York speeding up improvements to children’s services after Ofsted criticism

Council bosses have said they are already making changes to the way they run children’s services after a “disappointing” Ofsted inspection in March.

An action plan must be submitted to the watchdog by August outlining how City of York Council plans to turn around the department after all areas were judged to ‘require improvement to be good’ by inspectors.

Jamaila Hussain, interim director of children’s services, told councillors that they were not waiting until submitting the action plan to make improvements.

The inspection, which focused mainly on children in care and care leavers, found inconsistencies in the quality of social work practice, delays in decision making and a need for better supervision for social workers.

Ms Hussain told the children, education and communities policy and scrutiny committee: “In the action plan, some of the dates for improvement are in the next four to eight weeks – we can now really speed it up.”

She explained that the rating of ‘requires improvement to be good’, rather than just ‘requires improvement’ showed that the department was “on a journey”.

“We’re not starting from the inspectors finding lots of things that we didn’t know,” she added.

“We’re now coming to the end of part one of the journey and then moving to a consistently good social work and social care service.”

‘Constant churn’ of leaders

Commenting on the Ofsted report, Cllr Bob Webb, who is a teacher, said: “This is really disappointing for York – it’s a real worry for the children in our care.”

He thanked staff and acknowledged the positives highlighted by Ofsted, but said there was a “constant churn” in leadership within the department and accused the political leadership of “not taking children seriously in our city.”

Cllr Andrew Waller, who replaced Cllr Ian Cuthbertson as executive member for children following the Ofsted report, said: “I don’t believe that children were not taken seriously under my predecessor.

“I think that this plan does draw together many actions that were already being undertaken – the question was about pace. There was investment put in in the last budget.

“I think the priority has to be to deliver quality services for children and I think this is a strong plan to deliver that.”

Cllr Fiona Fitzpatrick, a former Ofsted schools inspector, said: “It’s never difficult to attract social workers to York, particularly coming from York University – they all want to stay in York. It’s retaining staff that we really need to work on.”

Ms Hussain said £300,000 had been spent on recruitment and retention of social workers and that two teams now had no agency social workers at all.

This summer, Martin Kelly will become the council’s corporate director of children and education and Danielle Johnson will become director of children’s safeguarding.

They are both currently based at North Yorkshire County Council. Its children’s services department was graded as ‘outstanding’ in 2018.