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A council has voted to take back control of its children’s services, six years after it outsourced them to a company at the direction of the Department for Education (DfE).

Councillors in Reading unanimously backed a proposal not to renew Brighter Futures for Children’s (BFfC) contract to run children’s services in the borough, at a meeting yesterday (28 January 2025).

Instead, the authority will take them back in-house, a move that will involve the transfer of 550 staff from BFfC and the closure of the independent fostering agency run by the company.

The process, which the council is aiming to complete by this autumn, is expected to cost about £600,000, though is due to yield annual savings of £200,000-£300,000.

Why council lost control of services

The DfE directed the outsourcing of Reading’s services, then rated inadequate, in 2017 on the recommendation of a department-appointed commissioner, who found provision to be “fragile” and in “considerable need of improvement”.

The council, which supported the move, then established BBfC as a wholly-owned company, with services transferring the following year under a seven-year contract, the overarching aim of which was to improve services to ‘good’.

Following an inspection in 2019, Ofsted gave the borough’s services a requires improvement rating. However, there was no progress on this overall grade after Reading children’s services’ latest inspection, in September 2024.

Services ‘not yet ‘good’

With the contract due to end in March 2026, the council commissioned public finance body CIPFA to review options for the future, and it recommended that Reading take back control of children’s services.

CIPFA said that a “significant factor” behind its recommendation was that BFfC had not achieved a good rating, though it recognised that there were factors beyond its control that had contributed to this.

It said that benefits from insourcing services included:

• Greater direct control over service delivery and operations.
• Reducing demands on officers’ time to maintain service level agreements with the company and eliminating a ‘layer of separation’ between children’s services and the council.
• Potential for greater integration of children’s services into wider council operations, enhancing the cost-effectiveness of service delivery.
• Assurance that children’s services are supporting the wider corporate plans and are more responsive to the council’s changing needs.
• Potential cost savings resulting from the removal of governance structures and operational duplication of approximately £200,000 – £300,000 a year.

‘Now is the time to take back services’

Commenting on the decision, council leader Liz Terry said that “now [was] the right time for the service to transfer back to the council”.

“This not only provides the council with better direct control, but additionally removes a layer of governance and helps to further integrate children’s services with other council services.”

She paid tribute to staff at BFfC “for the significant progress it has made towards delivering a ‘good’ Ofsted rating. However, she added: “At the same time, we acknowledge we still have a way to go in order to achieve that.”

BFfC chair Di Smith said the not-for-profit company’s board supported the decision, adding: “Given the national picture of increased costs and pressures in children’s services, it is logical that councils, including Reading council, would want to have full control of delivery and expenditure at this present moment in time.”

Outsourcing ‘has become less popular’

She also acknowledged that handing poorly performing council services over to children’s trusts or other so-called alternative delivery models, such as BFfC, “[had] become less popular in recent years and are now very rarely the preferred option in response to statutory intervention”.

When Reading resumes control of its’ children’s services, that would leave trusts or companies running provision in 10 of the 153 councils.

Since 2020, just one trust has been created, in Bradford, while Doncaster took its services back in-house in 2022 and Worcestershire did so this year.

During this time, trusts have been considered in other areas subject to statutory directions due to poor performance, but eventually rejected on the advice of DfE-appointed commissioners. This was often on the grounds of the potential disruption to improvements of transferring services to a new body, and the delay to progress that would result from creating such an organisation.

Instead, they have tended to recommend that the authority be supported to improve by a high-performing council, such as those listed as sector-led improvement partners by the DfE.

The DfE, meanwhile, is working on a project to develop a “more cost-effective” alternative to children’s trusts for struggling services.

A council is to vote on taking back control of children’s services from an external provider.

Reading council’s policy committee voted on 18 December to accept officers’ recommendation that it insource services from Brighter Futures for Children (BFfC).

It will now go forward to the full council on 28 January 2025 for sign-off. The transition, including the transfer of 550 staff to the council, would then start in February.

Contract review

The proposal follows a scheduled review of the arrangement triggered by the fact that BFfC’s seven-year contract with the council expires in April 2026

BFfC, a not-for-profit company wholly owned by the council, took over the running of children’s social care in the borough in November 2018, after the Department for Education (DfE) directed the authority to outsource its then inadequate-rated services to an alternative provider.

For its contract review, Reading council asked the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) to assess potential options, with the organisation recommending a full insourcing of services.

Services not yet ‘good’

CIPFA said that a “significant factor” behind its recommendation was that BFfC had not achieved the “overarching ambition” of the contract, which was to improve Reading’s Ofsted rating to good.

Following an inspection in 2019, Ofsted gave the borough’s services a requires improvement rating. However, there was no progress on this overall grade after Reading children’s services’ latest inspection, in September 2024.

Though Ofsted rated services for children in care and care leavers as good – a step-up from the requires improvement grade they received in 2019 – it concluded that there was “still inconsistency in the quality of practice and insufficient progress in certain areas”.

