Meeting documents

For the Committee to review and discuss the results of the Ofsted Monitoring visit which took place on 16^th and 17^th October 2019.

Contributors:

Mr W Whyte, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services

Mr T Vouyioukas, Executive Director, Children’s Services

Mr R Nash, Service Director, Children’s Social Care

The Chairman welcomed Mr W Whyte, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services, Mr T Vouyioukas, Executive Director for Children’s Services and Mr R Nash, Service Director for Children’s Social Care.

The following main points were made during the discussion of the latest Ofsted Monitoring visit.

·         The Cabinet Member explained that the Ofsted letter had been delayed due to the General Election. 

·         Ofsted had recognised that improvements had been made. The leadership team were keeping the pressure on but pace had been hindered by not being able to recruit sufficient numbers of social workers.  Recruitment remained the biggest challenge.

·         A new academy for social workers had been set-up and 10 recruits were currently going through the programme, with another cohort due to start during 2020/21.  The aim would be to over-recruit to reduce the reliance on agency staff and to build resilience within the teams.

·         An international recruitment campaign had resulted in nine posts being filled by international social workers.

·         Some agency staff had converted to being permanent staff which was helping to maintain continuity for children and their families. 

·         In response to a question about the turnover rate of 34.6% which was stated in the recent Cabinet report, Mr Vouyioukas explained that the job was very challenging but positive steps were being taken to recruit more permanent staff and reduce the reliance on agency staff.

·         Across the 17 teams, there was one team which was 100% staffed by permanent social workers and their performance was strong and consistent.

·         In response to a question about whether social workers were leaving having only spent a short amount of time in the job, Mr Nash explained that the length of service of each staff member was monitored regularly.

·         A Member asked whether the systems and processes were now in place to ensure the service did not receive a similar letter from Ofsted.  The Cabinet Member explained that a number of changes had been made to improve the service and, by way of example, mentioned that the way the service carries out court work had been altered and the launch of the new Family Support Service. 

·         The Ofsted letter focused on improvements in delivering front-line staff and acknowledged the work of the Leadership team.  Mr Nash explained that each monitoring visit looked at different parts of the system.  The speed of delivering the improvement relied on the ability to recruit good quality staff.  He went on to say that the service was 90% through the work required to put things right.

·         The Cabinet Member and Officers acknowledged that the service did not want to be in the same position in two years’ time.

·         In response to a question about the order of the priorities, Mr Nash explained that identifying a child’s needs was something which the service was doing well whereas management oversight was an area which required improvement which explained why this was given a higher priority.  He went on to say that there were four themes which presented themselves all too often and were the focus of the improvement work.

The Chairman thanked the Cabinet Member and Officers for their presentation.