Innovation and collaboration lands tri-borough ‘outstanding' ratings
Neil Puffett
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
A new social work practice model, low caseloads and joined-up services have helped two of the three councils in a merged children's services department become the first to be judged "outstanding" by Ofsted's inspection system.
It has finally happened – two and a half years after Ofsted’s single inspection framework first launched in November 2013, the regulator has awarded its first overall “outstanding” ratings for children’s services.
Both Kensington and Chelsea Council, and Westminster Council received the top grade, while Hammersmith and Fulham Council, was handed an overall “good” judgment, receiving outstanding sub-grades in two key areas – adoption performance, and leadership, management and governance.
Although the three London authorities were inspected separately, they make up a “tri-borough” children’s services department, headed by a single director of children’s services – Andrew Christie (see box) – after merging their services in 2011.
Here CYP Now looks into the factors behind the tri-borough’s impressive results.
New social work model
A recurrent theme of the three individual inspection reports is the praise given to the so-called Focus on Practice model of social work. The introduction of the system, which has been paid for with £4.2m from the Department for Education’s Children’s Services Innovation Fund Programme awarded in July 2014, has been quick and effective.
As well as working to tackle issues that inhibit practice and developing a career pathway to enable practitioners to stay working on the front line, Focus on Practice includes a comprehensive skills development programme that includes accredited modules in systemic practice, motivational interviewing, and parenting theory and skills.
The idea is to equip frontline social workers and managers to adopt a more engaging approach with families. Some of the funding was used to recruit an additional 24 clinical practitioners – family therapists or other clinically trained staff.
In each borough there is a head of clinical practice, who supervises these clinicians working alongside social workers and other professionals.
Ofsted said that Focus on Practice enables effective relationships between workers and families to flourish, while managing risks.
“Advanced and specialist practitioners and family therapists embedded in locality teams facilitate case reflection,” Kensington and Chelsea’s inspection report states.
“They mentor and guide social workers, and provide effective direct work in helping families to focus on solutions to their problems.”
Kensington and Chelsea’s report also reveals that the Focus on Practice model is “highly valued by social workers”, as it allows additional group reflection sessions.
“Inspectors saw examples of regular and ongoing senior manager- and director-level oversight and planning in complex cases,” the report states.
“This makes social workers feel safe when managing risk, while they describe an exemplary working culture where risk is ‘shared’ with senior managers.”
The local authority was also praised for “sophisticated” prevention initiatives that are under development within all early help services as part of Focus on Practice.
“For example, children’s centres use multi-agency meetings to share local intelligence and to target services to meet need,” the report notes.
The “exciting and ambitious” project analyses data from various sources in an attempt to predict which young people are more likely to be late entrants into the care system. An offer of targeted support is then given to children and families at the earliest opportunity.
Westminster’s inspection report states that social workers are able to undertake sensitive direct work with children living in families where parental difficulties are causing instability and risk.
“Social workers are supported in this work by experienced clinicians, who have undergone advanced training such as family therapy,” the report states.
“This assists their professional thinking and approaches to complex families through systemic reflection and evaluation.
“Social workers told inspectors that they appreciated the Focus on Practice systemic training they had recently completed, as it is providing fresh insights and improving engagement, particularly where families are resistant to involvement.”
Creating economies of scale
The tri-borough arrangement itself was also praised. Serving a combined population of 585,000, about 100,000 of whom are under 18, the three-way merger was launched in 2011.
The merged commissioning function is responsible for a children’s services budget of about £80m in spend, and is designed to deliver efficiencies from joint procurement, such as home-to-school transport and leaving care services.
The move saved about £12m during the first four years by removing duplicated spending.
The arrangement has resulted in one senior management team across the three boroughs. This comprises a single director of children’s services, a director of commissioning, a director of schools and a director of finance and resources. Each borough also has a director of family services.
There is also one youth offending service, serving one court, and one fostering and adoption service, working with 200 carers.
Hammersmith and Fulham’s Ofsted report states that: “Economies of scale, achieved through shared administrative and managerial functions, have created opportunities to develop and deliver a broad range of highly effective and innovative services.
“As a result of the tri-borough arrangements, positive services and developments for looked-after children are centralised and amalgamated.