CIPFA said it had recognised that there had been “factors beyond BFfC’s control that have contributed to this” and acknowledged the company’s work to improve services. However, it concluded that the council was best placed to take forward the improvement of the borough’s children’s services now.

Benefits from insourcing services

It listed a number of benefits for the council from insourcing services, including:

• Greater direct control over service delivery and operations.
• Reducing demands on officers’ time to maintain service level agreements with the company and eliminating a ‘layer of separation’ between children’s services and the council.
• Potential for greater integration of children’s services into wider council operations, enhancing the cost-effectiveness of service delivery.
• Assurance that children’s services are supporting the wider corporate plans and are more responsive to the council’s changing needs.
• Potential cost savings resulting from the removal of governance structures and operational duplication of approximately £200,000 – £300,000 a year.

These points are all applicable to outsourced children’s services generally and reflect a general turning away from the model nationally.

Turning away from children’s trust model

Since 2020, just one trust has been created, in Bradford, while Doncaster took its services back in-house in 2022 and Worcestershire did so this year.

During this time, trusts have been considered in other areas subject to statutory directions due to poor performance, but eventually rejected on the advice of DfE-appointed commissioners.

In two of these areas – Medway and West Sussex – the authority made significant improvements, with the former earning a good rating and the latter a requires improvement grade, with good features, from Ofsted last year.

In other cases, such as Herefordshire, North East Lincolnshire, Solihull and Sefton, commissioners rejected a trust on the grounds of the potential disruption to improvements of transferring services to a new body, and the delay to progress that would result from creating such an organisation.

Instead, they have tended to recommend that the authority be supported to improve by a high-performing council, such as those listed as sector-led improvement partners by the DfE.

The DfE, meanwhile, is working on a project to develop a “more cost-effective” alternative to children’s trusts for struggling services.

Were Reading to resume control of its children’s services, that would leave trusts or companies running provision in 10 of the 153 councils.

Praise for company’s staff

The turning away from outsourcing was reflected in BFfC’s reaction to the news.

The chair of its board, Di Smith, said “The board of Brighter Futures for Children supports the proposal to return full responsibility for the delivery of children’s services to the council. We recognise that alternative delivery models in children’s services have become less popular in recent years and are now very rarely the preferred option in response to statutory intervention.

“Given the national picture of increased costs and pressures in children’s services, it is logical that councils, including Reading council, would want to have full control of delivery and expenditure at this present moment in time.”

Speaking before the policy committee’s vote, Reading council’s leader, Liz Terry, said: “I want to place on record my enormous gratitude to BFfC staff, whose commitment and dedication to children in Reading is without question. We are committed to ensuring those same children and young people are not affected as we go through this process.”

Children’s services in Worcestershire have returned to council control after being run by a trust for five years.

Worcestershire Children First (WCF) is being wound up with its former staff having been transferred to Worcestershire County Council, which is now back in charge of children’s services in the area, as of 1 October 2024.

The move leaves 11 local authority children’s services in the hands of not-for-profit companies, either after having been transferred voluntarily by the local authority or because the Department for Education (DfE) has mandated outsourcing due to poor performance.

DfE direction for council to lose control of services

The DfE determined that Worcestershire should lose control of its children’s services in 2017, on the recommendation of a DfE-appointed commissioner, and following an inadequate Ofsted rating earlier that year.

The following year, the DfE approved the council’s business case to set up a company it wholly owned to run services and, in 2019, WCF was established, with a five-year contract to deliver social care, early help and education.

Prior to the transfer, Ofsted reinspected the council in 2019, leading to a requires improvement rating, which WCF has since improved further, earning a good grade last year.

Financially-driven decision

In a report to the council’s cabinet in January, council leaders justified the decision to take back control of services on financial grounds and due to the benefits of reintegrating children’s services into the wider authority.

While the company – whose gross expenditure budget was forecast to be £148.4m in 2023-24 – made small surpluses in its first three years, it overspent by £7.6m in 2022-23 and had been forecast to do so by £28.6m in 2023-24, mainly due to national cost pressures on care placements.

The council said it could save about £200,000 a year from winding up the company, which would remove the need for the post of director of resources at WCF as well as those of chair and non-executive directors on the company board.

Existing team structures maintained

Team structures and reporting lines have been maintained for the majority of former WCF staff, including those working in safeguarding, early help, education, early years and inclusion and all-age disability services, according to a council paper published in July.

These teams have formed a new children’s services directorate within the county council, it added.

A spokesperson for Worcestershire County Council said: “We’re pleased to report that the transfer of children’s services went smoothly with no interruption to services. The cost of the transfer has been confirmed as £83,000 and will deliver recurrent savings of an estimated £200,000 each year.”

DfE seeking ‘more cost-effective alternative to trusts’

The move comes with a DfE project looking to develop a “more cost-effective” alternative to children’s trusts for struggling services.

The project is also aiming to draw up a response plan for the possibility of any existing children’s trust failing financially.

