1. How many young people aged between 16 and 18 are supported using a floating support model (ie using support workers to give a certain numbers of hours support as opposed to using the 24 hour support of a children’s home, foster placement or semi independence supported accommodation.) to help them sustain their housing and or to provide emotional and behavioural support.
We do not separate those young people receiving floating support to those young people receiving 24 hour support within central data recoding systems and so for us to be able to give a specific answer to this would involve the review of each individual placement agreement for external services or each individual pathway plan for internal services. The number of young people that would be associated with this element of request is approximately 100. Allowing for, say, a 15 minutes review of each file, extracting this information will therefore take approximately 25 hours which is in excess of the appropriate limit of 18 hours and this information is therefore exempt from disclosure pursuant to s.12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
2. How much of this support is done within the authority’s own services and how much is commissioned to the independent sector.
3. What is the average number of hours that are allocated to such support
4. What is the average hourly charge for such support.
In response to questions 2-4 and the further information you have sought, this will require more time beyond the estimate provided in our response to question 1 above and we are therefore still unable to extract this information from the individual placement files. Please refer to the exemption we have indicated above.
5. How many times, in the year prior to June 2017 has the authority used an emergency non regulated respite service for a Looked After Child when finding the most appropriate placement has not been possible in the desired time frames.
Again, in response to this question, we would need to assess case notes for every placement made from June 2016 to June 2017 where a young person was placed in an unregulated setting to determine the answer to this; according to our records approximately 100 placements were made during that 12 month period and, with reference to the same mathematics that we used in response to question 1, this information is therefore exempt from disclosure pursuant to s.12 of the Freedom of Information Act 200.
By way of advice and assistance, we are uncertain if you may have been referring to placements under ‘short term let type accommodation’ and / or ‘mobile settings’ which in 2017 were determined to be unregulated settings by Ofsted where certain conditions apply. If this was the information that you were seeking then we can confirm that there would have been no placements of this type within the date range referred.
6. What has been the average length of stay in such provision and what has been the average cost per week or day?
Please refer to our response to question 5 above.
7. In the same period how many times has the authority had to use secure transport for a young person and what has been the average cost?
We paid 12 invoices between this period with an average cost of £1107.54
8. In the last quarter how many young people were referred for a semi-independent accommodation. How many of these were placed internally and how many were placed in independent provision.
We can confirm the following information:
From April 2019:
21 requests
7 external placements made
1 internal placements made
11 cases still have an ongoing open search
2 cases were abandoned and no longer needed.
9. How many available placements does the authority have in house for semi-independent accommodation?
We have 9 Supportive Lodging style placements