“This enables economies of scale, improvements in consistency and quality of practice, flexibility in the use of resources and an enhanced profile across the London region.”
Ofsted cites examples of strong practice as a tri-borough “connected persons” team, the independent review service and the commissioning of placements for looked-after children.
Keeping caseloads low
The benefits of manageable case-loads in the tri-borough, which are typically between 10 and 12 children for each social worker, were also noted by Ofsted.
Westminster’s report states that manageable caseloads allows “considerable time for direct work with families”. They are also cited as one of the reasons for the tri-borough’s “stable and experienced workforce”.
“Using high-quality performance reports, senior managers are helped to understand the workforce fully and to ensure that practice standards are rigorously maintained,” Westminster’s inspection report states.
“They describe a ‘virtuous circle’ in which quality candidates or students aspire to work in the tri-borough partnership.
“The offer of protected, and then very low, caseloads, and career development through training and promotion opportunities, attracts, then retains, high-calibre social workers.
“The skilled and well-trained staff group is able to deliver the highly innovative and aspirational ‘focus on practice’ outcomes.”
Inside view: "Good social work practice has been at the core of tri-borough's success"
By Andrew Christie, tri-borough director of children’s services
We are all incredibly proud of what we have achieved and I believe praise goes to the social workers in the three councils, their team managers and the senior managers who support them. There are also a lot of other people who have assisted in getting to this point. At the core, this is a product of good social work.
The innovation fund programme, Focus on Practice, has been key to delivering these results. It has shaped practice, which has involved equipping social workers with a broader skill set and supporting them in the use of those skills with systemic therapists in the workplace, who coach the social workers and work alongside them with families.
It is a collective approach across all three councils and also switches the focus from just being about assessment and risk management, to equipping our social workers to help families change.
That might be seen as something rather obvious and common sense, but I believe children’s social work practice has tended to lose its way and lost that ‘change’ aspect, being much more restricted to monitoring, supervising and assessing, and often referring on to others in the hope that they will deploy the necessary change programmes.
We have been able to make sure that in all three councils social workers have reasonable caseloads – a point recognised by Ofsted. These are currently around the 10 to 12 level, but if you go much above that you cannot expect there to be good social work practice.
Ofsted described the culture of the organisation as one that is open to learning. We know we make mistakes. It is a well-worn management principle, but it doesn’t always get employed. Learning, support and compassion were words used in the report, and referred to the whole organisation being open to learning and finding ways to improve.
The tri-borough arrangement was also recognised by Ofsted as providing the opportunity to operate at a scale that would not have been possible within a single borough. It has given us a platform to deliver improvements and innovations, and to develop specialisms, and support specialist posts and development.
While all of the workforce takes great satisfaction in what has been achieved, we all recognise that there are a lot of things that we need to improve.
*Andrew Christie is to retire from his post at the end of April
How tri-borough will help other councils to improve
The tri-borough is set to share its success with other local authorities as part of the Partners in Practice initiative launched by government last year.
The Department for Education has said it will create nine Partner in Practice sites at local authorities that are delivering “exemplary” models of working from which others can learn: Cambridgeshire; Durham; Hampshire; Islington; Leeds; Lincolnshire; North Yorkshire; Richmond & Kingston; and the tri-borough. They will be given “academy-style freedoms” to drive innovation in children’s social care.
Tri-borough DCS Andrew Christie said: “We absolutely see ourselves as having a responsibility to provide support and learning opportunities for the sector as a whole.
“We are particularly interested in developing a leadership academy. One of the things I am concerned about in the sector is that it is very difficult to recruit and appoint directors of children’s services, assistant directors of children’s services and heads of service.
“There are plenty of people with potential, but we need to give them the development opportunities to prepare them for progression. We’re also interested in forming partnerships with local authorities interested in sharing some of our learning.”
Children’s services Ofsted ratings
Outstanding: 2
Good: 21
Requires improvement: 42
Inadequate: 24
Source: Ofsted single inspection framework judgments of children’s services departments published up to 1 April 2016
21Good
42Requires Improvement
24Inadequate
Source: Ofsted single inspection framework judgments of 89 children’s services departments published up to 1 April 2016
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