Lambeth is an authority that has high ambitions for all children in the borough, but particularly those who have contact with children’s services.
The south London council has a youthful and transient population – more than four in 10 are aged 20 to 39 and a fifth of the borough’s 332,000 residents change each year. The number of children in care has risen by 16 per cent to 409 in 2021/22 since 2018/19 (see graphics) and the council has shown its commitment to improving their life chances by becoming one of the first in England to back care status as a protected characteristic.
At the helm is a new set of leaders, most appointed since an Ofsted inspection last autumn judged children’s services as “requires improvement to be good”.
Director of children’s services (DCS) Andrew Carter joined in November 2022 from the City of London Corporation where he was executive director of community and children’s services. He, alongside Ben Kind, lead member for children’s services, has spent the year tackling areas of weakness in the department.
Wealth of experience
Carter and Kind have known each other for years. “When I was on the fostering and permanence panel Andrew was one of the officers I was dealing with,” explains Kind, who has a background in public policy in children’s charities. “Here we are a decade later in these leadership roles and using the experiences we’ve gained.”
Kind comes from a family that has fostered dozens of children over the past 40 years.
“I’m still in touch with many of them and I know their experiences and the impact it had,” he says. “One of my adopted brothers told me he’s only now coming to terms with the fact that decades earlier people were making huge decisions about his life.
“Making care a protected characteristic is part of making sure that our corporate parenting responsibilities run across the whole council, not just children’s services. That extends to housing, employment and the skills agenda – it’s fundamental in all the work we do.”
The 2022 Ofsted inspection criticised delays in court applications and assessments of children in care and on protection plans. There were also “considerable challenges” in the recruitment and retention of staff.
However, a focused visit published in August which looked at arrangements for children in need and subject to protection plans recognised that solid progress had been made in the first half of 2023.
“Since the last inspection, there has been a strong focus by senior leaders on getting basic social work practice right for children in need of help and protection,” the Ofsted letter states.
Inspectors praised “committed” social workers for undertaking “thorough assessments of children’s and family’s needs which help professionals recognise and respond to risk in a timelier way”.
“Many of the assessments seen during the visit identify complex issues and challenges which increase children’s vulnerability, such as poor housing and poverty,” the letter adds.
Concerns remain about the speed of care proceedings and some children being stepped down from protection plans too soon, resulting in them having to be escalated back up.
The letter states: “In a small number of instances, opportunities to safeguard children sooner have been missed, or the decisions to step a child’s plan down to child in need are based on overoptimistic assessments of parental capacity to sustain change.”
The inspectorate praises senior leaders for demonstrating a “clear understanding” of the practice areas that need to improve and “robust” governance arrangements (see DCS view, below).
Leaders were also praised by staff who said they enjoy working for Lambeth and feel supported by managers, whom they describe as “visible and approachable”.
DCS VIEW: ‘GETTING BACK TO BASICS AND HIGH-QUALITY WORK’ DELIVER IMPROVEMENTS
By Andrew Carter, director of children’s services, Lambeth
When Ofsted visited in October 2022, we had an interim DCS and most of the assistant directors (AD) were interim too. They were all very able, but it doesn’t matter how good you are, having interim leaders makes it difficult for the organisation to get a clear sense of direction and leadership.
The first thing we did was stabalise the leadership: I joined last November and we recruited to all the AD posts and appointed a new director of children’s social care. Aligned to that is the appointment of Ben [Kind] to the lead member role and the support of the chief executive who is passionate about children’s services. They want to see change at pace and have provided the resources to deliver that.
Ofsted gave us clear recommendations about what we needed to do to get to a “good” rating. Off the back of that we’ve used our governance board – which has the chief executive, leader of the council and Ben on it – to drive the improvement planning and delivery. Both Ofsted reports say that we know ourselves. Our approach is to audit and review practice, learn what we can improve, come up with solutions and apply them, and then review again. It’s about embedding that continuous improvement cycle.
We’re striving for a learning culture so that people feel able to seek help and support, recognise where things are not working so we can help them come up with solutions. It’s about getting back to basics and delivering high-quality social work. That doesn’t mean we’re not innovative – we aim to give clear messages because if you try to do everything, it can get confusing.
Practice tools are useful, but people must understand them and have a clear sense that this is just one method – it’s never going to be one-size-fits-all. Where we’re going next is: what’s our social work model, do people have clarity about that and how do we simplify that and then build on it and flex.
One of the biggest challenges is the workforce. It is about what can we do to make us as attractive as possible so that when we have staff, they want to stay. We’ve got to attract high-quality staff, but also give them clear career pathways. That’s why we’ve established a Social Care Academy. What we’re trying to do is develop a three-year pathway where people know that if you come and join Lambeth, we’ll help you with the ASYE (assisted year in employment) in the first year and in the second and third years, you’ll have a career pathway.
We do the benchmarking of our pay scales and we sit somewhere towards the middle. We have a recruitment and retention supplement which is a staggered bonus that helps to attract and retain staff. Pay is important but it is not just that. We know that caseloads must be manageable – not just around numbers but complexity.
We are continuing to offer staff psychological support – we started offering that to foster carers and have extended it to social workers and are looking to expand that further.
Agency staff like working here so we’re looking at what we can do to assimilate those workers. Ofsted said we’ve got a good workforce and they’re very committed. We want to focus on keeping them.
