Ofsted moves to improve council inspections for children in need

What makes a good service for children in need? That is the question that Ofsted’s new proposals for inspections of local authority child protection, looked-after children, and care leaver services aims to answer.

The changes start from the perspective that inspections should follow children’s journeys through the care system, but it is clear that from Ofsted’s viewpoint, checks on work in this area need to be more rigorous.

These single inspections, which local authorities will undergo every three years, consist of three elements: the experiences of children in need of help and protection; the experiences of looked-after children and care leavers; and leadership and governance.

Under the plans set out in the consultation, local authorities that are deemed inadequate in any of these three areas will face being graded inadequate overall. The tough line on any inadequacy has ruffled some feathers.

Nushra Mansuri, the professional officer for England at the British Association of Social Workers, fears the approach may be too harsh. “It does seem unfair for those working in areas of the service that are performing well to be given this label because one area is underperforming,” she says. “All that will be reported in the media will be the overall label – the good performance going on will not get recognised.”

Shaun Kelly, head of safeguarding at Action for Children, says Ofsted needs to consider the wider context when considering imposing an overall inadequate rating due to problems in one of the areas.

“You have to recognise the huge pressure that local authorities are under at the moment,” he says. “A process that makes that pressure even worse for local authorities would not necessarily be a positive one, so you have to recognise the needs they have to meet and the financial position they are in. That does not justify bad services, but if judgments are being made on the overall process, then there has to be some context.”

Lack of detail
The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) is also uneasy and feels that the description of what makes a good service offered in the consultation document lacks detail.

“More work needs to be done to make the grade criteria more helpful,” says Eleanor Schooling, chair of the ADCS committee on standards, performance and inspection policy. “Local authorities need more than a long, potentially highly aspirational, list of descriptors to assess whether or not a service is good. There has to be a more precise and definitive definition of what ‘good’ looks like to avoid a superficial tick-box approach if we are to be confident that all children have access to high-quality provision and support.”

The lack of specific detail about what Ofsted will inspect to assess councils on these descriptors does make it difficult to know whether these new inspections will be better or worse, says Jack Smith, policy and research officer at the Who Cares? Trust.

Smith feels that Ofsted could put greater emphasis on the involvement of looked-after children and care leavers in its descriptors and also worries that kinship care is not being considered enough as a permanent home for young people in the care system.

“There are only limited mentions of kinship care throughout the framework, particularly on permanence, which we think is a big omission,” he says. “We know that many kinship carers offer a real permanent home for young people and it’s unfortunate they have not been given greater prominence.

“They have drawn out adoption as a particular form of permanence, but it would be useful to see the other forms of permanence more strongly featured.”

Another omission that concerns Smith is that the descriptors covering the emotional and mental health of young people are too focused on specialist services such as CAMHS.

“We definitely know that one of the challenges for young people is that they don’t always want to engage in those higher-tier services,” he says. “They want greater availability of lower level support, such as day-to-day support to help carers dealing with the emotional issues young people might be facing, and the descriptors don’t really pick that up.”

Action for Children’s Kelly says that Ofsted needs to pay more attention to early intervention. “The framework relies on cases that have already been identified through children’s social services. Although it does track back cases with social services involvement, it doesn’t look at cases that didn’t meet that threshold,” he says.

“Our concern would be that there may be cases where concerns about a child were raised by a school, youth project or health service that don’t ever get to social services. This process won’t address those cases. There should be closer links between the local area needs assessment and the impact of prevention and early health to marry that up.”

Safeguarding boards
But there is not much time available to debate whether Ofsted’s proposed descriptors are right and how they will be assessed during inspections. The consultation ends on 12 July and the watchdog intends to start inspecting local authorities using the new framework from November.

Ofsted’s proposals also set out its plans for inspecting local safeguarding children boards, a job it does not do at the moment, but which the Department for Education is set to propose in a consultation in the near future.

While Ofsted notes that its suggested framework for safeguarding board inspections may need to change depending on what the legislation giving them the task says, it already has a firm idea of how these checks might work.

The plan is that these standalone inspections will look for evidence that boards are regularly and effectively monitoring frontline practice and the quality of manage­ment across the gamut of children’s services, among other things.

That may go part of the way to easing any concerns about the new framework for children’s social services inspections.

“There is a worry that by pulling it back into a local authority-only inspection, that Ofsted won’t be able to look at how other services interact with local authorities,”
he says.

“There’s only so far you can judge a local authority on the quality of their relationships and that was the benefit of the multi-agency inspections – those recognised that provision of care for young people doesn’t end at the town hall.”


Proposed Ofsted indicators of what good looks like

Child protection