By Charlotte Webster-
An Ofsted report has blasted Northamptonshire county council for failing to keep children safe, according to an Ofsted report that identifies weaknesses across a range of services that support vulnerable young people.
The report is the latest blow for the bankrupt council which has mismanaged most of the funds made available to it. This is the second time in six years that Ofsted has rated Northamptonshire’s children’s services as inadequate. The department spent three years in special measures after the first inadequate rating, in 2013. It was uprated to “requires improvement” in 2016, but Ofsted said the quality of services deteriorated after that poin
Last month the council’s child protection services were lambasted in two inquiry reports on how two toddlers known to social services were murdered by men with histories of domestic violence, crime and drug use. Ofsted said its June inspection revealed grosse inadequacy in Northamptonshire’s child protection services , characterised by slow and complacent staff that kept children at risk of neglect for too long.
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OVER OPTIMISTIC
It said social workers and team managers were over-optimistic about the capacity of some parents to look after their children in chronically neglectful situations, and too willing to accept parents’ versions of events. Northamptonshire’s director of children’s services (DCS), Sally Hodges, said the cases were “a matter of considerable shame” for the council and that there were “no excuses”, but that the new trust offered an opportunity to turn things around.
The regulator also found that a majority of children involved with services who were in danger of sexual exploitation did not have an up-to-date risk assessment. There were also no adequate safeguards against prevalent criminal exploitation in Northamptonshire. There were also “highly vulnerable” children in care were found by inspectors to be living in dangerous unregulated environments due to longstanding issues around matching individuals to appropriate placements.
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A “small cohort” of care leavers, meanwhile, had been left homeless after services had failed to prevent them from ending up in “unsuitable and unsafe” places. Two serious case reviews in June highlighted council failings in the deaths of Dylan Tiffin-Brown, who was two when he died of cardiac failure after his father assaulted him in December 2017, and Evelyn-Rose Muggleton, who was one when she died in hospital days after being battered by her mother’s partner in April 2018.
Northamptonshire’s cabinet member for children’s services, Fiona Baker, said the council accepted the failings identified by Ofsted. “It is regrettable that our services overall have been graded as inadequate but it is a grading we agree with and we are determined to tackle the weaknesses identified,” she said.
IMPROVEMENT
Ofsted expressed optimism in a new senior management team under the director of children’s services, Jane Hodges, who was credited in the report with having a “comprehensive and credible” plan for improving children’s services, and had made some quick improvements such as lowering social workers’ caseloads. Working against this credible plan was high staff turnover. “The fragility of workforce, both in terms of status and practice, does not yet provide an environment in which good social work can flourish,” it said.
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