“Children and young people with SEND are valued and prioritised in Wiltshire.”

That’s the opinion of Ofsted and Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspectors who visited Wiltshire to check services for children and young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) and their families.

Wiltshire Council and the NHS Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire Integrated Care Board (NHS BSW ICB) – the local area partnership – are jointly responsible for the planning and commissioning of services for children and young people with SEND in Wiltshire.

Inspectors from the CQC and Ofsted spoke to professionals, families and other partners involved in SEND before publishing their findings in a report.

The inspectors also reviewed the range of alternative provision that Wiltshire Council commissions for children and young people who cannot attend school due to their needs, or for those who have been or are at risk of being permanently excluded from school.

The judgment by inspectors means Wiltshire Council is one of only five local authorities to have received the top grade for SEND and also an ‘outstanding’ rating from Ofsted for children’s social care, since the current SEND inspection framework was introduced in January 2023.

Key findings

The SEND report also finds that:

• Frontline services work together very effectively to meet need and improve outcomes.
• Many children with SEND get targeted help and support from the start.
• Plans strongly focus on promoting children’s independence, aspirations and confidence as well as ensuring support for education and health prioritised. This helps improve social outcomes and access to their communities.
• Wiltshire children benefit from an inclusive education system. The development of the ‘ordinarily available provision for all learners’ strategy, has helped secure a system-wide commitment to inclusive practice in schools.
• When SEND children go to school there is a shared vision and commitment from all professionals regarding inclusion. Schools work with council staff, health professionals and social workers to find ways to meet the need.
• For children and young people with more complex needs, the special school and enhanced provision is stretched but effective.
• Early identification and the meeting of children’s needs benefits greatly from successful joint working.
• The local authority ensures the quality of alternative provision is checked regularly so they can review how well they meet the commissioning needs of the area.
• The local authority makes creative and effective use of alternative provision.

‘Our efforts are making a difference’

Cllr Jane Davies, cabinet member for SEND said: “We want the very best for all our children and young people with SEND in Wiltshire. This report is a positive step forward, showing that working together our efforts are making a difference, though we know there is still more to do.

“Early intervention with support and advice, strong collaboration among professionals, and involving SEND families at every stage of the journey are at the heart of our approach.

“We recognise that we’re not perfect and there’s always room for improvement, but by continuing to work closely with our families, we are certainly moving in the right direction, as the report clearly demonstrates.”

‘A culture of partnership working

Gill May, chief nurse, Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire Integrated Care Board (NHS BSW ICB), said: “We are delighted that inspectors saw first-hand the positive work happening in Wiltshire to ensure children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities have the support they need to achieve the best outcomes and realise their full potential.

“Inspectors told us our culture of partnership working in Wiltshire has been incredibly positive, and that collaborating in this way has helped to improve services.

“The early years of a person’s life are often the most influential, and that is even more true for SEND children, so we will, of course, consider the report’s recommendations and work with partners to deliver any necessary improvements.”

Parent carers are ‘equal partners’

Stuart Hall, strategic director of the Wiltshire Parent Carer Council (WPCC), said: “This inspection of SEND services across the local area partnership highlighted how parent carers are equal partners in co-producing and implementing strategy, and the collective voice of parent carers informs positive change and supports improvement.

“We are delighted that parent carer led initiatives, such as the WPCC Neurodevelopment (ND) Advice Line, were recognised as a strength in the report.

“Although we are delighted that many strengths in Wiltshire were recognised, the report helpfully identifies areas that Wiltshire needs to continue to improve, such as reducing delays for children and young people, and increasing opportunities and choice for young people as they prepare for adulthood.

“The WPCC will continue to work in partnership across the local area to ensure that parent carers remain fundamental to ambitiously strengthening services for all families of children and young people with SEND as equal partners.

“We thank the many parent carers who invested their time and shared their views to contribute to this inspection.”

The report flags areas for improvement, saying the local area partnership should improve how it uses information and data for health services and work on reducing the delays that some children, young people and families currently face.

Young people’s experiences are more variable post-16 and up to age 25 in the area. The local area should continue to work in partnership to improve the education, work, health services and social integration opportunities for young people in their preparation for adulthood.

Wiltshire Council and NHS BSW ICB are already working hard together to address these.

