Chamber and committees

We do not hold information centrallyon the numbers of calls made to local social work and children’s agencies.

The CPLine has been operatingas a national service since its launch last February. The following table showsthe number of calls received each month from February 2007 to December 2007.

Month	Incoming Calls	Calls Dealt With	Referrals to Local Agencies – Calls About Specific Child or Incident	Info/ Literature Requests1	Incomplete, Hoax, Silent Calls, Wrong Numbers etc
February 2007	124	98	-2	-2	-2
March 2007	89	82	32	42	12
April 2007	53	40	9	19	5
May 2007	37	36	8	27	7
June 2007	46	44	12	26	1
July 2007	31	27	7	13	7
August 2007	36	33	12	15	14
September 2007	59	41	9	15	17
October 2007	42	36	6	17	13
November 2007	46	34	11	12	11
December 2007	24	20	5	6	9
Totals:	587	491	111	192	96

Notes:

1. Including referrals to nationalagencies such as ChildLine and ParentLine.

2. Information on outcome ofcalls is not available for February 2007.

S3W-8239 answered on 21 January 2008, explainsthat the service was launched last February on a national basis and the fourareas named were not pilots except in terms of the locally-tailored PR campaignwhich accompanied the launch.

Lessons already learnt fromthe 2007 media campaign and from subsequent experience of running the serviceare to ensure that sufficient time is given to help embed the 0800 number inthe public consciousness. That is why a national marketing campaign will takeplace over eight weeks this coming February and March. Other lessons learntthis year are to ensure that the national line does not work to the detrimentof local Child Protection Committees’ (CPCs) efforts to promote their own localnumbers locally. The CPLine Working Group has been engaging closely with CPCsin the planning and delivery of the national marketing campaign to ensure CPservice providers are kept well informed of forthcoming marketing activityrelating to the CPLine and are being consulted on local PR where relevant.

All answers to writtenparliamentary questions are available on the Parliament's website, the searchfacility for which can be found at http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/webapp/wa.search.

The 24 hour national freephonegateway line to local child protection service providers was launched inFebruary 2007. It was not piloted in Highland, Edinburgh, north-east Scotland and Midlothian as described in recent media reports, but was fromthe outset a national service. What distinguishes these four areas is that theyopted to participate in the three weeks of locally tailored PR activity whichaccompanied the national launch of the service. A formal analysis of the earlyadopters was not conducted.

A rigorous independentevaluation of the service will be carried out later this year (autumn 2008)which will analyse how the service has been operating, whether it is meetings itsaims and stakeholders’ needs, and whether it is delivering value for money. Thatevaluation will also assess the success of the marketing campaign when launched.

An announcement was made in October2007 to confirm allocations of £23 million for the Primary and Community Care PremisesModernisation Programme (PCCPMP) in 2008-09 and this week this amount has been increasedby a further £6.8 million.

NHS boards also receive a generalcapital allocation which they deploy to meet all capital needs including those fromprimary care.

 

The range of agencies involved with the CPLine are represented on the CPLine Working Group which consists of several Child Protection Committee (CPC) representatives, including social work and police. In addition, the working group includes representatives from ChildLine and from NHS24 as well as some out-of-hours social work representatives.

The vast majority of calls referred forward so far by the CPLine have been to local authority social work departments although a proportion (less than 10% of all referrals) have been routed forward to services such as ParentLine and ChildLine.

The tender for this nationalservice was won last January by Essentia Group based in Glasgow. Operationalcosts paid to Essentia to date (after 10 months of service) amount to £29,100. Weexpect the operating costs for the first year of service to be around £35,000. Afurther cost of around £8,000 has been incurred for two tranches of bespoke trainingrelating to the service. The operational costs for this service are met centrallyby the Scottish Government.

The tender for this service waswon last January (2007) by Essentia Group based in Glasgow. Essentiarun this service using a reserved bureau of 26 specialist staff within their staffcomplement of 400+ who work exclusively on the CPLine and other more specialisthelplines such as Know the Score, Sexwise, Smokeline, CALM mental health serviceand Learndirect. All the Essentia staff within this reserved bureau are graduatesand many have qualifications such as nursing, youth work, addiction work and similar.All the bureau staff have been trained in basic child protection and all have receivedone day of bespoke training and a further day of refresher training on the detailedoperations of the CPLine. Essentia’s bureau staff do not provide phone-based childprotection counselling as the CPLine is a gateway and not a counselling service.

Essentia’s performance is managedthrough the contract and through their participation in the national CPLine WorkingGroup.

As I confirmed in the courseof the debate on early years in October, we aim to publish the early years strategyby summer or autumn 2008.

The annual intakes toteacher training courses are matters for the Scottish Funding Council. the Scottish Government offers advice to the Funding Council on these matters andthe advice for 2008-09 is currently being prepared.

In the annual teacherworkforce planning exercise the number of teachers retiring each year are notdistinguished from those leaving for other reasons.