Ofsted warns of children being left at risk at 'low morale' council
Tristan Donovan
Thursday, March 22, 2018
Children are being left at risk due to a staffing problems and poor management oversight at Wakefield Council, a focused visit by Ofsted has found.
Inspectors carrying out a two-day check on the local authority's social work "front door" services in February found that social workers were "under a lot of pressure" and many of them had high caseloads.?
They found significant gaps in frontline management and social work staffing throughout the service.
"Social work teams have insufficient capacity to meet the needs of children and families," a letter outlining the findings states.
Social workers who met inspectors reported being under a lot of pressure. While some said they were well supported by their managers, others were unhappy with the support they receive.
"A significant number of the social workers who spoke to inspectors said that their morale is low and that they regularly work evenings and weekends," the letter states.
"There are high sickness rates, and some workers state there are increasing numbers of social workers leaving to work elsewhere."
There was also found to be high numbers of unallocated cases and disagreements between the council and partner agencies on how thresholds for action are applied.
"There are delays in allocating cases, visiting children and their families, carrying out assessments and in taking the appropriate action to protect children," it states.
The letter calls for Wakefield to take "swift and decisive action" to address its problems. It adds that while the council recognised its situation and has a transformation plan in place, "the issues of poor practice were so widespread that it will be a significant challenge for these plans to result in children being sufficiently safeguarded in the immediate future".
Ofsted found a high number of unallocated cases and that most child protection visits were not happening within the agreed timescales. On examining a sample of the unallocated cases, inspectors found no evidence that the risks to the children concerned had been identified or reviewed, putting this down to poor management oversight.
Inspectors reported that one in 10 cases referred to Wakefield's front door had been closed inappropriately, and that the local safeguarding children's board and other partner agencies do not agree with the authority on the thresholds for intervention and closure of cases.
The quality of case recording was also deemed to be sub-standard.
"The quality of recordings was so poor in some instances that it was not possible to identify what work had been undertaken," Ofsted's letter notes.
Ofsted said the council had improved its response times in recent months. In December 2017, only 43 per cent of referrals were actioned within one working day, but this had risen to 82 per cent in February.
However, inspectors warned that this improvement has put even more pressure on Wakefield's social work locality teams, which have seen the volume of referrals rise from 66 a week in January to 130 a week in February.
The workload pressures on social workers are such that the council was forced to halt the rollout of training on a new social work practice model because practitioners did not have enough capacity to attend the training.
Merran McRae, chief executive of Wakefield Council, said: "It is absolutely clear that we must improve some key areas of this service and that we must do this quickly. The council is putting every resource possible into making this happen."
She said the council had allocated £1m to its transformation plan and put an extra £3.5m into children's services' annual budget.
"We have brought in new leadership at the very top of children's services, a new corporate director, who will now lead the transformation," she added.
"We will learn from neighbouring authorities that have been identified as best practice. We have already developed a partnership with North Yorkshire County Council to support and guide our improvements, and are also learning from best practice at Leeds City Council.
"Our frontline social care teams are fully committed to providing the best service they can. Their need for more support and the need for more social workers on the ground is one of the key issues we are focused on tackling as swiftly as possible."
Beate Wagner became the council's new corporate director for children and young people this month.
Ofsted will use the findings from its focused visit to decide when next to carry out a full inspection of children's services in Wakefield.
In its last full inspection in 2016, Ofsted rated children's services in Wakefield as requires improvement.
At the time, inspectors said the council was making progress and the pace of improvement had been accelerating.