1

CS D Plan EIA V3 26 March 2012

Equality Impact Assessment - Children’s Services Directorate Plan EIA 2012

Directorate / Children’s Services
Functional Area / Across Children’s Services
Director or Assistant Director Responsible for EIA / Julia Morrison
Functional Area of EIA or Proposal / Children’s Services Plan

Aims of the EIA

Purpose of the EIA / Children’ Services is responsible for a wide range of services for children, young
people, their families and schools in Cumbria including education for all ages, social
care, youth support, early help, children’s centres, the youth offending service,
special educational needs and children with disabilities.
This EIA will consider impacts of the Children’s Services Directorate Service Plan 2012 – 13. In line with the Equality Act 2010 we will identify key equality objectives and embed these within the service plan to ensure we meet the PSED.
There are 3 functional areas within the Children’s Services Directorate they are, Children and Families, Strategy and Commissioning and Schools and Learning. This EIA will look at these functional areas and this work will inform the 3 large separate functional EIA’s during 2012 and as identified in the Equality Action Plan 2012.
This plan was written taking into consideration the comprehensive review, which had a major impact on local government with big implications for public service and welfare reform. Other drivers include: Social Work Reform, Munro Review of Child Protection, Academies Bill, Education Bill, Children’s Services Re-structure, Child Poverty, Carbon Reduction, Better Places for Work, Partnership Working, Transforming Learning and re-commissioning Children’s Centres and the development of a Youth Strategy.
Children’s Services is responsible for a wide range of services for children, young people their families and schools including education for all ages, social care, youth support, early help, children’s centres, the youth offending service, special educational needs and children with disabilities in Cumbria.
There is one cross cutting directorate priority to Support children and young people to be the best they can. This is about aspirations, confidence and emotional as well as physical well being. Everything that we do should be touching on and contributing to this goal. It is about how we work with children and young people, our ethos and culture. The other 3 priorities are targeting resources to support the most vulnerable and keeping children and young people safe this sits within children and families function and lead by Kevin Jones. Maximising Opportunities and raising aspirations this sits within Schools and learning function and lead by Caroline Sutton. The third priority is Strengthening services and improving partnerships this sits within the strategy and commissioning function lead by John Macilwraith.
Summary of findings / This EIA of the Children’s Service Directorate Plan is a strategic level EIA and has been done one year on following the Children’s Services re-structure.
April 2011 seen the implementation of the Equality Act 2010. CS took the opportunity to develop a manageable framework in order to meet the Public Sector Equality Duty.
The EIA has highlighted some negative impacts and raised actions to mitigate and manage them, some action will be part of other planned EIA’s or will be brought forward into delivery plans.
Scope of the EIA:
·  One directorate
·  Cross directorate
·  Outsourced organisation / One Directorate – Children’s Services.

Phase 1: Gathering information

List examples of background information that you think are relevant. If carrying out an assessment of a proposal this section should include the data used to establish whether the proposal has an impact.

