Ofsted
Inspections of local authority childrens services (ILACS)
I joined Ofsted at the start of 2018, when we had just embarked on our first inspections of local authority childrens services (or ILACS) inspections. At the end of the single inspection framework (or SIF), 22% of local authorities (LAs) were categorised as inadequate and 64% were less than good. We aspired to focus on the progress and experience of children in need of help, protection and care, and to narrate your improvement journeys as you establish an environment for the best social work practice to consistently thrive.
To do this, we implemented a wider range of tools; with short and standard inspections to take account of your starting points, and focused visits to garner good practice and identify areas for improvement outside of the graded inspection process. You have told us that our monitoring visits to inadequate areas have reinforced your self-evaluations of progress and highlighted where further improvements are needed, and have been helpful in recognising where progress had been made. No LAs judged inadequate under the SIF remain inadequate.
The very good news is that we have seen solid improvement. It has been particularly pleasing to see this continue despite the additional asks and practice limitations of the COVID period. And we also know that these challenges have been followed by increased financial stresses on families and new pressures from children and families fleeing events overseas.
And longstanding workforce challenges continue to grow.
There are now 23 outstanding LAs, 58 are good (several of which have one or more areas of outstanding practice), 52 require improvement and 17 are rated inadequate. There is more to do but as ever, I take my hat off to all those doing the heavy lifting in such challenging times.
At Ofsted, we continue striving to improve too. We made some improvements to the ILACS, to make sure we acknowledge the really good work many LAs are doing to keep more children safely with their families, through earlier help and intervention and through the Public Law Outline. We have made our joint targeted area inspections (known as JTAIs) more proportionate and focused, and we are consulting on an ILACS care leavers judgement.
Strengthening the social care element in area SEND inspections
We believe that including social care in our SEND framework will keep the education, health and care integration you model locally at the heart of our inspections too.
And we also believe that, in the new SEND framework, as with the refreshed multi-agency JTAIs, we can be better at identifying where weaknesses lie and to hold the right partners to account. We look forward to your consultation responses.
We are conscious of the National Panels recommendation for more multi-agency JTAI inspections of child protection, and new or changed inspection and regulatory asks in the Care Review.
The Care Review
I will turn to inspection and regulation later, but on the Review more widely, we absolutely welcome that it raises our shared ambition to better support families long before crises arise. Building the right early help and prevention at all stages will need clarity of expectation from all partners. Ease of access, consistency and transparency for families as well as respectful but assertive outreach needs to ensure that, across the continuum of help and protection, the right help and, where necessary, proportionate statutory intervention supports positive change in families and makes children safer.
We support the intention to achieve frictionless data-sharing by 2027 and we recognise the need for guidance and legislation on information-sharing to be strengthened. Our inspection evidence confirms that technology improvements need to be re-enforced by cultural changes to ensure universal practitioners see children as part of complex family networks, and are challenged and supported in getting the balance right regarding what to share with whom, and to provide even more clarity regarding consent.
Again, we strongly support the intention to strengthen the strategic role of multi-agency safeguarding partnerships. We need greater transparency about each partners contribution, and we support the potential for multi-agency inspection to drive collective improvements. However, alongside the JTAIs, we believe that single agency inspection must also reflect each agencys accountability for safeguarding, corporate parenting and SEND.
As government considers its response to the Care Review, we absolutely stand ready to play our part. As we start to get into the detail, we acknowledge that all of us the Department for Education (DfE), Ofsted and the sector must look at the collective as well as individual impact and footprint of the underpinning regulation and inspection. Of course, I believe that inspection has a very valuable part to play in supporting your improvement journey and in securing nationally benchmarked expectations for practice, service and the experiences of children and families. But we must also look at the accumulative impact on your day-to-day delivery and capacity.
The whole-system change visualised by the Care Review means that the wider accountability regime needs to be refreshed too. But this is not confined to Ofsted. The DfE, Social Work England, directors of childrens services, independent reviewing officers, local authority designated officers, fostering and adoption managers, responsible individuals, registered managers, independent visitors, Reg 44 visitors, Cafcass Guardians and Ofsted all have a regulatory role or provide important safeguards and checks and balances. A system that works for children and families needs transparency, coherence and join up.
Regulation
Our collective regulations have been constructed over time, with layers added in response to specific events. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was a reminder of many awful events that triggered the safeguards built into our regulated care system.
Of course, we all need to understand what safeguards we must protect, but challenge ourselves to ensure they are fit for purpose for:
- a significantly changed provider map
- the current and future needs and ambitions of the children needing care and care leavers
- and our collectively raised ambitions for them too
We will have to consider the right sort of oversight of the bespoke services which support care prevention, and which dont fall neatly under an LA service or home. This is a gap. But the area which worries me most, and where I feel we have collectively the most to do, is in relation to residential provision. As I have said repeatedly, we need the right homes, in the right place for the specific needs of children now and in the future. This requires joined up commissioning across mental health, justice and care. From needs analysis, to getting funding in the right places and stimulating the right kind of provision this is urgent.
We need the right sort of multi-disciplinary therapeutic offer to support children needing care and those returning to their families. This includes the right provision in the community for children and young adults with autism or learning difficulties, and a better response to the 400%+ increase in children before the High Court to consider the deprivation of their liberty. The right response in social care is rarely binary and often nuanced. Many of you, like me, will remember when a rogue performance table or nudge encouraged you to hit a target rather than do the right thing for a child.
I worry that the current lack of capacity in care homes and some provider anxiety about our regulation of supported accommodation are inadvertently driving up costs and reducing options for some children. I hear of providers telling you they cant take a child because it might affect their Ofsted grade. Yet grade profiles have broadly stayed the same, and I see some fantastic work with children with the highest levels of need. It is always about how providers are meeting those needs and we absolutely understand that progress wont be linear or easily achieved. I