Children and young people leaving care in Knowsley are being let down by services which have continued to deteriorate over recent years.
In 2014, Knowsley's children's services were rated inadequate by Ofsted, with a 2017 report having slightly upgraded those services to 'requires improvement'
Two further monitoring visits by the watchdog in 2018 and 2020 judged that insufficient progress had been made, with the latest inspection in October 2021 stating that the borough's children's services still require improvement.
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For those leaving care in the borough, Ofsted said the situation had got worse since 2017.
With a new management team has been put in place, including the addition of a layer of service managers, officers said they were optimistic the borough is on the right track for improvements to be made.
Discussing the most recent Ofsted report, however, they said more work needed to be done to ensure the impact of support services in place are felt by care leavers.
A report produced for a meeting of Knowsley's children's scrutiny committee last week, stated: "For care leavers, experiences and progress have deteriorated since 2017.
"Ofsted recognised that while personal advisers are caring and often build positive relationships that there is insufficient work put into place for young people to prepare them for adulthood."
Speaking about the findings, head of service for early help and prevention, Jo Parry said: "For care leavers there is a really good relationship built with our PAs (personal advisers) that we had with the care leavers, but they didn't see the impact that was having on the care leavers.
"When having those discussions, they could see that passion, care leavers talked to inspectors about PAs in good way, but when they looked on the case files, it was hard to see the impact of that.
"So it's that it's great you've got that good relationship but what difference is that making?"
Ms Parry said that measures are currently being put in place to improve the care leaver "offer" including refreshing a care leavers pledge made by agencies and professionals and a review of the corporate parenting strategy.
She said: "We've started already to refresh the care leavers offer, there is work going on at the moment with the new team manager in post, working with the service manager to look at what that offer is."
Currently there are around 300 children in the borough under the care of the local authority.
As well as issues around the effectiveness of support for care leavers transitioning to adulthood, problems were also identified in the quality of residential placements provided to some of the borough's most vulnerable children.
Inspectors found that outcomes for children in foster care were better than those in residential care in the borough, and Cllr Cath Golding asked what steps the council were taking to improve residential care for young people.
Assistant executive director for early help and children’s social care Lara Wood, said that often those children who end up in residential care are those with the most complex needs, where foster or extended family placements may have already broken down.
Ms Wood said: "We very rarely begin by looking at residential placement as first choice option, we try to place within families as first choice, if not in immediate family then with extended family within kinship networks and if that's not possible within a foster care or adoption placement. We want them to replicate and have family experience and environment.
She added: "It is very much children where people are not able to manage them in those environments or had those experiences and through various reasons due to trauma are not able to receive that support" who end up in foster care.
Ms Wood said that the council's in house residential placements have recently been subject to inspections, which will be fed back to the committee at a later point.
She added that the key to improvements in residential placements was to ensure "strong permanent leaders in place to create the right workforce environment."
Ms Parry said that ensuring staff were equipped to deal with trauma in children on residential placements was also key to improving the experience of young people in residential care.
She said: "We have to look at what can we do to improve that experience for them and when we look back at the workforce, is our workforce equipped to help that child?
"We've recently done trauma informed training, children in residential placements have had so many traumas, so staff are engaged.
"It's also about holding those residential placements to account, it's important that if we don't think that's good enough we're challenging that through commissioning team to make sure."
As well as the additional of service managers, officers said support is currently being provided by Salford Council to help strengthen the service's leadership team, with a bid having been put in to work with North Yorkshire Council, who have a rating of 'excellent' and use a similar model as Knowsley, in order to further drive forward improvements.
Overall officers said they were hopeful that services will improve and Knowsley could find themselves in a position be judged 'good' at the next inspection.
Ms Parry said: "Personally I think we've go the right people to make it happen.
"I think we do feel like there's been hurdle after hurdle and that's been the difficulty, and if we had time and head space now without other hurdles I genuinely believe we've got people passionate about making it happen.
"I do truly believe we can do and don't think i'd want to be in the job if we didn't.
"Children and families in Knowsley deserve that."
Summing up, chair of the committee, Cllr Joan Lilly, said: "We've come a long way since 2014."
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