Since 2020, just one trust has been created, in Bradford, while Doncaster took its services back in-house in 2022.

A turning away from the trust model

Since 2020, trusts and ADMs have been considered in other areas subject to statutory directions due to poor performance, but eventually rejected on the advice of DfE-appointed commissioners.

In two of these areas – Medway and West Sussex – the authority made significant improvements, with the former earning a good rating and the latter a requires improvement grade, with good features, from Ofsted last year.

In other cases, such as Herefordshire, North East Lincolnshire, Solihull and Sefton, commissioners rejected a trust on the grounds of the potential disruption to improvement of transferring services to a new body, and the delay to progress that would result from creating such an organisation.

Instead, they have tended to recommend that the authority be supported to improve by a high-performing council, such as those listed as sector-led improvement partners by the DfE.

The same was true of a highly critical report on Tameside council by its commissioner, Andy Couldrick, published last month.

The government is working on a project to develop a “more cost-effective” alternative to children’s trusts for struggling services.

The Department for Education (DfE) project is also looking to develop a response plan for the possibility of any existing children’s trust failing financially.

The work was revealed in the DfE’s annual report for 2023-24 and, while started under the Conservative government, is continuing under the Labour administration.

It is being carried out by the DfE’s regions group, which supports improvement across children’s social care and education.

A proposed solution to ‘failing’ services

The children’s trust model was strongly advocated by David Cameron’s Conservative government as a solution for turning around ‘failing’ services, as well as a way of using structural innovation to raise social care performance generally.

In a 2016 paper, the then government set a target of having a third of councils having, or being on course to having, their children’s services run by a trust or another alternative delivery model (ADM) by 2020.

The most prominent alternative ADM is one council taking responsibility for another’s services, as Hampshire did in relation to the Isle of Wight from 2013-24, during which time the island’s services improved from ‘inadequate’ to ‘good’.

From 2014-20, trusts or companies took responsibility for 11 councils’ children’s services, about 7% of the total.

All but one of these subsequently improved, in terms of their Ofsted rating, the exception being the already good-rated Richmond. The biggest success story was Sunderland, whose rating improved from inadequate in 2018 to outstanding in 2021 under the stewardship of the Together for Children trust.

Concerns over costs

However, since 2020, just one trust has been created, in Bradford, while Doncaster took its services back in-house in 2022. This followed a decline in performance which saw its rating fall from good to requires improvement, partially reversing the progress made from the trust’s ‘inadequate’ starting point, in 2014.

The south Yorkshire authority also said the trust’s services were a “significant budgetary pressure” and that bringing services back in-house would save money through reducing overheads.

In relation to Worcestershire, where children’s services are rated good, the council also cited financial reasons in its decision to bring provision back in-house.

Meanwhile, Bradford Children and Families Trust (BCFT) overspent its budget by £42.3m in its first year, 2023-24, driven chiefly by the widespread issues of placements costs for children in care and high agency staff costs.

In a statement last month, BCFT’s chief executive, Charlotte Ramsden, said it was investing in early help and kinship care to reduce demand for residential placements, was making “good progress” in safely reducing agency staff use and was on target to meet savings commitments in 2024-25.

A turning away from the trust model

Since 2020, trusts and ADMs have been considered in other areas subject to statutory directions, but eventually rejected on the advice of DfE-appointed commissioners.

In two of these areas – Medway and West Sussex – the authority made significant improvements, with the former earning a good rating and the latter a requires improvement grade, with good features, from Ofsted last year.

In other cases, such as Herefordshire, North East Lincolnshire, Solihull and Sefton, commissioners rejected a trust on the grounds of the potential disruption to improvement of transferring services to a new body, and the delay to progress that would result from creating such an organisation.

Instead, they have tended to recommend that the authority be supported to improve by a high-performing council, such as those listed as sector-led improvement partners by the DfE.

Commissioner critical of council but does not recommend trust

The same was true of a highly critical report on Tameside council by its commissioner, Andy Couldrick, published last week.

Couldrick was chief executive of Birmingham Children’s Trust from its inception in 2018 until last year, when he became its chair, during which time it has improved the city’s Ofsted rating from inadequate to good.

He found that Tameside, rated inadequate by Ofsted at the start of this year, had “most of the characteristics of failing services that have moved into children’s trusts”, including “a weak corporate and cultural context; unstable and inconsistent leadership over a protracted period; high churn in the workforce, linked to the leadership inconsistency; a weak partnership system”.

While noting the authority had made progress, he concluded that it could not improve on its own steam. However, he did not recommend that its services be turned over to a trust, saying that the authority, which he found had a tendency to blame others for its problems, needed to take responsibility for its own improvement.

Trusts ‘can be costly to implement and take time to establish’

Couldrick added: “In addition, children’s trusts can be costly to implement and take time to establish. Tameside’s most vulnerable children do not have this time.”

Instead, he recommended that the authority retain a commissioner and should be supported by a high-performing council, which the DfE has accepted through a revised direction.

