's lives significantly and reduce their offending, the cost-effectiveness of that input would be considerable for the community in the long run.
I phrased that like a policy question, but it is a question of reallocating resources from residential to community-based services such as drop-in centres.
Yes, but some initial pump priming might be needed to ensure that we have the resources in place that could provide that turnaround. Many young people require intensive residential, and perhaps secure, services. If we can begin to address differently the needs of those who would otherwise have gone that way, over time—say, over a five-year period—we could move to a different place.
Does Mr Ewart recognise the need for that pump priming?
A substantial amount of the new resources is going into precisely such areas to develop the responsive services that are required. However, there is another strand to the action plan that ministers have announced. There is a need for improvement of and extension to the secure estate. That requirement will be expensive, but it is needed for a small number of young people. It is important that that secure estate should be of the right kind to deal appropriately with the young people who require such treatment.
When we talk about mental health services, everybody thinks immediately of psychiatrists and huge costs. Psychiatrists might be needed for an initial assessment, but many more cost-effective measures, such as anger management courses, can be provided.
I do not disagree with that.
I do not agree with the comments about the secure estate. The position of the children and families standing committee is that we may not need the 25 extra beds. However, aside from the moneys that are directed at the pilot hearings, we are considering how we can provide other intensive support.
Mr Davidson and I have already touched on GAE, but I want to ask again about the large gap between the GAE for children's social work services of £224 million and what was actually spent on such services, which was £344 million. The expenditure was 54 per cent higher than the GAE. I presume that the Executive does not think that too much is being spent, so why is the GAE not higher? Will Mr Ewart amplify on his previous response?
I am not sure that I can amplify on it very much. The purely technical answer is that GAE is not a spending limit. Therefore, such a gap does not indicate that the Executive believes that too much is being spent on children's services. In our written response to the committee, we indicated the significant increases in resources that have been made available in recent years. In my earlier reply, I pointed out that the patterns of spend against GAE showed considerable variation across a number of local authorities. Plainly, we will need to address the issue that is raised by the report. We will need to do so in discussion with local authority colleagues.
When Mr Mackenzie referred to the issue, he said that the gap was serious. He did not use that word, but he used an even more dramatic adjective to describe the gap between GAE and what is spent. Presumably, the implications for local authorities are huge. Will Mr Mackenzie indicate what those implications are?
The implications are considerable. Local authorities receive a pot of money that must be distributed amongst a range of services, so some services are perhaps not receiving the spend that they require because of the amount of money that is, rightly, being prioritised for children's services. There is an issue that local authorities should have the ability to make such decisions, but when the disparity is as large as it is in this case, the GAE indicator must be fundamentally flawed. That issue needs to be addressed.
Without detracting from the need for the issue to be examined, I think that it is important to remind the committee that the GAE is not a method of calculating the size of the cake, either nationally or by local authority. Rather, the GAE is a method for deciding the distribution of the cake once its size has been decided.
I missed the questions that were asked about residential schools and secure units. Given the varied reasons for the steep rise in the costs of sending youngsters to such institutions, what provision is being made for alternatives such as specialised foster care?
The report flags up specialised fostering schemes as more effective—or, at least, no less effective—in working with such youngsters. Those schemes are being developed across Scotland and we will begin to see them over time. However, as Sandra Paterson pointed out, the dilemma is that, as we reduce the number of children involved, the costs go up. Therefore, there must be some way of putting in the kind of money that is required. The issue comes back to the bridging argument that was raised earlier.
What sort of value for money do the specialised fostering schemes provide in comparison with residential schools? What are the outcomes like?
The research shows that the outcomes are no worse. In fact, I think that a longer study would show that the outcomes are better. The report outlines the clear difference in the costs, so if we are following the pound, specialised fostering schemes provide more value for money and are a far better option to pursue.
I have a final question about ring fencing and hypothecation, which I raised briefly before. The resources for criminal justice social work are ring fenced, and powers exist to ring fence services for 16 and 17-year-olds in the children's hearings system. Why are those powers not being used to ensure that the services are in place?
