Doncaster U-turn on independent trust raises questions over model

On 1 September, children’s social care services in Doncaster will transfer back to council control after spending eight years being run by Doncaster Children’s Services Trust (DCST).

The move is significant because Doncaster was the first council in England to have children’s social care removed and placed into the hands of an independent trust in response to failings in the department. It is also a measure that has been subsequently used in other areas in response to poor Ofsted judgments.

Former Education Secretary Michael Gove was a keen advocate of the trust model and the approach gathered momentum in 2015 when former Prime Minister David Cameron challenged “poorly performing local authorities” to “improve or be taken over” when announcing wide-ranging reforms to children’s services to tackle underperformance.

Controversial model

The model has always been controversial and in the past year has been dealt several blows: in March 2021, Slough Borough Council transferred control of children’s social care from an independent trust to a company wholly owned by the council; while in April, long-standing plans to create an independent trust to run children’s services in West Sussex were scrapped. These decisions, and the move by Doncaster Council to end the arrangement with DCST two years earlier than originally planned, has prompted some sector experts to question whether other areas that have set up trusts will follow suit.

“The whole thrust towards trusts was politically motivated at the time – Cameron said children’s services had to be taken away from failing local authorities as part of an academisation of children’s services,” says Ray Jones, emeritus professor of social work at Kingston University. “Now, the political script is not being promoted in the same way and trusts are not seen as the magic bullet.”

Right choice

Riana Nelson, director of children’s services (DCS) in Doncaster and chief executive of the trust since April, says setting up the trust “was the right thing to do” in 2014, but that “coming out of Covid, we knew that to address the decline in performance we needed a better line of sight”.

The decline Nelson refers to was set out in a recent Ofsted inspection of local authority children’s services (ILACS) report which downgraded Doncaster from “good” to “requires improvement” (see below). The report criticised leadership at both the trust and council but acknowledged that leaders were starting to make inroads into tackling the problems.

Nelson says the “right leadership” is now in place to transition services back to the council.

“The context we are operating in now is completely different,” she says. “The leadership in the council is seen as being strong and our chief executive is the previous DCS.

“Both Rebecca [Wilshire, deputy trust chief executive and director of children’s social care] and I agree that the governance arrangements of having an independent social care function managed through a contract did get in the way of effective management in performance [and] in driving improvement at pace.”

Both Nelson and Wilshire say the decision to scrap the trust arrangement would have been the right one regardless of the ILACS outcome.

“If the ILACS report was outstanding again…it would have been the right time,” says Nelson, because of the “current context around financial pressure, demand, capacity, wider pressures on families” and the need to remove the “artificial barriers that a commissioner/provider relationship creates”.

A key operational factor in the decision is the desire to better integrate education services with children’s social care provision, Wilshire explains.

“What we could see is where services move closer together they work well, such as the virtual school and early help,” she says. “It makes sense to do it for the rest of the service and put it all under one roof.”

Nelson points to better Ofsted school ratings – 63 per cent of schools are rated “good” or better – as an indicator of wider improvements at the council.

“When we started on this journey it was a very low percentage,” she says of school standards. “Education services are on a trajectory of improvement and there’s pace behind that.

“Having social care back [will] enable us to drive that pace of improvement as well. Where we can do things better together in an integrated way makes sense.”

Wider lessons

Wilshire joined the trust in 2021 and says she recognises the benefits of having an organisation dedicated to social care “but we’ve come to the point in time when the right leaders are in the right posts across the council and trust to make this a successful children’s services as a whole”.

“I don’t know if it was ever meant to be forever,” she says of the trust, adding that it is important to “be aware of the exit strategies when you’re in a better position as Doncaster is now”.

For Nelson, it is about identifying what is the right structure for local needs.

“Every trust model is different,” she says citing the example of Sunderland where all children’s services functions have been transferred to a trust.

“It’s not about the split between education and social care,” she says of that arrangement.

“I’m sure for certain authorities a different option is more suitable. We feel right now that this is the right move for Doncaster.”

