Ofsted rules out social care inspector purge

As part of plans to bring its schools and further education inspection team in-house, earlier this week Ofsted announced that it will only take 1,600 of its 2,800 external inspectors who had expressed an interest in joining the regulator under the new arrangement.

Ofsted’s head of quality and training Sir Robin Bosher said a key reason for rejecting so many was due to their poor report writing skills.

An Ofsted spokesman told CYP Now there are no plans for a similar purge among its social care inspection workforce.  

This comes despite Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw last year telling the education select committee that one in three social care inspectors were "not good enough".

The Ofsted spokesman said inspection standards have already been improved as a result of the introduction of single inspections of children’s services, which he described as the inspectorate's “most rigorous and robust assessment of the performance and impact of a local authority on the lives of vulnerable children and young people".

“We introduced new requirements and expectations of our social care regulatory inspectors in April 2014," he added.