Local Spotlight: Lewisham Council

Lewisham is one of the most diverse and young boroughs in London. Almost one in four of its 300,000 residents is aged 19 and under, and nearly half the population identify as being of non-white ethnicity. The south-east London borough is also in the 20% most deprived local authorities in England, with an estimated one in six children in Lewisham living in relative poverty in the year ending April 2022.

These high levels of poverty impact the health, wellbeing and educational achievement of children – Lewisham has higher rates of child obesity and 4,000 families were living in temporary accommodation last year.

Good pace of change

Despite these challenging circumstances, the council’s children’s services is performing well. In January, Ofsted judged the department to be “good”, an upgrade from “requires improvement” at its previous inspection judgments in 2015 and 2019. Inspectors praised the “purposeful” pace of change at the authority with areas previously identified for improvement being prioritised, leading to better outcomes for children.

Developing a targeted early help service has been crucial to the turnaround, according to inspectors.

Pinaki Ghoshal, executive director for children and young people, says a renewed focus on early intervention services was a priority when he joined the department from Brighton & Hove Council in June 2020.

“There was no early help strategy in motion when I arrived,” he says. “There was criticism of that in the 2019 inspection and in the 2015 report, so an early task for me was to get to grips with that.”

Although the council has injected an extra £1m to recruit more social workers, the development of the early help offer was delivered within existing budgets.

“Creating an early help service and then offer wasn’t about additional money, it was about using that in a different way,” explains Ghoshal. “We did a very careful review of where the money was being spent. We stopped some things, redirected other resources, and created what’s now called our Family Thrive targeted service that we embedded within a wider early help structure.”

As part of the reorganisation, some universal services with “little evidence of impact” were reduced, functions being delivered by social workers unnecessarily were reallocated to other staff and some services delivered by external providers were brought in house. “It was about doing things in a different way,” Ghoshal adds.

The shift in emphasis appears to be paying off as the number of children in care and on child protection plans has fallen in recent years. However, rates remain high compared with some London boroughs.

According to Ofsted’s report, staff praised support from managers and the commitment to manageable caseloads, which most recent data shows is tracking below the England-wide average. “It varies slightly from team to team, but our ambition is to keep it at around 15 on average and we’re in that place currently,” Ghoshal adds.

Another aspect of the work praised by the inspectorate is the council’s commitment to tackling race inequality in the workplace.

Ghoshal says this is one of his six ambitions. “It’s explicit in all of the work that we’re doing across the directorate,” he adds.

He says the frontline workforce in Lewisham is diverse and that this is starting to be reflected in management roles, but adds “we’re not yet where I want it to be”.

“Two-thirds of our children are non-white, but that’s not representative of our leadership team,” he adds.

“That doesn’t mean that I don’t appoint people who are white to senior roles. It is about being open to applications from staff who have a variety of different backgrounds.”

DCS View: 'Right workforce support is key to children's services improvement'

Pinaki Ghoshal, executive director for children and young people, London borough of Lewisham

I’m interested in working in places where you feel you can make a difference and turn things around, and the trajectory after the 2019 inspection was of falling standards.

One of the legacy issues Ofsted identified as poor practice is that we had quite high levels of children in care in Lewisham. We still have higher levels than I would like, but the numbers are coming down. There’s a cost associated with that, in terms of the impact for those children and families, but also the financial impact. You need to invest in social care and early help, and through that process reduce the pressure on social care. That’s what we’ve managed to do.

There was a lot of criticisms in the 2019 report of the quality of social work practice – about poor recording, supervision and performance management. The permanent social workers in Lewisham have been here for several years, many of them before 2019. It’s not that they were not competent and suddenly they have become so. We had a good workforce, but I don’t think the right support was in place for them and the lack of an early help strategy meant they were overwhelmed.

I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the London pledge, which is about capping the rates of agency workers. We were haemorrhaging money on agency costs. We’ve reduced the percentage of agency workers, but we’re still spending more money than I’d like. In parallel, we’ve also invested in our wider workforce. For children in need, we are increasingly adopting a co-working approach between a qualified social worker and a family practitioner to co-work cases.

We, like every London borough, struggle to recruit qualified social workers. We’ve invested in a workforce development team and increased the number of newly qualified social workers (NQSW) we recruit. They need to be held, supported and nourished so that they become competent practitioners. We do that by ensuring we have advanced practitioners and consultant social workers who work alongside those NQSWs, to give them the very best start in their career.

After my arrival, we started to get a grip of the budget, but reducing the overspend has not been successful because post-Covid the pressures are just relentless. The costs associated with child placements are just nothing like I’ve seen before in my career. The cost of home-to-school transport have shot up as have all costs associated with special educational needs. These issues are causing us huge difficulties. The risk is that you stop doing that preventative work to deal with the reactive work. The trick as a DCS is to continue with the preventative work, focus on the evidence of what works, what makes the difference and spend your money wisely, while trying your best to respond to those pressures coming through. We’re looking at developing our own in-house residential provision because the current market doesn’t work.

Changes cannot be made in one or two years. It’s got to be a sustainable improvement programme. That’s been my key commitment to Lewisham. That’s not just from myself, but from the wider leadership team. We are supporting a self-improving system across Lewisham and that was recognised in the Ofsted report published in January.