Ofsted 'cannot ensure children in Stoke are safe'

Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s children’s services was handed the inspectorate’s lowest rating in March 2019 amid concerns about poor leadership and “ineffective management of risk”.

But a follow-up visit in February this year found a “lack of progress in improving social work practice”, according to a letter from Ofsted to the council.

• Decade of change: factors driving the rise in care during the 2010

• Children in care who are moved ‘out of area’

• Areas with deepest council youth service spending cuts revealed

This means that council leaders "cannot be assured that children in Stoke-on-Trent are safe”.

“Risk to children is not consistently identified and acted on,” adds the letter.

“The quality of social work assessments and children in need planning is poor. This leads to delays in ensuring that children have the right plans to meet their needs and results in plans that are difficult for parents to understand," it states.

Social workers are still failing to recognise thresholds for taking action to protect children, Ofsted found. This concern was also highlighted during the inspectorate’s full inspection last year.

Other concerns are “overly optimistic” audits by managers of cases, that “do not provide a realistic base to support improvement”.

Children in need plans are “almost uniformly poor” and are particularly confusing for parents.

“In some plans, it is difficult to see what a parent needs to do to successfully respond to initial concerns and bring intervention to an end,” states Ofsted’s letter.

An improvement plan has been put in place by the council. But Ofsted found it is failing to “provide clear measures of what progress has been made, and, as a result, its effectiveness is limited”.

Only in some cases are social workers seeking out the views of children and listening to them. Where this is happening “their work is making a positive difference to children’s experiences”.

A reduction in unallocated cases and caseloads as well as timeliness of assessments are noted among some improvements taking place.

In February, it emerged that Stoke-on-Trent City Council is looking to make £1.2m of cuts to its children’s homes provision. This involves closing five settings that form its small group homes.