Meeting documents

For the Committee to receive an update about the last Ofsted monitoring visit.

Contributors:

Mr Warren Whyte – Cabinet Member for Children’s Services

Mr Richard Nash –Service Director Children’s Social Care

Mr Whyte introduced the item as the third monitoring visit from Ofsted, which provided an update on Buckinghamshire County Council’s improvement journey and a review of the progress they had made. He told the Committee that the visit had taken place a few months ago, so further improvements had progressed within the service area and he welcomed Mr Nash, Service Director Children’s Social Care, who provided an operational update. 

Mr Nash told Members that Ofsted had deemed the service area’s self-assessment to be accurate and said that there had been steady improvement progress. There had been some staffing issues and high turnover in some departments which had affected workforce stability, but this situation had been improving. Despite challenges with caseloads, the staff who had given feedback to Ofsted said they enjoyed working at Buckinghamshire County Council. Mr Nash praised the hard work of front-line Social Workers and had been happy with staff morale levels. He had worked hard to ensure all staff felt supported and he remained committed to ensuring that the right people were coming into the service. Overall the service area had been pleased with Ofsted’s last review.

In response to questioning from Committee Members, Mr Whyte, Mr Hussain and Mr Nash said:

·       They would be establishing useful key performance indicators (KPI’s) to measure and report back on the success of the new early help model. It would be a challenge to measure how they had diverted families away from social care. This update would come to the January CSC meeting

·       Mr Whyte would monitor early help and ensure all aspects of the model work, including partnership working

·       Councillors could refer families who needed help directly into the family support service using the more proactive and flexible online service

·       Complaints had reduced over the last 14-15 months and new data says that visiting regimes were improving.

·       They had a good system to manage all eventualities and put contingencies in place to ensure visits to families were timely.

·       Gaining access to families had sometimes been problematic when families hadn’t wanted social care involvement or help

·       Schools would all receive a designated early help contact to assist with partnership working and improve the chances of referral through schools

·       The service area had been taking action to improve staff morale where it had been low. The High Wycombe office was due to be refurbished to improve the working environment for staff based there

·       The service area had been creating good avenues for communication between professionals and for improving working relationships, such as through monthly open days which they had hosted

·       Heads of Service had prioritised the management of worker’s caseloads along with Managers, to ensure all caseloads were achievable

·       Children who go missing from care are always offered a return home interview and this doesn’t form a one-off event. In all instances, social workers and partner agencies had tried to establish why a child had gone missing with the aim to stop it happening again and reduce the risk of exploitation. Some children had refused these interviews or would only speak to certain people and this had been reflected in the latest Ofsted monitoring visit.

·       All visit recordings had been digital. Heads of Service continued to work with individual Social Workers on the quality of their recording as it continued to be variable. There had been an upward trend of improvements within the service and they would continue to eradicate poor quality recording practices

·       The Senior Management Team tended to use more imaginative and less formal classroom-based training with Social Workers. This had included talks on focussed topics, such as domestic violence, and the use of good training resources

·       Recruitment of good Social workers continued to be a challenge, both at local and national level. The service area continued to find it hard to attract the right people into the organisation, while in competition with other local authorities.

·       There was a focus on growing and developing Buckinghamshire County Council’s own staff and they had ten staff in the development pipeline.

·       Mr Whyte was unsure when Ofsted would be visiting to reassess the grading, but he estimated that there would be 6 monitoring visits prior to the reassessment. As the 4^th visit had been scheduled for October, Mr Whyte said that the full re-inspection could be around April 2020.

·       Particular teams within the social care service had experienced ongoing retention problems. These tended to be within teams which required a lot of support within the roles, such as the help and protection teams, where children had been subject to child protection plans

·       When monitoring the causes of staff leaving, the service area had ensured they had triangulated a range of data sources to find non-biased reasoning. Common reasons had included performance issues and the nature, intensity and difficulty of the role.

·       There had been a large focus on the wellbeing of all staff within the service using proactive conversations and visits from Heads of Service. Some staff members within the service were now trained as Mental Health First Aiders, to be able to support their colleagues.

The Chairman thanked Mr Nash, Mr Hussain and Mr Whyte for their contributions.