The council is currently recruiting a new director of children’s services to replace Allison Parkinson, who held the role on an interim basis from summer 2023 to August 2024 and whose work was praised by Couldrick.

In response to his report, the council’s chief executive, Sandra Stewart, said: “We acknowledge and support the recommendations made by the Commissioner to help us achieve the substantial and sustainable improvements we are striving for.

“We have already started to put in place the key building blocks needed to deliver an improved and stronger children’s service that will support better outcomes for families in Tameside. We are committed – as a whole organisation and with our partners – to taking swift and positive action to build on these foundations and creating the stability needed in our workforce to progress.”

A children’s trust will be disbanded with services returning to council control later this year.

Worcestershire County Council will take back control of early help, children’s social care and education services when its current contract with Worcestershire Children First ends in September 2024.

WCF’s staff – numbering 942.01 as of September 2023 – will transfer to the county council at the same time.

Improvements under trust

The move comes despite services progressing from requires improvement, in 2019, to good, in 2023, in Ofsted’s view, under WCF’s stewardship, and the company consistently meeting targets set by the council.

In a report to the council’s cabinet earlier this month, leaders justified the decision on financial grounds and on the benefits of reintegrating children’s services into the wider authority.

While the company – whose gross expenditure budget is forecast to be £148.4m this financial year – made small surpluses in its first three years, it overspent by £7.6m in 2022-23 and is forecast to do so by £28.6m in 2023-24.

The cabinet paper said this had been driven by national cost pressures on care placements and claimed that the council could save about £200,000 a year from winding up the company. This would remove the need for the post of director of resources at WCF as well as those of chair and non-executive directors on the company board.

However, in a response included in the report, the WCF board pointed out that these savings were “small and will not immediately aid our overspend situation and some of our financial challenges, which are driven by national market conditions”.

DfE direction for council to lose control of services

The Department for Education determined that Worcestershire should lose control of its children’s services in 2017, on the recommendation of a DfE-appointed commissioner, and following an inadequate Ofsted rating earlier that year.

The following year, the DfE approved the council’s business case to set up a company it wholly owned to run services and, in 2019, WCF was established, with a five-year contract to deliver social care, early help and education.

Prior to the transfer, Ofsted reinspected the council in 2019, leading to a requires improvement rating, which WCF has improved further, earning a good grade last year.

Ofsted’s praise for trust 

In their 2023 report, inspectors praised WCF for making “significant progress” in improvement areas identified in the two previous inspections and said most staff were positive about working for the trust, due to its supportive culture and accessible leadership team.

In comments to councillors in September 2023, WCF chief executive and Worcestershire’s director of children’s services, Tina Russell, said the improvements had not been driven by setting up the company, but by strong leadership and additional investment.

However, in its comments on the council’s proposal, the WCF board raised concerns about the potential disruption to the children’s services’ leadership team of winding up the company.

Trust board’s concerns over potential disruption

It said “extremely strong leadership with considerable focus on performance and continuous improvement” was behind the good rating from Ofsted and the importance of maintaining the stability of the existing leadership team “cannot be emphasised enough”.

“The senior leadership have forged positive working relationships with a wide range of stakeholders including the regulators and any change may be considered detrimental by stakeholders and be an unwanted distraction given the challenges we face in trying to reduce our budget overspends in residential care and improving our [special educational needs and disability] performance,” the board added.

Taking back control ‘the right thing to do’

In a statement on the decision, the county council’s cabinet member for education, Tracey Onslow, said: “Bringing children’s services back to the county council once the contract has ended is the right thing to do.

“The wholly owned company was set up at a time when Ofsted deemed our children’s services to be inadequate. Thanks to the hard work and dedication of our officers we have seen this rating rise to good at our last inspection in 2023.

“Our officers…will transfer back to the county council and will continue to work tirelessly to deliver quality services and support for the children of Worcestershire.”

The state of the trust model

Worcestershire’s move will leave 11 of the 153 local authority children’s services under trust stewardship, and marks the second time in two years that a council has taken children’s services back in-house, following Doncaster’s decision to do so in 2022.

Doncaster’s trust was set up 10 years ago, at the DfE’s direction, while in the same year, Kingston and Richmond councils voluntarily set up a community interest company – Achieving for Children – to run their services.

A DfE-directed trust was established in Slough in 2015 while in 2016, ministers set an ambition of having a third of children’s services being delivered through trusts or other alternative delivery models (ADMs), such as partnerships between councils.

Spate of trusts created

Over the subsequent four years, trusts were set up in Birmingham, Northamptonshire, Reading (Brighter Futures for Children), Sandwell, Sunderland (Together for Children), Windsor and Maidenhead (under Achieving for Children) and Worcestershire.

However, since then the tide appears to have turned away from the trust model, with only one created during that time, in Bradford.

During this time, trusts and ADMs have been considered in other areas subject to government intervention due to poor performance and eventually rejected on the advice of DfE-appointed commissioners.

