NCAS Conference: Tough Ofsted inspections having detrimental effect on child services standards
Neil Puffett
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Tougher inspections by Ofsted are having a detrimental effect on standards in children's services, the president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS) has warned.
Speaking at the National Children and Adult Services conference in Harrogate, Andrew Webb said that children’s services should be judged by very stringent standards, but these standards “must be based on evidence, not an unreal expectation that no harm will ever happen”.
“We must avoid making judgements based on the wonderful clarity of hindsight and our use of language needs to be controlled,” he said.
“We have the country’s chief inspector of children’s services [Sir Michael Wilshaw] describing social workers as ‘pussyfooting around dysfunctional families’: is that an appropriate way to start a debate about state intervention in family life?”
Speaking to CYP Now after the speech, Webb said overly critical judgements can destabilise services. “It creates an environment in which it is harder to recruit and retain staff,” he said.
“One director of children’s services had a relatively stable service with a three per cent vacancy rate in the children’s social care workforce.
“Ofsted judged them to be inadequate and a year later, the number of posts that were vacant or filled by agency workers was 30 per cent.
“It is hard to see how Ofsted is improving services for children when a direct consequence of that sledgehammer approach seems to be to destabilise the workforce.”
Webb added that Ofsted’s belief that it could improve lives of children by raising the bar on inspections is “facile”.
“They have never measured where the bar currently is,” he said. “They have never commissioned any work to see whether what they are measuring makes a difference, or whether what they are measuring is reliable.”
During his speech, Webb also called for leaders in children’s services to nurture and support staff to deliver better, more personalised services.
“Our teachers, our health visitors and our social workers need to be sure of their skills, they need to be allowed to adapt their practice to fit into whatever structures we create, they need to be supported to learn and develop their practice throughout their careers by managers who are confident to give them their space once they have the skills,” he said.
“In short, if we are to cope in the coming economic climate, we need to invest more in creating and maintaining confident practitioners and less in systems.”