By James Simons-
Child protection services in England remains “unsatisfactory and inconsistent”, six years after the government vowed to improve provision, the National Audit Office (NAO) has concluded.
In a damning report, the watchdog has highlighted huge variations in the quality of protection received by children in different parts of the country. Nationally, the quality of help and protection for children is unsatisfactory and inconsistent, suggesting “systemic rather than just local failure”, according to the report. Since 2013, Ofsted found that 80% of services are not providing services rated as good to protect or help children in need.
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The National Audit Office was critical of the Department of Education for making “poor progress” in improving services since the commissioning of Professor Eileen Munro to review child protection in 2010. The watchdog found that after six years, the quality of care remained “significantly below par” , adding that interventions to improve failed services had “been ad hoc” rather than comprehensive. Thresholds for accessing the system were not well understood by partners such as the police and health services, the report concluded.
The Department’s data show a big gap between the educational outcomes of children in need and all children. Around 15% of children in need get five or more A*-C grades at GCSE (including English and mathematics), compared to 54% of all children
.
DISAPPOINTING
Head of the NAO, Amyas Moore said: “Six years have passed since the department recognised that children’s services were not good enough. It is extremely disappointing that, after all, its efforts, far too many children’s services are still not good enough.” Children’s services are too important an aspect of social services and should be brushed under the carpet.
Speaking to the eye of media.com, Moore added that ”it was the first time the NAO had published a report this damning against the poor quality of the services, highlighting ” a lot of investigation was done to get to this conclusion, and we also spoke to people on the ground to confirm that our findings matched up to their experiences”
The NAO investigation found that social workers in boroughs with less work load tended to do better than those that had to hire agency staff or that had plenty of vacancies to be filled. ”They do not have enough resources, though there are several other factors that come into the equation”, Moore stated.
With the average spending on children’s service up by 11% in real-terms over the past three years, according to the NAO, it remains a mystery why improvement rates have still not been realised. There is no direct relationship between the amount of funding children services receive and the results they deliver, Moore told the eye of media.com. ”There are also many boroughs that have not been checked by Ofsted, so there is an ”information gap”, Moore added. The investigation cycle will not be completed until 2017.
OUTCOMES
In 2010 the Department recognised that child protection services were not good enough but its response has not yet resulted in better outcomes. The Department also launched a programme to reform social work, revised statutory guidance, established the first two children’s social care Trusts and provided over £100 million funding for the Innovation Programme (to encourage new approaches and share good practice). However, Ofsted inspection results are not yet showing a marked improvement.
Concluding a link between judgments and the levels of caseloads, vacancies and agency workers, the NEA established a correlation between social worker agency staff and the level of adequacy of services. It concluded that:
In most authorities judged ‘good’ each social worker had between 10 and 14 cases, compared to up to 35 in ‘inadequate’ authorities. Authorities classified as ‘Good’ authorities had an average of 7% of social workers as agency staff compared to 22% in ‘inadequate’ services.
Most good authorities had around 11% of social worker posts vacant compared to 22% in ‘inadequate’ services.
The NAO found the department of education’s interventions to improve failing services were “neither risk-based nor early enough”, adding “The department only intervenes when Ofsted has already found services to have failed local children”. It said the DfE should consider using performance data to “anticipate risks of failure”.
It is critical that the Department learns from good practice and mistakes elsewhere in government. For example, the Youth Justice Board made improvements to the youth justice system which have led to reductions in recorded, the report stated.
PRIORITY
A Department for Education spokesperson said in a statement: “Keeping children safe from harm is an absolute priority for this Government, which is why in July this year we published plans to deliver excellent children’s social care – strengthening protection for the most vulnerable children and transforming the support available to them.
“We are taking tough action to drive up standards in children’s services across the country, stepping in when councils aren’t doing well enough and linking them up with better performing local authorities to share best practice. We have also cut red tape so that social workers can spend more time actually supporting families.”
Ruth Allen, chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers, said: “The report shows a concerning lack of consistency and quality of services across the country. More early intervention to robustly address concerns rather than waiting for Ofsted failure is a clear message and there is a pressing need for a strategy that enables improvement across all authorities.
“The current approach appears from the evidence to not be bringing about coherent, whole-system change.”
The need for that change is desperate now, and something needs to be done. This report is as damning as it gets.