A common reason proffered by commissioners has been the potential disruption to improvement plans by creating new organisations from scratch.

Also, in two of the areas where a trust was considered – Medway and West Sussex – the authority has made significant improvements, with the former earning a good rating and the latter a requires improvement grade, with good features, last year.

Structural change ‘not panacea for performance issues’

In addition, a report for the Local Government Association in 2022 found that large-scale structural change was not a panacea for councils’ performance problems, drawing on the experience of children’s trusts.

The study concluded that factors such as political will, specific leadership qualities and the willingness to take a long view around achieving service improvements were the most important enablers of successful change.

A council whose children’s services will be transferred to an independent trust next year has improved its provision for care leavers, Ofsted has found.

In its latest monitoring visit to Bradford council, the inspectorate found that a bigger and more stable workforce of “committed and caring” social workers and personal advisers (PAs) were delivering more consistent practice under the oversight and leadership of “capable” senior managers.

At its 2018 inspection, in which it graded Bradford as inadequate overall though requires improvement for children in care and care leavers, Ofsted found that support for care leavers was inconsistent. Some councils lacked access to key documents to support them in adulthood, such as passports, pathway plans were not user-friendly and the voice of the young person was “minimal” in case records.

However, at the monitoring visit in July, inspectors found that the “voice of the young person is significantly stronger, and this is ensuring young people’s views and goals are incorporated into planning”.

Their views were central to pathway plans – which were now “sensitively written in easily understandable language” – and this meant that interventions were based on young people’s expressed wishes, goals and aspirations.

Practitioners considered young people’s faith and cultural needs well, and provision for young asylum seekers had improved through an approach that saw them as children first and migrants second. Most care leavers had access to the documents they needed to move into adulthood.

Stable workforce

While care leavers had experienced churn in the social workers or PAs supporting them – forcing them to retell their story – most were now benefiting from a stable workforce of practitioners who visited them regularly and ensured they felt supported and cared for.

This was enabled by manageable caseloads for social workers in leaving care teams. Though PAs’ caseloads were higher and their ability to spend time with individual care leavers was restricted by their responsibilities in organising group work, the council was recruiting more staff to cut vacancies and reduce workloads.

Social workers and PAs had benefited from a “thorough learning and development programme” that was helping to embed new practice standards and make the quality of practice consistent, inspectors found, while they also said management oversight had become more robust.

A key area for improvement was the lack of access to adult social care for young people with complex needs, such as learning disabilities, due to being deemed ineligible, and long waits and delays for care leavers in receiving mental health support.

“As a result, not all care leavers have their complex needs assessed appropriately, or have the right specialist intervention in place to keep them well as they enter adulthood,” said Ofsted.

Bradford DCS: ‘we cannot be complacent’

Inspectors also found supervision records were of variable quality, with some sessions overly focused on compliance overly focused on compliance as opposed to reflection.

Following the report’s publication last week, Marium Haque, strategic director of children’s services, said: “This is a really positive outcome. We have been working extremely hard to drive improvements in the services we deliver to children. We’re pleased that Ofsted have seen that we have committed and capable managers in place and that we have excellent staff who are able to deliver improved services for our district’s young care leavers.

“While this report is very encouraging, we cannot be complacent. We know there is more to do and we know we need to see improvement across all our services. But the outcome of this visit is recognition for the hard work and commitment of staff who deliver these services.”

The report comes with the council having agreed with the Department for Education to transfer its children’s services to an independent trust next year, in the light of longstanding performance issues that a DfE adviser found it lacked the capacity and capability to rectify.

Large-scale structural change of children’s services is “no panacea” for challenges facing councils, the Local Government Association has said after research for the organisation highlighted important factors that can deliver successful service redesign.

The study concluded that factors such as political will, specific leadership qualities and the willingness to take a long view around achieving service improvements were the most important enablers of successful change.

The research drew on the experiences of children’s services trusts, areas that have gone into improvement partnerships, and counties that have been reorganised to create new unitary authorities.

It concluded that while such changes could be valuable tools towards delivering benefits – including improving organisational identity, focus and culture, and working more flexibly and innovatively – making them did not in itself offer any guarantee of a positive outcome.

‘Relentless focus on quality of practice’

Instead, success was more likely to be linked to the presence of crucial building blocks, and to key ‘design principles’ relevant across a range of different ways of delivering children’s services (see box), the study found.

“[Structural change] can be an enabler to create the leadership, staffing and financial capacity to deliver improvement,” an LGA spokesperson said. “Without these changes, and a relentless focus on the quality of practice, structural change cannot on its own improve services for children.”

Local circumstances were also crucial in terms of understanding the types of structural change that might work in a given area, the LGA said.

“The importance of the local context is also emphasised in the report’s findings that children’s services work best when services are integrated, where they are well connected with the rest of the council and where they are firmly rooted in local communities,” the spokesperson said.

Capacity for change

The LGA’s research, carried out by the Isos Partnership consultancy, aimed to identify approaches to structural change that had worked well, especially for children and families, with a view to informing future work by local authorities.