Nelson adds that the trust model in Doncaster that saw the council retain the DCS role but not have day-to-day responsibility for children’s social care damaged the “line of sight” on performance.

“You need to come back to the statutory role of the DCS – there needs to be effective line of sight,” she says. “In other models the DCS is part of the trust and the chief executive of the trust – I think their experience will be different.”

Transition arrangements

Its most recent set of accounts, posted last November and covering the period up to March 2021, showed DCST employed 657 members of staff. They will transfer to the council under TUPE regulations on 1 September.

Nelson adds that there will be no changes to teams under the transition and says the process has been done “with staff, not to them”.

Engagement events have been held over the spring and summer to “talk about the council and what it will look like after the transition”, explains Wilshire.

“The feedback on the whole has been positive and staff understand that the time is right,” she says. “I think they see the need for us to be children’s services again. There will inevitably be one or two that feel they haven’t had their voices heard.”

Some working practices such as staff summits that were a popular feature of DCST will transfer across and work is ongoing to develop a vision document and set of organisational priorities.

“We’re doing a lot of work around making sure we merge the cultures in the council and children’s trust together to create a new joint culture that takes the best from both sides and co-produces that with our workforce,” adds Nelson.

Wilshire says a review of staffing and team sizes has been undertaken so there is a “clear vision” of what the department will look like over the next one, three and five years.

An additional £8.5m has been allocated to children’s social care in 2022/23, partly to tackle the £4.7m overspend in 2021/22, and in July, the council approved a further £4.03m of one-off funding to “stabilise the workforce capacity and drive improvement”.

“There’s significant investment in children’s services to bolster the improvement and deliver on that,” says Nelson. “There was nothing in ILACS that we weren’t up front about. They could see the green shoots of improvement and trajectory of that. It’s about moving on from that. There’s an exciting opportunity to be part of the Doncaster workforce.”

STORY BEHIND THE CREATION AND DEMISE OF DONCASTER CHILDREN’S SERVICES TRUST

Doncaster Children’s Services Trust was created in 2013 on the orders of then Education Secretary Michael Gove after an independent review by Professor Julian Le Grand, then Hackney director of children’s services Alan Wood and experienced social work leader Moira Gibb found there was a “culture of failure and disillusion that pervades the service and that serves to obstruct every attempt at reform”.

The review had been ordered in response to several high-profile child protection failures by the department. It concluded that “only a decisive break from its past and with the council” could improve children’s services in Doncaster.

Despite initial resistance to the plans from council leaders, responsibility for all children’s services except education were transferred to the trust, along with staff, on 1 October 2014 for a period of 10 years.

Despite an “inadequate” Ofsted judgment in 2015, under the leadership of trust chief executive Paul Moffat and chair Malcolm Newsom the move delivered improvements. Additional funding from the Department for Education helped the trust invest in innovative approaches and improve outcomes despite a rise in demand. Use of agency staff, vacancy rates and levels of sickness all halved between 2014 and 2017.

When Ofsted revisited in November 2017, there had been a complete turnaround in fortunes with the inspectorate rating services “good” overall and across key measures.

The improvements were maintained in a focused visit a year later, but when inspectors returned in early 2021, it identified problems in some areas of social work practice. In addition, changes in senior leadership teams and staffing in 2020 had led to a reduction in managerial support, challenge and oversight, at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic had increased pressures across children’s social care services.

By the time of the full inspection this February, these problems had not improved, with Ofsted downgrading the rating for children’s services to “requires improvement”. Inspectors criticised senior leaders for overseeing a decline in the quality and impact of services.

“Senior leaders in Doncaster Council and Doncaster Children’s Services Trust have together overseen a decline in the quality and impact of services for children, young people and their families since the last inspection in 2017,” the report states.

The report highlights how contracted arrangements between Doncaster Council and the trust have “failed to sustain good help and protection, care and support” for many children and young people.

The findings reopened the debate within Doncaster Council about the future of the trust and led to it concluding that a different approach was needed.