Agenda and minutes

Paula Lavis who is the Development Officer for the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition will speak for this item.

Amanda Allard, Assistant Director of the National Children’s Bureau will attend to talk about the SEND reforms.

Children and Young People Board only

Cllr David Simmonds welcomed everybody to the January Children and Young People Board.

The Joint CYP and CWB meeting came to a close. Members of the CYP board stayed for the rest of the agenda. 

Cllr David Simmonds introduced the report and a discussion on the new arrangements was held. Members argued that with the new committees covering such a wide remit, over less time lead members would have to do more to keep up the work of the board. Therefore the boards would need to have a stricter forward plan and decide which decisions would be left to the board and how these would be organised.

Helen Johnston introduced the report and invited members to comment. Members discussed amongst other things:

·         The Improvement and Inspection Programme - It was raised that with the Improvement and Innovation Board taking on all of the responsibility for improvement, this work would have to be done collaboratively between the boards. It was also important that ADCS and SOLACE were involved in these discussions.

·         Schools – The letter from Cllr Simmonds to Rt. Hon David Laws MP regarding Free School meals was discussed. One member pointed out his dissatisfaction with the letter arguing that it should have included a thank you to the government for the money they were spending on the scheme. Others suggested the money was not sufficient in certain areas and schools were short on capital. A number of other issues including an increase in the number of children causing unfair distribution of funding and debates over what was counted as a nutritious meal were also discussed.    

Decision

Members noted the report

Action

Officers to take forward this work in light of Members’ comments.

Cllr Paul Lakin, Cllr Paul McLain, Cllr Anne Western and Cllr David Bellotti all asked for the attendance records from 18^th October to be amended to say they did attend the meeting.  Cllr Neil Burden and Cllr Nick Forbes asked for the attendance records from 9^th January to be amended to say they did attend the meeting.

The Board agreed the note of the last meeting.