Children's services deteriorating in Sunderland, Ofsted reports
Dan Parton
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
The independent company running children's services in Sunderland is failing to adequately protect all vulnerable young people, an Ofsted inspection has found.
A monitoring visit by the inspectorate - the second since the local authority was rated "inadequate" for overall effectiveness for a second time in July 2018 - also found that management oversight and quality assurance were not robust enough to identify and address weaknesses in practice.
Children's services in Sunderland are delivered by Together for Children (TfC), which was set up by Sunderland City Council after the services were found to be inadequate at an inspection in July 2015.
In its latest monitoring report, Ofsted states that unless there is an obvious risk, children are not always protected from harm.
The findings echoed criticism of the service in last year's inspection report.
Since its last visit in January, Ofsted said the quality of front-door services have deteriorated. It also criticised the shortage of social workers in locality teams, cases remaining unallocated and poor management oversight.
However, when safeguarding concerns are recognised, child protection investigations and assessments are generally good, timely and thorough, Ofsted said. This had improved since it was last looked at in July 2018.
In response, a joint statement from TfC, the council, Northumbria Police, Sunderland Safeguarding Children's Board and Sunderland Clinical Commissioning Group said: "As partners, we recognise there are still some areas where a greater pace of improvement is needed and have already taken steps to address these.
"This includes improving information sharing, the way actions are recorded and being able to provide robust evidence of the impact improvements are having on the lives of the children and families we work with."
However, progress is being made in other local authority children's services departments that were rated inadequate last year.
In Wakefield, a second monitoring report by Ofsted noted that there has been significant work undertaken to improve front-door services and build a sustainable framework to support social work practice.
Problems remained in identifying risk, screening contacts and decision making at the front door. Ofsted also said that too many assessments are still of a poor quality, child protection enquiries are not consistently thorough and not all frontline managers challenge poor practice.
Meanwhile, in Buckinghamshire, a third monitoring report noted that the local authority has made "steady progress" in improving interventions when children are first referred to the multi-agency safeguarding hub.
Ofsted found that while most children receive support when first referred to children's social care, there is still variable practice within the multi-agency safeguarding hub and assessment teams.
In addition, while understanding of thresholds has improved, leading to more timely responses for most children, a small minority are left at unassessed risk of potential harm as strategy discussions are not always convened when needed.
Management oversight has also improved, and social work caseloads have been reduced too.