Type of information / Findings
Comprehensive Spending Review
The spending review announced in 2010 had a major impact on local government with major implications for public service and welfare reform.
In terms for Cumbria the consequences are:
Funding cuts of 35.4m by 2013/14;
Profiling front loaded info first two years;
Savings of £69.1 million by 2013/14;
Reduction in capital funding across all departments.
The Social Work Reform Board
The social work reform board are implementing proposals made by the social work task force to improve the quality of social work. Proposals for significant reform are currently under construction.
The Munro Review of Child Protection
‘The Munro report on child protection, a child centred system’ was published earlier this year, which found that local areas should have more freedom to design their own child protection services and that a ‘one size fits all approach’ to child protection is preventing local areas from focusing on the needs of the child. It recommends that the Government and local authorities should operate in an open culture, continually learn from what has happened in the past, trust professionals and give them the best possible training. The recommendations made in this review signal a radical shift from previous reforms.
Academies Bill
The Academies Bill made it possible for more schools to apply for and achieve academy status, which dependent on the number of schools that convert to academy status would have a significant impact upon the Directorate. Currently there are six ‘new style’ academies in Cumbria, four secondary and 2 primary schools. Cumbria also has four secondary academies that opened prior to the publication of the Academies Bill.
Children’s Services Re-structure
In line with the comprehensive spending review in 2011 Children’s Services undertook a re-structure.
Child Poverty Strategy
Cumbria County Council has identified challenging poverty in all its forms as a key priority over the next three years.
·  Children (aged 0-15years) currently make up 17% of Cumbria’s total population, compared to 19% in the North West region and 19% in England;
·  16.4% (c15,000, 22.5% in England) of 0-15 year olds live in poverty in Cumbria with 15.6% (c17,000, 21.6% in England) of 0-19 year olds in the same situation;
·  Child Poverty is highest, in both number and concentration, in urban parts of the county, there are however significant numbers of children in poverty in rural Cumbria.
Partnership Working
Children’s Trust Board
The Children’s Trust has been re-shaped and is made up of representatives from Cumbria County Council – elected members and officers, health, police, LSCB, public health and voluntary sector.
The Board sits under the Cumbria Strategic Partnership and is responsible for ensuring that the other key partnerships in Cumbria are aware of the issues children and young people face in Cumbria so that the partnerships can work together and collaborate to address the issues.
The Children’s Trust Board has also established 3 district delivery groups which will drive forward the localism agenda and will work with local communities to support and promote learning across areas whilst remaining sensitive to local needs and developing and delivering services appropriate to individual communities. Joint key priorities have been agreed and the Children’s Trust Board and the district delivery groups will identify what needs to be achieved in each area to deliver the joint key priorities.
Children’s Centre
Children’s Centres have been re-commissioned and Sure Start Children’s Centre
contracts for the period 2011-14 have been awarded to Barnardos, Action for
Children and Howgill Family Centre.
Service delivery has been re-shaped to focus specifically on the provision of a
universal health offer for 0-5 years and a more targeted offer for the most vulnerable
children (0-19) and families by extending outreach work, linking with locality based
Early intervention teams and reducing levels of service delivery at certain centres across the county.
Cumbria’s Profile
Cumbria is the second least densely populated county in England with a population of 500,000. The county has an ‘ageing’ population which is driven by in-migration of people aged 45 and over and out-migration of younger adults. The ethnic profile of Cumbria is changing to become more representative of the rest of the UK.
The table below summarises the diversity profile of Cumbria
Allerdale / Barrow / Carlisle / Copeland / Eden / S.Lakes / Cumbria / England
Population / 94,100 / 70,700 / 104,500 / 69,500 / 51,800 / 103,700 / 494,400 / 62.26M
% Males / 49.1 / 49.2 / 48.8 / 50.4 / 49.6 / 49.1 / 49.3 / 49.2
% Females / 50.9 / 50.6 / 51.2 / 49.8 / 50.4 / 49.6 / 49.1 / 49.3
% BME / 4.3 / 4.1 / 5.6 / 3.7 / 4.8 / 6.3 / 4.9 / 16.2
% Christian / 85.5 / 81 / 80 / 86.3 / 81.4 / 79.1 / 82.2 / 71.7
% non-Christian / 0.4 / 0.6 / 0.6 / 0.5 / 0.5 / 0.8 / 0.6 / 6
% No Religion / 14.4 / 18.4 / 18.7 / 13.2 / 18.2 / 20.1 / 17.3 / 22.2
% Lesbian Gay Bisexual / 5 / 3 / 3 / 3 / 2 / 1 / 3 / n/a
% Disabled / 20.2 / 24.8 / 19.3 / 20.4 / 17.1 / 18.5 / 20 / 17.9
% Disabled - working age / 15.2 / 20.3 / 19 / 22.4 / 22.8 / 2.5 / 20.2 / 20.4
% 65+ / 20.5 / 18.8 / 18.8 / 19 / 21.8 / 23.9 / 20.5 / 16.6
Education
Data is available on school pupils of by age, Special Educational Needs, gender and ethnicity (including first language). Analysis of the data and information held by the Children’s Services suggests a number of trends.
Ethnicity: 3.4% of all pupils are from a BME background and there are 62 languages spoken in Cumbria’s schools. Carlisle has the largest proportion of pupils who speak English as a second language (2.8% of all pupils). In terms of educational attainment BME pupils and pupils who speak English as a Second Language compare well with White British pupils. The only main gap is at KS2 for English for pupils who speak English as a Second Language.
Gypsy Roma and Traveller pupils underperform compared to all other ethnic groups in terms of attainment at Key Stage 2. Previous work with GRT families has led to an increase in the numbers attending nursery provision and primary schools.
Racial incidents and bullying: Schools have reported racial incidents since 2005. These have provided valuable information on the effects of addressing race relations in school settings. Evidence has shown that racial incidents increased during 2006-8 as reporting became more reliable and has declined since. Over 90% of schools routinely submit reports, and cases show that schools have increased their understanding of how to address racism.
Special Educational Needs: Schools monitor pupils by category of Special Educational Need rather than disability. The population of children with different Special Educational Needs is monitored to help ensure we have the provision as well as the policies to meet these needs, thus improving equality of opportunity.
Gender: In line with national data there is an attainment gap between girls and boys at KS1, KS2 and KS4. Countywide this is widest in English at KS2 (10.6%) with Barrow having the highest gender attainment gap in English at KS2 (14.8%). District variations in the gender attainment gap are significant.
Social Care
The Children’s Social Care service collects data on age, gender, ethnicity and disability. Issues arising from an analysis of the information include the proportion of BME and mixed race children seeking adoption compared to White British families and the supply of BME fosterers and adopters. An inquiry into a child death in Cumbria in 2005 advised better cultural awareness and equality training of the children’s workforce, and this work is being completed.
With the increasing diversity of the population the demand for interpreters and translators has increased. This had resulted in difficulties around meeting statutory deadlines for first assessments, due to the lack of locally trained and approved interpreters. This is a particular issue for services that have a statutory requirement to provide an interpreter. Action has been taken by using the Managing Impacts of Migration Fund to train a body of local interpreters, and to renegotiate the service level agreement with the Council’s supplier of interpreters to ensure that they source and train interpreters from Cumbria. This action has improved the responsiveness of the service and will continue to be monitored.
The Needs Analysis was used to inform this EIA.
At K

