Agenda item

For the Children’s and Education Select Committee to note and ask questions relating to  the positive outcome of the recent Ofsted reinspection of services for children in need of help and protection, children looked after and care leavers.

Contributors:

Richard Nash, Director of Children’s Social Care

Simon James, Director of Education

Palvinder Kudhail, Director of Children’s Services

The Chairman introduced this item on the outcome of the Ofsted inspection which was recently undertaken at the end of 2021. It related to the services provided for children in need of help and protection, children looked after and care leavers.  The service had undertaken an extensive amount of work prior to and during the pandemic. Many issues related to the retention and recruitment of social workers, and front-line managers and these were compounded by increased workloads. The Select Committee responded to this immediately and had set up a rapid review group in January to look in detail at the issue social worker recruitment and retention. The group would present their report to the committee in June.

The Chairman thanked all the staff in the Children’s Services department and the Directors for their thorough work over the last few years.

Richard Nash, Strategic Director, attended the meeting via Teams and noted that the meeting had been rescheduled due to another Ofsted inspection of the SEND services. The findings of this would be reported in due course.

Mr Nash gave details of the Council’s Ofsted history noting that the service was found to be inadequate in 2014 based on previous service provision. The service was also found to be inadequate in 2017 when it had been hoped that a different outcome would result. 2017 was the starting point of the current leadership team’s attempt to turn the service around. It is recognised that change in Children’s Services takes time to achieve. The inspection was very thorough with the outcome “requires work to be good” and so was no longer “inadequate”.

The findings, which were published in February, were as expected as the department was aware of the shortcomings through quality assurance. 400 children’s cases were reviewed and 350 documents. The inspection took place over three weeks with two weeks on site. The report showed that much good work had taken place but it was understood that there was more work to be done to keep the service improving into the future. The work that was achieved by the staff during the pandemic and with the history of poor service in Buckinghamshire was extensive and was recognised by Ofsted.

In response to points made by Councillor Hussein regarding (i) the frequency of change of social workers and therefore fragmented service in some cases and (ii) performance data not feeding through to reducing referrals, Mr Nash responded that the recruitment and retention of social workers was a national problem.

In Buckinghamshire the pandemic has caused a huge increase in volume of work (62% in child protection) which had put great pressure on the workforce, and therefore some social workers would make decisions to work in different roles. The issue was mainly in the frontline child protection area. Agency worker turnover also impacted as cases had to be transferred to other social workers.

Three things were being actioned to address this:

-          the expansion of the in-house social worker academy enabling workforce planning; encouraging staff loyalty and reduced dependency on agency staff;

-          support around career development and

-          the management of high caseloads.

Social work is a difficult area of work and Mr Nash noted the department’s intention to support and manage the issues as best as possible.

Mr Nash reported that:

-          the Ofsted Inspection is a “stop the clock exercise” i.e. Inspectors report on the situation current at the time. With regards to performance management, the department were aware of the issues.

-          High re-referrals were due to a) the pandemic and b) the historical state of the department.

-          93% of care leavers live in suitable accommodation. Ofsted picked up on two cases where there was an issue. The department would manage the changing circumstances of care-leavers lives carefully and although unsuitable accommodation was sometimes used when necessary, the department always tried to ensure that this is for as short a time as possible.

-          Children’s social work is a statutory requirement of a council so the number of cases referred to the teams varied day to day but had to be dealt with and measures were taken to balance out the workloads on a daily basis.  However, work could be at too high a level for some people for some of the time.

-          One of the impacts of the pandemic was not being able to involve children as much as possible in the department’s work, however going forward they would be involved in corporate parenting.

-          In response to a question, the Director noted that part of the improvement work since 2017 included ensuring that the children’s recording systems were fit for purpose. Two systems were currently in place but work was progressing to implement only one.

-          Supervision and management oversight was very important and performance data was provided on a monthly basis giving information as to which staff had supervision sessions. It was important to make sure this was reported regularly.

-          High caseloads meant that sometimes supervision was functional rather than reflective due to time pressures and the high volume of cases but this was being addressed going forward.

-          Much work was required to ensure school children moving in and out of the county were given school places at the right place and time. Most schools were near full capacity and therefore the support for children in their education had to be flexible sometimes.

In response to a question from Councillor Collingwood, Mr Nash noted that the service had created a comprehensive set of action plans from the 2017 inspection which were monitored through the Improvement Board, chaired by John Coughlin, Chief Executive of Hampshire County Council.

-          Progress from the Board was regularly reported to the Council’s Cabinet.

-          There was a combination of actions to be taken to avoid the issue of children having too many changes of social worker.  The whole service would be looked at to ensure maximum consistency for children.

-          The SEND Ofsted inspection report would address the issues of early help mentioned in this Ofsted report and there would be an action plan going forward for that inspection relating to various issues including emotional health which would be addressed in conjunction with health partners.

Foster care had shown an improvement in both the number of carers and placements also. Mr Nash noted the following:

-          that work would always seek to improve the numbers of adopters and fosterers.

-          Work was underway to increase assessment of the type of skills required by some children re-referred to the service.

The Local Authority Designated Officer had been referred to in the report and the issues in relation to this were resolved prior to the inspection.

The Corporate Director noted how important it is for the service to keep improving. Ofsted had covered a wide scope during its last visit and would keep in touch with the council once a year and would visit again in the future.

Mr Nash emphasised that all the service’s staff who had all worked over the last two years during the pandemic with a hugely increased workload to keep children safe under pressurised circumstances, were to be valued highly for their hard work.

The Chairman and the Committee thanked and congratulated the service on the work done in a short space of time to improve the service from “inadequate” to “requires improvement”.