A new form of joint inspection designed to scrutinise how well local health, social care and justice services work together to protect children has this year come into force.
Two inspections have already been carried out by a joint team of inspectors from Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation (HMI Probation), with five to be completed by June. These built on the findings from a pilot carried out last autumn.
From 2017 the process will be stepped up with 10 inspections taking place each year – around one a month with likely breaks in the busy holiday months of December and August.
Each year the Joint Targeted Area Inspections (JTAI), as they are known, will include a “deep dive” element, taking an in-depth look at a particular safeguarding issue and the response by agencies. This year’s focus is child sexual exploitation (CSE) and missing children.
In addition, findings from all areas will help create an annual thematic review with the aim of highlighting good practice. Areas to be inspected will be chosen to give a good mix of geography and demographics, rather than because of particular concerns.
Once notified, the local area’s director of children’s services (DCS) is expected to swiftly mobilise partners across children’s services, health, police and youth justice.
Ofsted lead inspector Wendy Ghaffar is confident the timescales and workload involved for both inspectors and local teams being assessed is manageable.
On the day of notification the inspection team asks “for a list of all children and young people that have been identified as at risk or are victims of CSE”, she explains.
On the second day this is whittled down by inspectors from a long list of 20 to five to seven cases. Local partners are then asked to carry out a detailed multi-agency audit on each case.
Originally the notification period, from initial call to submitting audited cases, was intended to be eight days. However, following the pilot this was extended to nine days to ensure enough time to examine the cases.
Eleanor Schooling, Ofsted’s national director of social care, believes the process of multi-agency auditing should not be daunting for local services as “you would expect them to be carrying out joint audits of cases anyway” (see below).
On-site inspection
Following the notification period there is a week-long inspection on site, where the inspection team examines the audited cases and carries out interviews with professionals, children and families with a focus on how well services work in partnership to protect children and tackle CSE.
The joint inspection team has three inspectors each from CQC, Ofsted and HMIC as well as two from HMI Probation, explains Sue McMillan, CQC deputy chief executive.
“You will then get subgroups within that with perhaps a group of four across the inspectorates investigating one aspect of the work on one day,” she adds.
Inspecting “front door” child protection services such as multi-agency safeguarding hubs is also key to the joint inspection, says Ghaffar, as is interviewing children to gather their experiences of local support.
Each morning the inspection team has a team meeting. They also meet up at the end of the on-site visit to gather evidence from the joint subgroups and prepare verbal feedback for the local partners. A formal letter, detailing where improvements need to be made through an action plan as well as local strengths, will then be published around a month later.
“Partnerships have said this feedback is really valuable as quite often we are shining a light on things they were not aware of,” says Ghaffar.
Indeed, a spokesperson from the unnamed pilot JTAI confirms it was a “helpful learning opportunity”.
To date South Tyneside is the only inspected area where a letter of inspectors’ findings has been published.
This 10-page document was particularly critical of South Tyneside’s health organisations, which are now subject to an immediate action plan. South Tyneside Foundation Trust was rebuked for a “lack of robust management oversight of the quality of safeguarding practice”. Health services were also criticised for failing to share information with local children’s social workers. Among strengths identified were a “whole-council” approach to identifying CSE.
Sir Paul Ennals, the independent chair of South Tyneside Safeguarding Children Board, welcomes this narrative style of feedback as it “gives clear direction for the partnership”.
While this narrative approach has been widely lauded, the pilot area’s spokesperson concedes the inspection process “within a tight timeframe” is “not without its challenges”, in particular co-ordinating meetings across partners and with inspectors.
With children’s services already subject to Ofsted’s single inspection framework, as well as separate targeted inspections to investigate specific concerns (see below), British Association of Social Workers professional officer Nushra Mansuri, maintains “this will inevitably have a bearing on workload”.
Joint inspections by the four inspectorates were first mooted in 2011’s review of child protection by Professor Eileen Munro to help address poor information sharing and a silo mentality among local services.
But it has taken nearly five years to get up and running. A proposed 2013 launch was shelved after pilots revealed the process needed to be refined further, and it was not until 2015 when the deep dive-themed JTAI was put out to consultation that the four inspectorates were able to present a workable set of plans.
A major stumbling block has been “the breadth of the work involved” says the CQC’s Sue McMillan but she believes the JTAI focus on a small number of cases and on partnership arrangements has effectively addressed that.
However, for Mansuri this protracted launch has led to “confusion” and “left many feeling bemused”.
“We have also had changes in wording,” she adds. “At one point, they were called integrated inspections so people are not even sure what these new joint inspections actually are.”
This sense of confusion was apparent last year when no areas answered the inspectorates’ original call for volunteer pilot areas. It had been hoped six would come forward but Ofsted board minutes from August 2015 reveal they had “yet to secure a volunteer”.
Schooling admits “there had been a misunderstanding about the nature of the joint targeted inspections”, with some believing that it would be something “that would be universally applied” to all areas.
Once the inspectorate team emphasised the importance of its thematic review to wider learning, it was able to attract one area, she says.
A particular hope for Helen Davies, assistant chief inspector at HMI Probation, is that thematic reviews reveal good practice in how adult probation and youth offending services can work better together in protecting children.
“This makes it an important inspection for us as 10 times a year we will go out and have that unique opportunity to see how well adult and children’s probation services are working together,” she says.
Targeted support
Such information can help local services better understand and target support at families caught up in a persistent cycle of offending where crime spans generations, as well as better identify children at risk of harm in households where there is an adult offender, she says.