I do not have anything to add to what was said during the earlier discussion about the balance between ring fencing and local discretion and the issue of the multiplicity of funding streams.
We move to a topic that should be to Mr Mackenzie's taste: the growing problems in finding social work staff to provide the core supervision service for children.
These are the questions that Mr Mackenzie and his colleagues have been waiting for. My first question is for Mr Ewart. The Executive has announced various initiatives to tackle recruitment and retention problems in social work services. However, it will be some years before those initiatives will be delivered on the ground. How can the new moneys that are being allocated to those initiatives result in effective additional services if there is a continuing shortage of social workers?
The number of social workers who are involved in providing children's services is increasing and has increased over the past couple of years. However, as you say, it will take some time before the current recruitment and retention work flows through into further increases in numbers to address the shortage that exists in many areas. Nonetheless, it would not be right to hold back on the development of services, provided that they can be delivered and administered effectively by the existing staff in the system. There is a balance to be struck. The Executive believes that we can achieve effective implementation of the services that we expect to be delivered as a result of the investment that is being made. I would be interested to hear whether colleagues who are delivering those services on the ground share that view.
I ask the same question of Mr Mackenzie.
I think that Mr Miller wants to speak first.
I have just a brief comment. In legal terms, the responsibility for supervising a child who is subject to supervision lies with the local authority, not just with the social work department. Local authorities are increasingly waking up to that quite significant change in the law, which was little noticed in 1997.
They smelt the coffee a bit late, though.
They are now recognising that there are appropriate roles for other professional groups such as educational specialists and community workers. Clearly, social work professionals bring specific skills to working with young offenders and other groups of young people. However, there is considerable scope for the involvement of other professional groups as well as community foster carers, mentors and other members of the community.
As I said earlier, much has been said about the apparent shortage of social workers. An article in one of the newspapers today talks about a crisis, but the crisis is clearly in the mathematical abilities of the journalist concerned. It is true that there is a shortage of social workers, but that shortage has come about because of the new projects and developments and because there has been such a large increase, over the past few years, in the capacity of social care. The fact that that capacity has increased dramatically has meant that people have chosen different paths.
You said that, given some of the legislation that regulates aspects of social work, we will not return to the time of the generic social worker. I am quite happy about that, as it is the view of the ADSW. However, I am concerned about aspects of the new degree. What about the age barrier? I understand that 19-year-old applicants to the current degree programme are told to come back when they are 21. They are eager to get into the profession, but they are told to do something else for two years.
Indeed. The fact that someone is 19 should not prevent them from entering a degree programme. The duration of the degree is not specified, which opens up the gateway. Depending on people's experience, the degree would last for four years or less. The fact that people's prior learning and experience can be taken into account should allow them to move through the process and to come out of it at different stages. That will all be helpful.
Good.
I will be brief. We have talked about getting more people into the profession and about continuing training and career development, which you touched on briefly in respect of skill updates. If social workers are under such pressure, I assume that it will be difficult for them to be released for specialist training and skill updates.
Lots of local authorities commission services from a range of organisations; there is not a barrier to that. The organisation that you mentioned might well be used in that way, although not in my area because it does not exist there. We have to recognise that a mixed economy is a good way forward. That concept was introduced a number of years ago for community care, so it is not a new lesson for local authorities, which have experience of it.
Mr Mackenzie has set out the current position, about which he is absolutely right; I am grateful to him for doing so. Cathy Jamieson will make a number of announcements on Monday, which will complete the cycle. The 12-month action plan that was announced last April has pretty well been completed. The plan included a return-to-learn project that was launched in October and is proving successful and other aspects of widening access. One or two elements are still to come and one or two announcements are still to be made. We will have to wait until Monday for those, but the committee might want to take them into consideration when it comes to its conclusions.
Thank you for the trailer of forthcoming attractions.
You talked about initial education of social workers. Given our discussion about multidisciplinary working, can we be assured that with the review of initial teacher education, the approach is becoming more integrated?
