Children's services in Leicester judged 'inadequate'

The inspection of children’s social care found that both the council’s ability to keep children safe and the leadership of its children’s services department were inadequate.

Care leaver and looked-after children’s services were also criticised, with both being handed a judgment of "requires improvement".  

Inspectors were particularly critical of the management of the service over the last year. They found it has been blighted by a social worker exodus, delays in allocating cases and poor oversight of work.

This “resulted in children remaining in harmful and unsafe situations”, inspectors concluded.

Social workers were also “insufficiently aware” of the signs of child sexual exploitation (CSE) and there were widespread failures to meet with children who returned to care after going missing.

Leicester City Council has been ordered to carry out a raft of improvements including scaling down caseloads for those who work with care leavers, improving the timeliness of assessments and ensure social workers can better identify and tackle CSE.

Inspectors praised the current director of children and young people’s services Frances Craven, who has only been in post since October 2014, for having “quickly grasped and begun to tackle some of the critical issues around staffing and performance information”.

But they said her efforts “remain hampered” by poor performance data.

Craven said: “It is clear there is still much to do, but I know that we have a committed workforce who want to do their best for the children of Leicester, and my aim is to make sure they are fully equipped to do that.”

Ahead of the publication of the report the council announced it has dismissed Elaine McHale, who was interim director of children’s services between May 2013 and October 2014, as well as assistant mayor Vi Dempster, who was the lead member for children’s services.  

The mayor of Leicester Peter Soulsby has now taken direct lead for children’s services “for the foreseeable future”.

Soulsby said: “Fortunately we have a new director in post who is already getting to grips with these issues, and we have brought in additional support to accelerate work in key areas such as improving performance monitoring.”

Despite the concerns inspectors, who visited in January and February this year, did judge the council’s adoption services to be good.

Meanwhile, children’s social care at Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council has shown improvement but is still underperforming, according to a separate Ofsted report following an inspection earlier in the year.

Inspectors said the council "requires improvement" across its child protection and looked-after children services as well as children’s services leadership, and rated its adoption services as "inadequate".

While critical, the report noted that child protection services had previously been judged as inadequate and had been handed improvement notices by the Education Secretary three times between April 2012 and January 2014.

Calderdale Council’s cabinet member for children and young people’s services Colin Raistrick said: “Although there is still room for improvement this is very welcome recognition of all the hard work and dedication of the children’s services team and our partners.”