West Sussex: Independent trust no longer needed to take over children’s services
Nina Jacobs
Sunday, April 3, 2022
Plans to hand over control of children’s services in West Sussex to an independent trust have been shelved after “continued and secure progress” was made by the county council, a report says.
The recommendation, put forward in December 2019 by government-appointed commissioner John Coughlan, followed an inspection of the council’s children’s services that judged them to be inadequate.
At the time, Coughlan published a report that laid bare the extent of the problems in West Sussex including criticism of the corporate culture at the council.
The Department for Education, which had appointed Coughlan six months earlier to oversee any necessary changes, endorsed his recommendation to hand over children’s services to an independent trust to avoid improvement being held “hostage” to wider problems at the council.
The latest progress report from the commissioner says a children’s trust is no longer required for West Sussex because “such a structural reform would probably be actively detrimental to the continued and secure progress of the services under the direct auspices of the county council”.
The report praises the council for its “radical and wide-ranging overhaul” of corporate governance and leadership following earlier assessments carried out during 2020.
It says a new council leader has been in place for more than two years having previously been lead member for children and had provided urgently needed stability to that role at the peak of the council’s crisis.
Changes were also made to the key roles of lead member and chair of children’s scrutiny and to the council’s corporate parenting panel of elected members. In addition, an externally facilitated good governance review was carried out.
A “strong and experienced” director of children’s services took up post in April 2020 and had appointed an effective team of senior managers that worked closely with Hampshire County Council, the local authority appointed as West Sussex’s improvement partner in 2019.
“Work was maintained to progress the trust but it was becoming increasingly clear that the senior and related changes were taking place at such a pace as to challenge the costs and benefits of the trust proposal going live,” the report explains.
It concludes that, in the view of the commissioner, there is “overwhelming” evidence that progress in West Sussex is “on track” and the costs and disruption of introducing a trust did not warrant such a measure.
“The picture is not a perfect one. It is again clear from this exercise that while all of the building blocks are now in place, there can be no avoiding the long, hard iterative work of driving relentlessly and collectively at granular practice improvement on a case by case, worker by worker level.” the report adds.
While it highlights positive progress in partnership working in West Sussex, it says further work is needed to address how schools and their communities engaged with children’s services.
It recommends that the commissioner should oversee a “specific and immediate” piece of work, carried out by the council and representatives of the schools’ community in the county.
This would consider issues of communication and engagement between children’s social services and education and report back to the DfE, the report adds.