You can read the full report here.

How much support did you have when you returned to social work after becoming a first-time parent?

In three episodes of the Social Work Community Podcast, social workers at Essex County Council discuss the various ways the local authority supports its workforce and promotes their wellbeing.

In this episode, Amy, a team manager in a Care Quality Commission service improvement team in adult services, and Brooke, who works in a family support and protection team in children’s services, share their experiences.

Both first-time mothers highlight that being a parent is no barrier to career progression at the local authority and show how supportive management structures have helped them achieve a work-life balance.

Listen to “Returning to social work after becoming a first-time parent” on Spreaker.

Access the transcript here

The Social Work Community Podcast explores the issues that matter to social work practitioners in their working lives. You will hear directly from social workers in your community about their successes and their challenges.

Our first season was nominated in this year’s British Association of Social Workers (BASW) Social Work Journalism Awards.

So sign up to the Social Work Community to be among the first to catch each episode and to connect with fellow practitioners in a safe space.

Otherwise, check out the Social Work Community Podcast on the following:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Spreaker
• Audible (Amazon)

Click ‘follow’ or ‘subscribe’ on your podcast app so you know when a new episode is published.

And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram.

Staff wellbeing and getting it right for practitioners are at the heart of Walsall’s journey. Principal social worker Hannah Thompson says: “We have a ‘workforce and wellbeing strategy’ in place because we absolutely want to recognise that we need to look after and care for all of our staff who are out there working tirelessly for children, young people and families in Walsall.

Hannah Thompson, PSW at Walsall.

“To develop this approach, we constantly ask our staff how we are doing and what we need to do support them more, provide development opportunities for them and continue to respond to feedback and develop as an organisation.”

Feedback from staff has led to Walsall introducing a number of key changes. As part of the Walsall ‘Right 4 Children’ programme the council has:

• Introduced a nine-day fortnight as a standard offer for all frontline practitioners so they can visit families at times that suit them and know they will get this time back.
• Offered clinical supervision across the workforce, delivered by the child psychology service.
• Changed structures to introduce more experienced senior practitioner and consultant social worker roles to support all practitioners and keep practice wisdom in practice.
• Focused on a ‘grow our own’ approach so practitioners feel able to take their careers where they want. This includes a clear career pathway for all social workers, including senior roles.
• Offered retention payments of 10-14% salary to frontline social workers in duty and assessment and family safeguarding teams to underline that pay matters.
• Consistently tracked workloads to keep these low with the aim of setting a maximum of 15 children for experienced social workers – on the understanding that workloads matter and practitioners want to be able to do a good job.
• Enabled every staff member to develop a specialism, as part of the families first model.

Practitioners feel that the work-life balance in Walsall reflects this, given the realities of the sector.

Sarah, a social worker at Walsall, explains: “The nine-day fortnight has been a great addition to the flexibility of my work. It recognises that sometimes social workers need to change their hours to meet the needs of the families we are supporting.

“It is nice to have a day every two weeks to catch up on life admin! We are able to work in the office and at home as a hybrid of the role. It gives social workers the independence and autonomy to manage our own schedule. We do have flexible working when we have appointments or commitments so we can make up our hours too. We are also flexible in our approaches, to creatively support families.”

Walsall is committed to asking our staff how it can work in the best way possible with children and families, and to do the things that matter. Last year, the council achieved a satisfaction score of 8.1 from the annual Local Government Association health check, based on feedback from staff.

PSW Hannah Thompson says she feels there is more to do: “We are pleased with the positive feedback from our staff, but we know that we have to keep pushing to improve. Working with children and families is a privilege but it is also hard at times.

“We want to keep learning and growing all the time, and for Walsall to be a place where you know your voice as practitioner will be heard.”

Photo: Walsall Council

At Walsall, the families first pathfinder is about constantly asking the question, ‘what is the right thing here for the child?’

This forms the heart of the families first programme – making sure the right decisions are made for children and families, and systems and processes are shaped around them, as opposed to fitting them into current systems and ways of working. Families first means designing and delivering services which have children, families and their experiences at the centre.

Families first for children is a core part of the Department for Education’s Stable Homes, Built on Love agenda to reform children’s services, and Walsall Council has been named as one of the pathfinders trialling the programme.