Making links between adult and young offenders can also help spot CSE, as involvement in offending is one of the indicators that can lead to identifying a victim, adds Davies.
All four inspectorates are now considering further themes to put forward for 2017’s programme of inspections.
For Davies “children who are living with domestic abuse” figures highly on HMI Probation’s wish list, as does “sexual abuse within the family”.
McMillan is another to place domestic abuse high on the agenda for future themes as well as mental health support, for both children and parents.
John Carroll, lead for the national child protection inspection programme and JTAI at HMIC, also wants to see domestic abuse become a future theme. “Issues around mental health are also echoed in our child protection inspections,” he adds.
For Schooling the true measure of success of the JTAI will be improved support for vulnerable young people.
David N Jones, chair of the Association of Independent Local Safeguarding Children Board Chairs, says another key measure of success is whether the four inspectorates themselves are able to work together well.
“It’s a question of whether they are able to display effective working among themselves, as well as the intellectual ability to present a narrative of what is happening locally that genuinely takes forward our understanding rather than just repeating rather worn analyses,” he says.
“The JTAI is as much a test for the inspectorates as it is for the areas they are visiting.”
Timeline
- May 2011 Munro Review of child protection calls for development of joint inspections system
- April 2013 A plan to launch joint inspections in June 2013 is shelved
- February 2015 Plans for a more focused Joint Targeted Area Inspection (JTAI) including a deep dive element are published
- July 2015 Consultation on the JTAI inspections
- Autumn 2015 A full JTAI inspection is piloted in one area
- February to June 2016 Five full inspections scheduled to take place
- Summer to Autumn 2016 The first year’s programme will be completed and a thematic review drafted. All four inspectorates will decide on next year’s theme
Joint process will give ‘complete picture’
By Eleanor Schooling National director of social care, Ofsted
Joint Targeted Area Inspections (JTAI) have been a long time in the making. Along with our fellow inspectorates for health, police and probation services, Ofsted has been working on a truly joint approach to inspection for a number of years now.
So why do it? Anyone who works with vulnerable children and young people knows the benefits of effective joint working between local agencies can’t be undersold. In areas that do this well, agencies have a strong grip on issues affecting children and their families. They have a clear picture of children who are at risk of harm, taking timely, effective action to respond. Children are, frankly, less likely to ‘slip through the net’.
Professional practice has long embraced the multi-agency approach, and it makes absolute sense we mirror this in inspection too. Individual agency inspection remains essential, but when inspectorates come together to jointly assess and report on how well local agencies are working together in an area, we get the most complete picture yet.
The new approach goes a long way to realise Professor Eileen Munro’s vision of joint, multi-agency inspection with a strong focus on the experiences of children. Not every area will receive a JTAI inspection, but we will choose a variety of areas to give a balance of geography, contexts and structures, and look at how agencies are responding to issues.
The inspections also allow us to be more responsive, targeting specific areas of interest and concern. Just as important, they will also identify areas for improvement and highlight good practice from which others can learn to help all agencies involved to improve.
Each inspection includes a “deep dive” element, with the first set focusing on children at risk of sexual exploitation (CSE) and those missing from home, school or care. The “deep dive” will involve all-important scrutiny of individual case files so inspectors can understand the experiences of children in the area and how all agencies have worked together to support them. We see this as vital.
There was clear public interest in ensuring the first set of inspections focused on CSE. However, this is with the aim of highlighting good, as well as troubling practice. Future inspections will have a different area of focus, to be decided on with the help of key stakeholders.
I’m confident JTAI will support improvement and – most vitally – have a positive impact on the experiences of children and young people. The final inspection report will include narrative findings that clearly set out what each of the local agencies are doing well, and what they need to do to improve. When each set of inspections by theme is complete, a thematic overview report will be published to highlight the learning from the “deep dive” more widely. The first will be published in September.
What is clear is the responsibility of safeguarding cannot rest with one agency alone. These new inspections will provide a clear picture of how several agencies work together in an area to ensure children are safe - markedly different from what has gone before, and undoubtedly an important step forward for inspection.
Ousted prepares new targeted inspections
Another new inspection regime to launch this year is Ofsted’s Targeted Local Authority Inspections.
The inspectorate is keen to stress these inspections are not a rolling programme of inspections like the Single Inspection Framework (SIF).
Instead this form of inspection has been created solely to investigate councils where significant concerns have been reported.
As with SIF visits there will be scrutiny of “front door” child protection services, effectiveness of management and timeliness of referrals. The targeted inspections also have a “deep dive” element looking at the specific area of concern reported.
Three inspectors will be involved in the four-week inspection. In the first week the council is notified and asked to send the inspectors a list of all children affected by the “deep dive” theme.
Over the second week the council will be asked to evaluate the experiences of five to seven children selected by the inspection team. In week three the inspection team will arrive on site to collect further evidence. The final week sees the team move off site to prepare their findings and draft a letter to the council.
Eleanor Schooling, Ofsted’s director of social care, says few councils are likely to be subject to this inspection, with none so far getting the call.
“This is only for use where we have significant concerns and where we need to inspect almost as an emergency,” she explains.
The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) has welcomed this new focus on councils where there are serious concerns. However, the body questions the need to also continue with the SIF cycle of inspections at the same time.
“Having something that allows Ofsted to respond to genuine concerns in a targeted way seems to make sense and is a doorway to trigger other work,” says Stuart Gallimore, chair of the ADCS’s standards, performance and inspection policy committee. “But our hope was we could move quicker to the targeted inspection being the only inspection in town, rather than this slavish need to finish the SIF process.”
