Behind the Inspection Rating: Data analysis drives improvement
Tristan Donovan
Monday, June 9, 2014
Hampshire Local Safeguarding Children Board demonstrates how its strategic work is being turned into results on the ground.
Hampshire Local Safeguarding Children Board | LSCB inspection | March 2014
When Ofsted published its good practice guide for local safeguarding children boards (LSCBs) in September 2011, it noted that even the best struggle to demonstrate the impact of their work.
So its inspectors must have been pleased to find that Hampshire LSCB had plenty of evidence of how its strategic work is being turned into results on the ground.
There were examples of the board successfully pushing for improvements in early help, addressing social worker caseloads and getting social work assessments to pay more attention to fathers.
As a result, the board came away from its Ofsted visit with a good rating in the bag.
Maggie Blythe, the board's independent chair, says there are three foundations behind its success in bringing improvements to frontline practice.
The first is having strong strategic links with the key partner agencies.
"It's not just about having an effective local authority it's about ensuring the health partners, policing, criminal justice, education and the local authority are working really well together as a partnership," she says.
But that, she says, can only be the starting point.
"It's all very well having all the right people at a very senior level sitting around the table able to tell each other what the story is locally but there is a need to demonstrate that it changes policy and practice," she says.
And doing that requires not just commitment from the key agency leaders but also a safeguarding board with a good grasp of the numbers.
Hampshire LSCB collects data from numerous sources, most notably its recently introduced multi-agency balanced scorecard that draws in the key indicators from all services within the child protection system.
Gathering and understanding the data plays a central role in allowing the board to drive improvement.
"If, for example, there was a variance in the number of children on repeat child protection plans, I would want to make sure someone was delving into that and giving me an answer as to why that might be happening."
To ensure something is done the board maintains a risk register that records things that could undermine the protection of children and a challenge log that keeps track of how partner agencies are doing in addressing key issues facing the area.
"We've been particularly proactive on keeping track of the challenges to make sure organisations are addressing and identifying them. We feel it has been useful as a means of engaging partners."
The board also got praise from Ofsted for its efforts to ensure staff in different agencies learn the lessons from serious case reviews and other reviews.
"Where we had serious case reviews or learning from reviews we put in place a range of multi-agency training," she says.
"In the last six months we have put 700 frontline staff through that training. Not just social workers but police officers, health visitors, teachers and others."
Ensuring the board's work connects with the frontline is, she adds, crucial to winning over Ofsted.
HELPFUL HINTS
Keep councillors informed. There is a lot that local safeguarding children boards (LSCBs) can do to keep political members engaged, says Maggie Blythe, the board's independent chair. In Hampshire the LSCB produces leaflets and runs sessions to keep them up to speed. It's also important to make annual reports accessible to councillors.
Nag the non-statutory sector. Getting the voluntary sector and independent schools engaged with the work of the board can be challenging, says Blythe, but it's important to keep pressing. "We use the Section 11 process that allows us to require organisations to self-assess themselves against basic safeguarding principles. They don't have to comply with that but we can keep writing to them and asking them to comply. We found that general badgering has been helpful."
Attend multi-agency events. Although board chairs are not full-time it's worth the effort of attending events that bring frontline staff from different agencies together. "For example, at three or four of the eight events on learning lessons from serious case reviews I go and introduce it and that means you meet about 400 staff and can get their perspectives."
FACT FILE
Location: Winchester, Hampshire
Description: Hampshire Local Safeguarding Children Board covers the county of Hampshire, where under-18s account for 21 per cent of the population. At 31 March 2013, 909 children in the county were subject to a child protection plan. The board works with organisations including Hampshire County Council, the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, Hampshire Police, the armed forces and Hampshire Youth Offending Team
Number of children: 280,150 children and young people under 18
