By Anna Whittaker, Local Democracy Reporter
Council officers were questioned on an Ofsted inspection which saw Nottingham’s children’s services rated ‘inadequate’ in light of ‘serious failings’.
A report published in September said Nottingham City Council’s children’s services were found to be leaving some children at risk of harm.
The Government then served the Labour-run authority with a formal ‘improvement notice’ on October 24 “following significant concerns highlighted by the publication of Ofsted’s inspection report”.
Ofsted inspectors downgraded the department’s rating from ‘requires improvement’ to ‘inadequate’.
During the inspection, Ofsted found the service, which can look after as many as 650 young people at any given time, left some children at “continued risk of harm” when first in need of support.
In a Children and Young People Scrutiny Committee meeting on November 3, councillors questioned officers on the failings.
Officers said their ambition was to demonstrate that they are “unequivocally good” by the next inspection, which is expected to be in around three years’ time. Eight new social workers are also being recruited.
Vice-chair of the committee Maria Joannou (Lab) said: “Why has it taken another Ofsted inspection to get to this point?
“Some of this does make grim reading, unfortunately.
“One of the weaknesses is managers not being able to support workers.
“How did we have a situation where we have front-line workers doing a good job and managers not in a position to support them?”
Councillor Georgia Power (Lab) representing Bestwood added: “How did we get here? Children’s services have not been good enough for a long time.
“We seem to be going backwards. Did we have an understanding of that?”
Catherine Underwood, Corporate Director for People Services, which includes children’s social care, said: “In terms of understanding where we were at the time of the inspection, I had the impression we felt services were improving but they hadn’t gone backwards, clearly that wasn’t the case.”
She said the service was rated requires improvement in 2018.
Focused visits were carried out by inspectors in 2019 and 2020 and it was then made clear that “services had deteriorated and needed to achieve considerable improvements”.
Ms Underwood also cited the impact of Covid and the context that the city council on the whole is “seeking to make a lot of improvements as well”.
Ailsa Barr, Director for Children’s Integrated Services for the council added: “We are in a challenging environment locally but that is in the context of a very challenging environment nationally.
“There isn’t a peer that I speak to anywhere in the country that is delivering consistently outstanding services.
“There is significant difficulty with retention and recruitment of experienced staff.
“Our recruitment and retention package is aimed at retaining people with experience and we have secured places for all our social work team managers to do a leadership programme.
“Our ambition must be that at the next full inspection we will demonstrate that Nottingham children’s services are unequivocally good and we will also want to be confidently demonstrating we have clear areas of outstanding practice.”
Councillor Cheryl Barnard (Lab), portfolio holder for children, young people and schools, said she spent Tuesday afternoon meeting staff in the children’s department.
She said: “I could see they are buzzing with the improvements that have been made, they feel they are top of work now.
“They were bang up to date on cases and they’ve got a new system for grading cases.
“It was really good to see staff morale was really good, they understood the judgement wasn’t about them or their work.
“The improvement has been hampered by the shortage of social workers.”
In their report, inspectors also said the council’s multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH) had “significant, widespread and systemic” weaknesses, leaving city children without enough protection and waiting up to six weeks to meet a social worker.
They also found management was not providing social workers with direction or overseeing the length of time it took to process children’s cases.
And, when allegations of significant harm were first presented, decision-making within the MASH was not quick enough – continuing to expose children to harm and leaving them without safety plans.
Councillor Phil Jackson (Lab) added: “It still seems very top down for me.
“It would be really useful to have front-line staff here as part of this discussion today talking about these really serious issues.
“Clearly this hasn’t just happened, it’s been going on quite a number of years.”
The authority is drawing up an action plan and will provide this to Ofsted by December 12.
The authority will also have between four and six monitoring visits from the watchdog in the next 18 months.
This will be followed by a full inspection, with visits to focus on areas where improvements are most needed.
An improvement board, chaired by an independent official appointed by the Department for Education, will monitor the authority against its improvement plan.
