DELAYS in assessing looked-after children have “deteriorated significantly” in Reading according to health bosses, who said there are "unacceptable" risks to children.

When a child comes into care, initial health assessments must be made within four weeks, to find out what help they need.

But in Reading, delays to these assessments are getting worse, mostly due to social workers quitting or moving to different jobs, according to the Berkshire West Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).

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A recent report listed the delays as one of the top risks facing the CCG. The report said: “There are risks to children, arising from failures to meet the requirement for initial assessments to be made within 20 days of a child becoming looked after.

“This is along with subsequent delays, in producing a care plan and onward referrals, and health reviews at prescribed intervals.

“In Reading, there has been a significant deterioration and delays have been ongoing for some time and have increased over the recent months. This is largely due to staff churn in social work teams.”

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Childrens’ services run by Reading Borough Council in August 2016 were rated as inadequate by Ofsted. This led the government to order the council to set up an independent company, Brighter Futures for Children (BFfC), which took over childrens’ services in December 2018.

The CCG risk report said while BFfC are “taking active steps to address the delays … thus far there is little progress.”

According to Maria Young, director of children’s social care at BFfC, the delays are partly due to language barriers. Ms Young said: “The figures given relate to a very small number of children – fewer than ten. 

“We are doing our best to improve the timeliness, but acknowledge this indicator can be impacted upon by the language barrier in obtaining health information for unaccompanied asylum seeking children, and also when children are placed outside of the borough due to the unavailability of local placements.

“We have been actively working towards finding a sustainable improvement and working towards completion within the timescale. Historically, this performance indicator has been hard to stabilise, but we have made significant improvements recently.”

“In September 2019, at time of our Ofsted ILACS inspection, our performance was at 70 per cent and at end of February 2020 we were at 75 per cent of children who received timely initial health assessments.”