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Summary: A new report by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) which inspects children's social care in England, including child protection services, said more needed to be done to address "incompetent and ineffective" leadership in children's services.
A new report by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) which inspects children's social care including child protection services, said more needed to be done to address "incompetent and ineffective" leadership in children's services. One in seven councils in England are inadequate at caring for some of the most vulnerable children in society, the report has found. The standard of child protection at 20 councils is "unacceptably poor", Ofsted warned. Only one in four local authorities is judged to be good at safeguarding children. Ofsted's national director for social care, Debbie Jones, said: "The picture of performance we are publishing today shows there is clearly an ongoing need for improvement.” "Some services are increasingly expert at reducing risk, helping families to look after their children and enabling children at risk in their area to make good progress.” “Ofsted will be rigorous in holding local councils and social care providers to account but we will also support them to make the improvements that children deserve." One of the 20 councils deemed to be inadequate was Birmingham city council, which has now failed on seven inspection judgments. HM Chief Inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw called England's second city a "national disgrace". He said: "These characteristics of failure have been encapsulated in one area in particular: England's second city, Birmingham, a city where we have had seven failed inspection judgments, eight whistleblowing incidents in four years, nine years of inadequate serious case reviews, and 10 years of failure for vulnerable children. "Why is it that nearly a third of children in the city live in households on low incomes? Why is it that infant mortality is almost twice the national average, worse than in Cuba and on a par with Latvia and Chile? "They must surely be linked to the evidenced failure of corporate governance on a grand scale – governance that has failed to grasp the nettle over many years and which has relegated our second city to fourth division for children's services.”