Phase 2 Impacts

From the evidence above use this section to identify the risks and benefits according to the different characteristics protected by the Equality Act.

All/general: Any issue that cuts across a number of protected characteristics

Issue / Positive Impact or benefits / Negative impact or risks / Action Required
Embedding directorate wide equality improvement S & C / Equality Embedded into Children’s Services Plans to enable Equality Objectives to be set for 2012. / Availability and use of comprehensive equality data in service planning process. / Re-designed template for 2012 to capture equality information – Equality Needs Analysis to inform service planning process.
Embedding enhanced locality working S & C / Strengthening Partnerships / Fully functioning District Delivery Groups
Service Planning S & C / Services are not needs lead. / Service Planning processes to embed equality into the directorate – share Equality Needs Analysis with service leads
Developing a Participation Strategy S & C / All children have a voice. / Participation Strategy developed and implemented.
Improve access and support around complaints service and improve responses. Endorsed by CTB 27 Feb 2012 and implementation plan approved.
Equality Evaluation at the tender evaluation stage of commissioning / All commissioned providers meet the PSED / Possible discrimination and non-compliance with Equality Act 2010 leading to challenge against the authority. / Identify training and development needs of new & existing providers – work with Contact Management Team and Commissioning team – this will be looked at as Part of the S & C Functional EIA commissioning process.