Its fieldwork drew on the experiences of arms-length trusts set up in Worcestershire and in Kingston, Richmond, and Windsor and Maidenhead, where Achieving for Children operates services. It also looked at partnerships between Hampshire and the Isle of Wight and the bi-borough areas of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, as well as local government reorganisation within Dorset.

The research team additionally spoke to senior leaders at Birmingham, Northamptonshire and Sunderland, all of which had experience of children’s trusts being set up – and in Northamptonshire’s case of local government reorganisation too.

Jill Colbert, the chief executive of Together for Children, which manages services in Sunderland and is now ‘outstanding’, said she had contributed “to support the wider understanding of the role the [alternative delivery model] in Sunderland has played in improvement”.

She said she hoped her input would “enable an informed insight of what works in children’s social care, so we can build effective intervention programmes based on the difference they make for children rather than on ideology or custom and practice”.

Common building blocks

In most of the areas where children’s trusts have been established – and also in the case of the Hampshire/Isle of Wight partnership – structural change had effectively been pushed on the local authority areas in the form of statutory directions from the Department for Education following poor Ofsted ratings.

This enforcement approach was tied to a crucial factor identified as influencing the direction of change – whether sufficient capacity to achieve it was deemed to exist within an organisation. Two other important considerations were found to be whether a restructured organisation was big enough to bear the cost of an experienced DCS and new leaders and specialists, and whether suitable high-performing neighbours were present that could enter a partnership.

But whatever the approach pursued, the study found “a remarkable degree of similarity” in the crucial building blocks without which successful change was unlikely to happen, which included:

• A long-term commitment to a change model, giving the time and space for new structures and practices to bed in, backed by local political will – which has not always been present in cases where the DfE has intervened.
• The presence of senior leaders with particular skills, such as taking a “visible and hands-on” approach focusing on practice and performance, being open and willing to listen and being able to make staff feel safe.
• Effective communication of why change is happening, clearly focusing on the impact on children and families and how staff can contribute, and extending to co-design – including by communities – of structural design details.
• Linking structural reorganisation to positive cultural change, including around institutional values, which can act to raise morale among existing employees – making them more likely to stay – and attract new ones.
• Carrying out change using a strong project-management approach and within coherent frameworks, especially relating to organisations’ governance and accountability structures and their IT systems.

The presence or absence of such factors has been highlighted in Ofsted reports and evaluations of a number of areas that have undergone structural change. Experts interviewed by Community Care in 2020 made similar remarks in relation to how successful the practice of setting up independent trusts to manage poor-performing children’s services departments has been overall.

‘Grounded in experience’

Ray Jones, an emeritus professor of social work at Kingston University and St. George’s, University of London who has been an outspoken critic of removing children’s services departments from direct council control, said the report’s conclusions were “sensible” and “grounded [in] experience and wisdom”.

“Too often, organisational change has been imposed by politicians, civil servants and corporate managers, with little understanding or expertise regarding children’s social services,” Jones said. He said a fixation on “big bang changes” for their own sake was the path to “churn and chaos”.

“What this report highlights is the importance of building a stable, confident, experienced workforce, close to communities, with continuity over time, and with leaders who are focused on the needs of children and families, stay close to frontline practitioners and teams, and where there is an honest and open culture,” Jones added.

Sandwell’s children’s services have shed the ‘inadequate’ tag they have carried for almost a decade, after Ofsted praised the “energy and vision” of new leadership.

Following an inspection in May, inspectors said progress in the West Midlands borough – judged ‘inadequate’ since 2013 – had increased in “trajectory and pace” since the appointment of Emma Taylor as chief executive of Sandwell Children’s Trust in 2021. The trust has run services on behalf of Sandwell council since 2018, after the government required the authority to hand over its services to the new body.

Initiatives introduced under Taylor – including a shift to locality teams, an early help strategy, a social work career pathway and “high-quality” specialist services – meant there were “no longer widespread and serious weaknesses” at the trust.

But in grading Sandwell requires improvement to be good across all areas, the inspectorate warned that many services were still inconsistent, often due to workforce instability and lack of management oversight. Overall, progress had taken too long since its last ‘inadequate’ grade, back in 2017.

‘Positive impact’ on exploitation risks

Ofsted found that leadership improvements meant many children’s needs were well met by social workers, who worked well with partners.

Several areas attracted high praise from inspectors, such as the work of the trust’s Horizon team with children at risk of being exploited or going missing.

“Horizon social workers are skilled and knowledgeable,” inspectors said. “They develop effective relationships with children, including those who have previously not engaged with professionals.”

Ofsted added that the team successfully reduced risk for many children and that families appreciated its “positive impact”.

Inspectors also commended the support offered to families by Sandwell’s edge-of-care services. “[The multi-systemic therapy service] provides a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week therapeutic service which is highly successful in preventing family breakdown in circumstances linked to trauma and high-risk behaviours, and is highly valued by families,” they noted.

