13 April 2007
A quarter of councils are under-performing in the services they provide to children, with the most vulnerable getting the worst service, Ofsted has said.
The inspectorate used its first publication since taking charge of children's social care inspection to raise its concerns about service gaps relating to vulnerable children.
Miriam Rosen, Ofsted's director of education, told Public Finance that even in councils whose performance was judged 'adequate' or 'good', services for those children was often 'poor'.
'We have found poor provision for vulnerable children, particularly disabled children and those with mental health needs. There are long waiting lists for mental health services: children are not getting access to support when they need it.'
Out of the 139 authorities Ofsted has jointly looked at with the Commission for Social Care Inspection over the past two years, four were judged 'inadequate' for their children's services and 28 'adequate'.
Ofsted defines 'adequate' as delivering 'only minimum requirements', 'not demonstrably cost-effective' and 'does not contribute significantly to wider outcomes for the community'. Rosen said those 32 councils (23% of those inspected) had 'many areas for improvement'.
But the report Narrowing the gap: the inspection of children's services found that even in higher performing councils there was a 'lack of leadership and expertise, and insufficient urgency in addressing weaknesses identified through previous inspection, coupled with an inability to account for weaknesses in performance'.
Partner agencies such as schools and the NHS were also 'lacking a clear shared understanding of their roles in relation to safeguarding', which meant abuse might not be detected early enough.
The quality of partnership working was highlighted through Joint Area Reviews, which were undertaken in 37 of the 139 councils.
Those revealed much poorer performance than reviews that focused simply on the councils, with 62% of Jars finding only 'minimal requirements' were met or worse, when it came to safeguarding children from abuse.
PFapr2007