We will be announcing this on Monday, but I think that it is widely known that the structure and formulation of the standards for the new degree will match those of the recently announced standards for initial teacher training and nursing. We have had teachers on the working group considering that project, so it has been well informed. Next year, in Dundee, we will have a course that will train together, in the first year, teachers, social workers and nurses and which will build on that thereafter. We have done everything that we possibly can. We are in negotiations with the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council about how to support the significant academic and cultural change that is involved in the new approach to multiprofessional education.
How is the Executive monitoring the position in different local authorities in relation to social work staff in children's services? Does the Executive have information on the number of unallocated cases, the delays in allocation of cases, the numbers of vacant posts and the varying sick rates?
I shall tackle at least some of that list. We publish information on social work services staff in local authorities. There are three sources of information. First, there is the publication by the social work services statistics part of the Scottish Executive, which covers social work services staff in local authorities and vacancy rates; those figures are often quoted, accurately or inaccurately, in the press. Secondly, there are COSLA's staffing watch returns, which provide additional information. Thirdly, Audit Scotland provides returns on the professional staff numbers and sickness rates; those returns are broken down for teachers and police, but not for social workers.
I will answer one point that we might have left hanging from Ms Jamieson's questions. She asked whether we were sure that the extra resources for community programmes could be delivered. We have noticed that part of the increase in children and families workers is represented by an increase in the voluntary and independent sectors. That is partly why the decision was taken to prioritise the youth crime prevention fund on the independent sector, to bring that sector, its skills and its qualifications into the service provision tent.
If a local authority had too many vacancies and high sickness levels, when would the Executive expect to intervene?
Mr Ewart will answer that question on unsustainability.
I thank the committee for the opportunity to walk on warm and inviting ground. The best way in which I can answer Ms Jamieson's question, and remain helpful without hanging myself, is to say that what is at issue is whether the local authority can deliver its statutory responsibilities effectively. Rather than picking indicators and a point at which they become unacceptable, the question to be answered is the broader one of whether the statutory responsibilities are being, and can be, effectively delivered by an authority.
Would your monitoring set enough alarm bells ringing at an early enough stage?
I am fairly sure that, if we reached such territory, we would hear many alarm bells ringing in a variety of quarters. The numerical infelicities of the stories that we have seen today indicate that people are watching that territory closely, even if they cannot do the sums.
Is it safe to say that registered social work staff who felt that the situation was reaching that stage would be under a duty to report that to a professional organisation, as nurses and doctors would?
Two codes of practice have been published. One is for employees—people who are registered—and one is for employers. To an extent, the responsibility that the Scottish Social Services Council and the Scottish Commission for the Regulation of Care will exercise will be to ensure that employees and employers fulfil the requirements on them. The commission will do that for all the services that it regulates and registers and the social work services inspectorate will do that for the other social work services. There is a range of matters that are germane to ensuring that employees can fulfil their responsibilities without undue stress and difficulty.
My local authority has a high vacancy level within the children and families section, but a low absence rate. There seemed to be an implication that vacancy levels and absence rates went hand in hand, but that might not be the case.
The report comments that there is difficulty in recruiting and retaining good quality staff in children's services and it contrasts that situation with that in criminal justice social work services, where the profile of staff is more stable and experienced. It is clear that there are many issues underneath the surface.
We move on to the final topics, which are multi-agency working and youth justice teams.
Paragraph 188 of the main report says that too few senior officials are involved in some youth justice teams and that some key agencies are not participating. How well do you think that the key agencies are engaging in multi-agency youth justice teams?
A sea change has clearly taken place over the past five or six years, which was instigated because of the unitary authorities and the development of children's services plans, and because of the publication of "For Scotland's children", which examined how we work together. I said earlier that joint working is difficult, but joint standards, joint performance indicators and the funding streams that we must all sign off all lead down the path to joint working. In a number of the authorities in which I have worked, I have seen such a shift in working practices.
I commented on the matter earlier. The range of innovative, exciting and highly effective projects and interventions on working with offending young people in Scotland is increasing. To say that they all arose from multi-agency planning and a desire to improve planning might tempt fate, but the vast majority are multi-agency service innovations. There is a groundswell and everybody realises that joint working is the way to go. The SCRA is heavily engaged in joint working and we have in every authority area staff who are working with partners in the local authority and other services. That is the way that working practices will increasingly go in the future.