Walsall is at the start of its journey as a pathfinder and is about to launch the families first programme. This is seen across Walsall Council’s children’s services and its safeguarding partnership as an opportunity to innovate, and commit to doing things differently in ways that are best for children and families. It means focusing on meeting the needs of children, parents and carers at the earliest possible point, and where this will be most likely to help create change.

Families first is also about working with and building the wider family and community networks around a family, as they are the people who are around when professionals are not. For this to work, there have to be strong partnerships: providing multi-agency help delivered by the right professionals connected with local services, from places families will visit, including schools, community centres and family hubs.

To achieve this vision, Walsall has set out to deliver:

• Combined family help locality services – bringing together a range of practitioners including social workers, family support workers, specialist adolescent workers and parenting support staff. These services will provide help from community family hubs, and be connected with community and voluntary sector partners.
• A new FAMILY service – a specialist trained team to undertake family network meetings and family group conferences as a standard offer for all families before reaching child protection. This service will also offer targeted help at evenings and weekends.
• Lead child protection practitioners – specialist experienced social workers who will not be allocated professionals, but will lead child protection enquiries, conferences and plans, and co-ordinate strong multi-agency practice responses.

The right direction

Practitioners at Walsall. Photo: Walsall Council

Families first in Walsall builds on the family safeguarding model, which Walsall implemented in 2020. The learning from this model has been essential in developing an approach for providing effective multi-agency help for families, and understanding how this improves decision-making, joint working and purposeful relational practice.

These changes build on a positive direction of travel in Walsall, evidenced in a ‘good’ Ofsted judgement in 2021, and strong multi-agency feedback in a joint targeted area inspection in 2022.

Senior leaders in Walsall are fully committed to the families first programme. Colleen Male, executive director for children’s services – who started her career in Walsall as a social worker – said:

Colleen Male. Photo: Walsall Council

“I am very proud that Walsall has been selected as a pathfinder, and this reflects the tremendous hard work of our staff. They have driven our transformation journey to continually improve how we work, and step-by-step to get the right structures and ways of working in place with children and families. The pathfinder is a real opportunity to learn and innovate together and to create a framework that provides the foundations for great practice.”

Practitioners at Walsall echo this.

Aklima has recently completed her assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE) in Walsall and has taken time to reflect on her experiences:

“I feel I have been supported and guided by colleagues who have offered advice and their perspectives on situations that families are going through, which is always great as they can provide a different insight. I have an understanding and supportive manager and consultant social worker who consistently checks up on me and offers guidance and considers opportunities for me to widen my knowledge and skills within social work to make progression within my career”.

 Khaleel, a team manager, has been in Walsall for five years:

Khaleel, a team manager at Walsall.

“The culture and support are fantastic with a real visible and present senior leadership team. I think our ethos and outlook is key to the help we provide our families and children, and we care about getting it right! The family help approach is really exciting for all of us, and we can’t wait to develop and shape this within our own service, with a focus on early prescriptive social work.”

Social worker vacancies continue to be a daily challenge for local authorities, with the latest Department for Education statistics showing that 18.9% of children’s social work posts lay vacant as of September 2023. Children’s services in England were also employing a record number of agency social workers at the time (7,200).

These national figures obscure significant variations at a regional level. While social worker vacancy rates stood at a quarter (25.2%) in London and 20.5% in the North West, the picture was very different in the North East, where only one in nine (10.9%) social worker posts were vacant.

Leaders at three local authorities in the region say there is no ‘magic wand’ to solve recruitment and retention challenges. However, controlling use of agency staff, investing in their workforces and collaborating across the region are key, they add.

Reducing use of agency staff

The 12 North East councils signed a memorandum of understanding on capping the pay and use of agency social workers in 2017.

Angela Bremner, strategic lead for people services at Together for Children, which delivers children’s services for Sunderland City Council, says: “When the memorandum was introduced, I distinctly remember thinking, ‘this is going to create pressure’. And it did!”

Angela joined the trust in 2017, just after it took over responsibility for children’s services from the council.

“At the highest peak, the rate of agency staff use across social workers and management was 43% and we were spending £6.4m annually on agency staff,” explains Angela.

To address these challenges, managers converted 32 locum social workers to permanent employment following meetings to address their needs. Incentives such as ‘golden hello’ payments were introduced, the application process modernised and Signs of Safety bedded in as the preferred social work model.

