Behind the Inspection Rating: Collaboration to overcome crises

Paul Moffat’s inauguration at Northumberland County Council was, he says, “a baptism of fire”. In the week that he began work as the council’s corporate director of children’s services, local man Raoul Moat sparked a major manhunt after shooting three people in two days.

The situation placed unexpected demands on local safeguarding services. “Even though it wasn’t your normal set of issues there were concerns that school children would not feel safe,” says Moffat.

The response, which included mobilising educational psychologists and action to reassure parents and children, is an example of why Northumberland’s multi-agency safeguarding work secured an outstanding rating in its recent Ofsted report.

“It was because we have such strong strategic partnerships that we were able to come together and allocate resources within hours to support the schools and local community,” says Moffat.

“Even though it was a one-off, it was a good example of how the senior management and various partnerships could provide a very good emergency response to a very unusual situation.”

The glue holding these partnerships together, says Moffat, is a multi-agency performance framework that encourages constant improvement. “We conduct management reviews of cases,” he says. “We look at the lessons learned and then share that with frontline staff before coming back six or 12 months later to see if we have reduced the likelihood of things going wrong. It’s not about just doing the review and ticking boxes.”

Within the council’s safeguarding teams this cycle of feedback and improvement is bolstered by an approach that helps frontline staff raise concerns and ideas with senior managers.

“There are strong messages from senior management about the need for staff to be supported well and to have good supervision but we also want frontline staff to have access to senior management,” says Moffat. “There’s a visibility of senior managers that creates a sense that everybody’s in it together.”

One example of this is how senior managers regularly meet team managers and social workers when reviewing cases.
“These meetings are part of our case file auditing process, but I expand it to talk about how the social worker is finding working within the system. That way I get an assessment from the frontline about the whole cross-section of services provided and what it is like for them,” he says.

This feedback is then backed up with a management response. “I did one last week,” says Moffat. “What I picked up from that was that the staff could do with more training about working with troubled adolescents. Afterwards I spoke to our training department and started putting together a training schedule for providing that.”

Having staff who are happy in their jobs and want to remain in Northumberland is important too.

“We’ve created a culture where we always want to improve and our staff have bought into that, not because they want to appease Ofsted, but because they want to have pride in offering an outstanding service,” says Moffat.

Fact File
Location: Northumberland
Description: Northumberland is England’s sixth largest and least densely populated county. While its child poverty figures are in line with the national average, there are significant areas of deprivation and 15.3 per cent of pupils are eligible for free school meals. The 2001 census found Northumberland’s population was 99 per cent white British but black and ethnic minority groups now account for about 4.7 per cent.
Number of children: Those aged from birth to 19 form 21.5 per cent of Northumberland’s 313,000 residents. ?The county has 273 looked-after children and 198 children subject to child protection plans

Helpful Hints

• Cross the party divide. Corporate director of children’s services Paul Moffat says working with all councillors ensures there is strong support for safeguarding work. “Engagement across all parties has led to cross-party commitment,” he says.
• Be ready to review fostering agencies. When Ofsted gives the independent fostering agencies that Northumberland uses lower ratings, the council reviews its services and safeguarding processes to make sure existing placements “remain viable”.
• Help looked-after children make a difference. Ofsted liked the Voices Making Choices scheme run by the county’s children in care council. The scheme helps looked-after children contribute to their local area and to the services they receive.
• Co-locate to get maximum reach. Given Northumberland’s size, health, social care and fire services are often located together. This helps ensure that services are not based too far away from the people they serve. In addition mini-buses are used to help bring services to more rural locations. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in the north or south, you get the same standard of support,” says Moffat.