How long will that process take? We have heard that it will take five years, but could it come sooner or later?
The end point that we seek to reach is our being able to say confidently that effective services are available at a range of levels of need, and that those services can be put in touch quickly with the children and young people who need them. If we put the target in such terms, we will always be striving to achieve it. However, in five years, we ought to be much more confident about saying that we are at that point.
You have used phrases like "on track" or "lead down the path to joint working". How far down that path are you now and how far do you still have to travel?
Joint working happens now, but all our experience of really making a difference for children and young people through joint working demonstrates that we can go further.
I concur with that. The key point is that joint working is not just a desirable way forward, it is the only way forward.
I asked the question because I was trying to illuminate how far the process has gone.
I want to get an exact angle on how multi-agency youth justice teams work, apart from one-on-one relationships between people in different agencies. Do they operate in the same way as DAATs—drug and alcohol action teams—which meet in their territory once a month so that everybody can get round the table? I know that those teams are different because they share resources, but such meetings are a way of sorting out problems and achieving more effective joint working.
The mechanism that we have used in one of the pilot areas for fast-track hearings is to bring to one building all the players; staff from social work, education, health and the police work together on the delivery of the new service.
We have talked about sharing practice. It has been suggested to me that sharing information is a problem and that there are legal difficulties with passing information between different parts of the system. Do the witnesses share that concern?
The Data Protection Act 1998 is often used as a barrier to sharing information. To link the issue to the previous question, various models are being developed for youth justice teams. Some models are at strategic level—such as the DAATs and other such organisations—and some link to the children's services plan. At the service delivery level, police, health, education and social work staff come together to share information. When a youngster needs a service, those people decide how best to target the service. That system gets past some of the issues that are often thrown up in relation to joint working.
How can we ensure that sufficiently senior officers become involved in local youth justice teams? We have covered the matter a little already, but there are other issues such as opportunities for continuing professional development and senior management training. Who is responsible for ensuring that senior officers become involved?
I can speak only from my experience. The youth audit identified that there is a range of multi-agency strategic teams. The guidance indicates clearly the range of people that is required for the teams to function. The issue must be set in the context of the children's services plan—we cannot get away from that because it is the context within which the teams should operate. Whatever form the children's services plan steering group takes, it will have senior personnel on it. That might mean that the group below the steering group that will inform the plan might not be required to include the same level of seniority. However, senior staff should sign off any work that that group does.
Rhona Brankin's question is relatively simple for the SCRA. Our senior local staff are authority reporters who manage the children's reporter teams in each local authority area. The authority reporters are closely involved in planning children's services and youth justice locally. We are a small organisation—a few individuals can spread themselves only so far. However, it is appropriate that those are the people who are engaged in that work.
The other important factor that I should have mentioned is that our group is chaired by a person from the chief executive's department. That person is corporate and is therefore seen not to have a particular agenda, such as might come, for example, from the social services or education departments. That has lent weight to the view that youth justice is a corporate responsibility, and that is how it is seen throughout the council. There can, therefore, be an advantage in the work's being led by someone from a council's chief executive's department.
Local authorities are struggling with the fact that all the organisations have different layers: we have community planning, which will be the overall umbrella; we have the joint futures agenda and the whole business of how we work together in community care; we have the changing children's services strategic imperative; we have community safety policy; and we have DAATs. We must find out how all those can feed into community planning so that we can bring the most senior members of staff around the table to make sense of the agenda and to ensure that the priorities are aligned properly across the council and its partner organisations. I would not want community planning to be missed out of the agenda—it is an important part of it.
I feel that we have seen a good example of joint working today, given the range of witnesses whom we have welcomed and the contributions that we have heard. This market day is wearing late and we have reached the end of our questions. We have covered a considerable range of topics, and what we have heard will help to educate and inform the committee's view of the subject. The evidence will certainly inform our final recommendations.
Meeting continued in private until 17:37.