The children’s services trust’s multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH) was another area found to be operating competently – despite referring agencies often not applying thresholds well.

“The vast majority of contacts and referrals are dealt with in a timely way through the MASH, based on effective decision-making,” Ofsted said. “Contacts are screened by experienced and skilled social workers who make suitable decisions, informed by appropriate agency checks and history-taking.”

Inspectors did, however, highlight areas where the MASH could be improved, with social work analysis judged to be “overly descriptive” and managers’ record-keeping sometimes insufficient.

Workforce instability at root of problems

However, inspectors found issues remained across a range of services, many driven by workforce instability and a lack of management oversight.

As of September 2021, 31.5% of children’s social workers in the borough were locums, double the West Midlands average (16.1%), the vacancy rate was 27.7% (West Midlands: 18.2%), while turnover over the previous year had been 25.7%, up from 14.9% the year before.

Too many children in need experienced changes of social worker, undermining trust with families and disrupting progress in their plans, found Ofsted.

While most child protection plans clearly identified needs, risks and expectations of parents, and resulted in them being provided with the right services, inconsistent management oversight meant agreed actions were not always followed through.

Despite inspectors’ praise for edge-of-care services, they found that most children were entering the pre-proceedings stage of the public law outline (PLO) too late, meaning a small number remained in neglectful situations for too long.

“Drift for these children is exacerbated by changes of social worker and weaker management oversight,” the report said.

Children also remained in pre-proceedings for too long, with deficient management oversight meaning there was a lack of accountability or escalation when progress was not made.

Quality of practice ‘too variable’

The deficiencies in pre-proceedings meant too many children came into care in an unplanned way.

Also, the duration of care proceedings was “excessive” and far exceeded judicial guidelines, exacerbated by changes of social worker for children.

Workforce instability and inadequate management oversight also meant practice with children in care was “too variable”.

While many children benefited from skilled work, some – particularly disabled children, those placed out of area and the few young children in residential care – experienced delay in progressing their plans, due to staff turnover and vacancies.

Though oversight was stronger in some children in care teams, supervision was not consistently effective in progressing plans.

“This includes insufficient oversight and escalation by independent reviewing officers (IROs) to senior managers when issues or delays arise,” it added.

Stronger leadership

At a strategic level, Ofsted assessed the situation in Sandwell to be gradually improving.

Governance was found to be getting better, as was communication between the trust and council, resulting in the needs of children being prioritised.

Performance management was deemed to be strengthening, with social workers viewing case audits as a “learning experience” and work culture become more reflective.

Inspectors said that partnerships still needed to be further developed with a view to “resolving challenges in relation to a shared understanding of thresholds and referrals into children’s social care, and sufficiency of placements for children with complex needs”.

While staff churn meant services remained “fragile”, Ofsted said senior leaders were taking a realistic view of the situation.

“A comprehensive workforce plan has been implemented, which includes recent investment to create additional teams to support social work capacity, a comprehensive staff learning and development offer, and investment in career pathways,” the inspection report said.

‘Turning a corner’

Responding to the inspection outcome, Sandwell council leader Kerrie Carmichael, the leader of Sandwell council, said she was “pleased this inspection shows we have turned a corner”.

Simon Hackett, the council’s cabinet member for children and education, said the local authority “now [has] clear plans in place that mean we can help families when issues first arise”.

“Although we are only still part way through our improvement journey, we are delivering a much better service to children and young people in Sandwell,” he said. “I want to thank our hard-working staff at the council and our partners, particularly Sandwell Children’s Trust, for their dedication to supporting children and young people.”

The trust’s chair, former Labour MP and cabinet minister Jacqui Smith, described the inspection result as a “big step for us”.

“Most importantly, we have much more stability for the majority of the children we are helping,” she said. “The report recognises the pace of change has increased and affirms our own assessment of what further improvements to the service we need to deliver.”

Story corrected

North East Lincolnshire council has for now avoided having its children’s services transferred to an independent trust, after a government commissioner’s review found such a move posed a “significant risk” of causing services to deteriorate further.

Instead, the Department for Education (DfE) has directed the council – found to be ‘inadequate’ in all areas by Ofsted in November 2021 – to enter a formal partnership with a peer authority, to be identified by the DfE.

The verdict came after the commissioner, Peter Dwyer, found many weaknesses remained at North East Lincolnshire, highlighting in particular its struggles delivering major change while “firefighting” operational challenges such as high caseloads and unallocated work.

“[Firefighting] approaches have a long history in the organisation, with pressing issues distracting leadership from coherent strategic change activity,” Dwyer warned in the new review.

Problems at the council emerged in 2019 when a visit by Ofsted found “exceedingly high” caseloads were putting children at risk. The full inspection late last year concluded that leaders had subsequently failed to prioritise children’s needs, invest sufficiently in services or address priority actions identified by Ofsted.

