children’s social services

I don’t often comment on Children’s Services in local government, preferring to stick to education about which I hopefully know more. However, having served a period of time as a Cabinet member for Children’s Services in a shire county, I couldn’t resist reading the report published last week by the DfE from the commissioner put into Devon County Council to oversee the improvement oft heir Children’s services.

There were two interesting comments from that report caught my eye.

The first deal with the issue of local government re-organisation: not strictly part of the Commissioner’s brief, but an interesting and thoughtful comment

“Although not in the remit of this particular piece of work it would be wrong not to highlight a second significant risk. The current round of Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) consultations is already consuming large amounts of political and operational time. However, that isn’t the main risk. The bigger concern would be for any recommendation which leads to the break up and fragmentation of Devon CC and the existing arrangements for children’s services. Given the positive improvement trajectory I have seen and identified in this report and the critical importance of having a well led and well functioning children’s services for the local population anything that breaks that model would risk stopping the existing work in its tracks with an even bigger risk that things would quickly slip backwards. As stated, this is not strictly in my brief to comment on, but the potential impact of LGR on services that are now showing signs of improvement should be appropriately considered by government as part of their decision making process.”

The second comment was, of course, interesting to me as a Liberal Democrat.

“Following the recent local elections Devon now has new political leadership. The Lib Dem group have made an impressive ‘fresh start’ and they are very clear that they will be judged on the improvements they are determined to see in Children’s Services. Children’s services are undoubtedly the top priority for Devon County Council. Three cabinet members (including the Leader) hold portfolios across Children’s services – Education, Lead Member and SEND. My observations of two cabinet meetings and scrutiny alongside additional face to face meetings assures me that the Leader and his team are very serious about bringing about the improvements needed.”

Commissioner’s report on children’s services

Managing a Children’s Services is probably a much more complex task than managing adult social services in local authorities, as Children’s Services encompasses not only the whole of the remaining education functions of a local authority, but also children in care or at risk, plus youth justice, and youth services, as well as relationships with the NHS over SEND. This wide range of activities may be why so many local authorities have received adverse reports over the past few years.

Indeed, an analysis of the reports by the size of the authority may well help to support the view of Devon’s commissioner about local government review. Is there a minimum size for a Children’s Service to function effectively, and does it need good political oversight?

When searching the DfE website this morning for the latest numbers about schools and pupils to allow me to compare the number of teachers per school for different subjects, I was distracted into looking at the number of ‘open notices’ from the DfE to Councils across England. Currently they total around 30 such notices and there are others that have been closed in recent times. These notices refer to the provision of either special needs (SEND) or children’s social services.

There really must be something wrong with a system where nearly 20%, or one in five, of all upper tier local authorities have such notices that are issued to councils for ‘poor’ or ‘inadequate’ performance. I had expected the majority of such notices to be for SEND services, but in fact half are for Children’s Social Services. This raises the question of whether in some authorities, and especially smaller unitary authorities, there is the funding to cope with both SEND and Children’s Social Services?

Of the local authorities with ‘open’ improvement notices for children’s social services, most are small metropolitan districts of unitary authorities.: Liverpool, Nottingham City and the counties of Herefordshire and Worcestershire are the exceptions. The pattern for SEND notices is different, with six counties, four metropolitan districts, four unitary councils and one London borough with ‘open notices.

What is striking about both lists is the geographical split. The relative absence from the list of well-funded London boroughs – only three appear, and only one in the SEND list, compared with eight metropolitan districts really is worthy of note and discussion. Comparing the distribution with my recent report on pupil teacher ratios does suggest that funding, or the lack of it, may play a part.

If the 16 other authorities with closed notices since 2020 are added to those with ‘open’ notices, then almost a third of all local authorities have been on the ‘naughty step’ with the DfE and Care Quality commission so far in this decade.

If that percentage and the split between types of authorities doesn’t raise questions about why and why some authorities are more likely to be faced with improvement notices than others, then I think we have a serious lack of inquiry.

The relationship between the size of an authority and competence to deliver high quality services is important, both because of the Reform Party’s pledge to cut out waste, and the Labour government’s intention to reform local government. Both need to be seen in light of this list. Is bigger better, or is local government outside London just not well-enough funded

Of course, I must declare a personal interest, since I look over as Cabinet Member for Children’s Service (excluding SEND) after Oxfordshire received a ‘notice’ in the autumn of 2023 about the quality of its SEND provision.

To some extent with SEND, authorities are at the mercy of the NHS, over which they have little power, and that relationship with SEND needs to be investigated thoroughly. Penalizing democratically elected local government for the failing of a nationally run NHS is neither fair not equitable. That the government’s funding of the High Needs Block may add to local government’s problems also needs to be taken into account. Oxfordshire is in the bottom 30% for SEND funding.