16 September 2005
The Commission for Social Care Inspection has condemned the government's plans to move its children's services remit to an enlarged Ofsted as 'incoherent', 'illogical' and 'dangerous'.
At a meeting to discuss CSCI's formal response to the government's consultation on its plans, commission chair Dame Denise Platt said that she and her commissioners were concerned that the vulnerable children whose welfare the CSCI is charged to safeguard would be neglected by a watchdog concerned primarily with educational standards.
'The issue of significant risk is that there will be so much to be looked at which is of high political priority that some areas of safeguarding may be overlooked,' said Platt.
Commissioners singled out the issue of school exclusions as an example of a 'policy tension' that an enlarged Ofsted might be unable to resolve. Whereas the CSCI is concerned at the increasing powers of schools to expel children, Ofsted might implicitly encourage exclusions as they translated into better GCSE results, commissioner Peter Westland said.
Platt said that the commission agreed that the new policy direction indicated by the Every child matters green paper did require a different approach to inspection, but the government's Ofsted proposal 'misses the opportunity to really grasp the policy initiative'.
The CSCI is also concerned that Ofsted's brief will not include how children are treated by the NHS, or by the criminal justice system.
'There aren't different groups of children that relate to different parts of the system,' said Platt. 'There is an illogicality about a policy that looks at children and an inspection arrangement that looks at institutions.'
PFsep2005