Students joined from the Step up to Social Work programme, while the principal social worker built up the annual cohort of newly qualified social workers (NQSWs) from about nine to 32. This was supported by a comprehensive year two offer for NQSWs, in order to retain staff. An apprenticeship scheme was also developed, which allowed residential staff to be trained up as qualified social workers.

Ofsted rated Sunderland inadequate in 2015 and 2018, yet fast forward to 2021 and the city’s services, under TfC’s management, were rated outstanding. In its report, Ofsted said that senior managers had been “decisive in recruiting a permanent and excellent set of social workers to replace the short-term and agency staff that were previously in post”.

The vacancies from September 2023 have now been filled. “Recruitment and retention is one of our key priorities,” says Angela. “We can enjoy the stability for now but we don’t take things for granted and have heavily invested in succession planning and are always looking at new and innovative ways to recruit and keep our staff.”

The role of social work academies

Neighbouring Gateshead children’s services have been rated good by Ofsted for the past decade, most recently in 2019. But, according to the inspectorate, this followed a period of “instability” in the workforce between 2015 and 2017 when it was under interim leadership.

In its 2019 report, Ofsted found the authority was “increasingly effective at recruiting and retaining staff”, creating a “culture in which social workers are valued and feel valued”.

Andrea Houlahan, deputy strategic director for children’s services and early help, says: “Our recruitment and retention strategy is a huge priority and focuses on all aspects of the workforce including emotional wellbeing, continued professional development, equality, diversity and inclusion, and targeted recruitment approaches, including the use of a highly commended social work academy.”

NQSWs, recruits from the Step Up programme and apprentices spend between three and six months in the academy undertaking comprehensive training with a dedicated manager. They then move to their ‘host’ teams but with continued oversight from the academy, including mentoring and 1:1 and group supervision. The academy also supports staff in their second year after qualification, with development days that encourage them to think about their next steps in their career.

Angela Houlahan adds that a ‘grow your own’ model and supporting staff to remain in Gateshead are central to its strategy. The authority also actively applies for Department for Education funding to pilot various models and innovations, to be at the cutting edge of social work while also creating opportunities for staff.

Ashleigh Soward joined Gateshead in 2009 and, having been involved in the social work in schools pilot and in developing a kinship care programme, wholeheartedly agrees this variety has contributed to her long service.

“The different roles reinvigorate your passion for social work.”

However, she also attributes her 15 years’ service to “having flexibility in my role, strong genuine relationships – which are helped by us being a comparatively small authority, all based under one roof – and feeling valued. If the job satisfaction is there, practice is always better.”

‘No blame’ culture

Hartlepool, rated outstanding by Ofsted in May 2023, is also a smaller local authority. Sally Robinson, director of children’s services, describes it as a strength in terms of supporting staff, “as we can adopt the relational approach we use in social work to our workforce”.

“When we ask social workers why they stay with us, they say they feel safe, supported and have confidence in management to back them. We operate a ‘no blame’ culture.”

Hartlepool recruits staff through the Frontline graduate training programme (now called Approach Social Work) and apprenticeships. It also recruits more social workers than it needs to the ASYE programme, with fewer caseloads and more support, so that when there is ‘natural churn’ of staff, the additional NQSWs drop into those roles.

“We have never brought in a project [agency social work] team following the memorandum [of understanding],” says Sally. “We built a business case around recruiting over establishment and this is cheaper than hiring costly agency staff to cover vacancies. We don’t rely on attracting staff from neighbouring authorities, we focus on retaining our staff.”

Jane Young, Hartlepool’s assistant director of children’s services, adds: “We focus on social workers’ motivation to join Hartlepool as we need the right people with the right values.

“It is all part of a jigsaw and not one part solves it on its own, it’s various strands coming together and us identifying what the next piece of the jigsaw will be to be ahead of the game.

“We have workforce stability currently but it still feels as pressurised. In the North East, there are high levels of risk and deprivation – so it’s not that jobs are easier here. It is a really challenging area that takes up a lot of time, effort and collaborative work across the region.” .

“[Workforce] is our main priority, you can have the right ambition but you can’t deliver a service without the right people in the right places,” adds Sally.