‘Compelling reasons’ needed to keep services

The DfE had said in a statutory direction issued earlier this year that it would require “compelling reasons” for North East Lincolnshire’s children’s services not to be removed from the council’s control.

But with establishing children’s services trusts entailing an initial period of extra disruption, and with no guarantee they will achieve success, Dwyer concluded that going down that route was too risky. Only Bradford council, which was this month the subject of a national review into the circumstances surrounding the murder of toddler Star Hobson, has recently been directed to hand over control of its children’s services.

He instead said the council should form a strategic partnership with another ‘strong’ authority, to include “integrated leadership” across some or all of children’s services, citing evidence of positive impact elsewhere. This includes the Isle of Wight’s improvement through a strategic partnership with Hampshire.

The DfE has accepted this recommendation and will commission an options appraisal to determine how the partnership should work. Partner candidates include outstanding-rated Lincolnshire council, which Dwyer said had “many years’ experience of undertaking partnering improvement work with other LAs”.

But the review added that if a formal partnership could not be established then alternative arrangements, including setting up a trust, should be looked at again in the autumn. The DfE has appointed a new commissioner, former Cafcass head Anthony Douglas, to oversee progress.

Persistent underperformance

Dwyer’s review for the DfE sought a “wide cross section of views” from across North East Lincolnshire, taking in interviews with senior staff, politicians, Ofsted and trade union representatives as well as focus groups with staff.

He noted that Ofsted’s harsh verdict on the state of its children’s services was “an almost cumulative judgement” based on persistent underperformance and the council’s failure to address recommendations from previous reports.

Inspectors had also been “rightly concerned” by the discrepancy between leaders’ more positive self-assessment of practice and the reality on the ground.

While finding positives relating to individuals in senior positions, Dwyer said the council’s small size had hampered its ability to recruit experienced directors and, as a result, to improve services.

Staff were quoted as saying they were “constantly told” they were on an improvement journey without that process being adequately defined, and that senior leaders were “out of touch” and prone to micromanage problems rather than tackling their root causes.

Overall the management system was deemed to be over-complicated, potentially leading to “fragmentation”. Dwyer particularly criticised the fact that most social workers were supervised by assistant team managers (ATMs), which not only took the most experienced practitioners away from direct practice, but also led to drift and delay as ATMs lacked decision-making responsibility.

Caseloads remain an issue

Dwyer found caseloads were still an issue at the authority, with an average of 25 as of January 2022, but with some staff carrying significantly more work than this, on the back of rising demand across the service.

He said he was “particularly concerned” about significant levels of unallocated cases. Though senior leaders were addressing this through the use of agency teams, Dwyer warned “this would further increase inconsistency of involvement into the lives of children and families”.

The review also found children’s services had lacked “strategic profile” within the council and there had been “significant weaknesses” in governance and oversight of children’s services by councillors over a number of years.

An improvement board set up after Ofsted’s 2019 focused visit first identified problems had “operated as though the job was done when the strategy was completed not when its implementation and impact was seen”, one interviewee told Dwyer. As a result it had ended its work “prematurely” in March 2021, with liaison with the DfE being reduced to caseload monitoring and other audit activity.

‘Key ingredients’ not in place

Since being found ‘inadequate’ across the board by Ofsted, North East Lincolnshire had taken a number of positive steps, Dwyer found.

It had moved quickly to address some areas of concern, put in place a fresh improvement plan, enhanced leadership capacity and approved measures to increase resourcing of children’s services, the review noted.

Unlike many councils in similar positions, partnership working in North East Lincolnshire “does not look totally fractured”, added the review. It also praised the council’s openness to accepting outside support from peers, including ‘outstanding’ North Yorkshire and Lincolnshire councils, and the Local Government Association.

Nonetheless, Dwyer wrote, “it is of considerable concern that the key ingredients for delivery of the strategic change agenda are not yet secured”.

‘Fair and accurate’ assessment

He added: “Pragmatic leadership arrangements are in place which bring strengths and experience, but are clearly not the arrangements which will be able to see the LA through a change programme of significant duration.”

The fact that governance arrangements to oversee improvement work had not yet been put in place was a concern, the review found, with elected member-led arrangements lacking sufficient credibility.

Reflecting this Dwyer recommended the establishment of a new improvement board comprising senior council and partner leaders, and external experts, to oversee progress against the authority’s improvement plan. The DfE said this would be chaired by Douglas, as commissioner.

Responding to the review findings, council leader Philip Jackson said the authority welcomed “the opportunity to work with [peers], using their experiences and support for the good of our future”.

He said Dwyer had “fairly and accurately identified the improvements that had been made and the challenges we have ahead to address our weaknesses.

Jackson added: “His recommendations are accepted, and we must continue to look forward, working with fellow members, officers, and partners to ensure the improvement of our service for the benefit of our families, young people and communities as a whole. This will be done.”

*The story has been corrected to state that Lisa Arthey’s resignation followed the Ofsted inspection report that rated the council as inadequate, rather than was triggered by it.