"We are fully committed to making the necessary improvements:" Ofsted say Cambridgeshire council's children's services requires improvement

Children’s services in Cambridgeshire require improvement across the board, Ofsted have said.

Cambridgeshire County Council has been given the ‘Requires Improvement’ grading in all areas of Children’s Services in the latest Ofsted report, which has been published today (Thursday.)

However, inspectors have said there are green shoots of improvement being shown.

"Evidence of concrete and significant improvement”

The report said: “The last full inspection of children’s services in Cambridgeshire, in January 2019, judged all services as requires improvement to be good. Since that inspection, there has been no overall improvement in services for vulnerable children.

"This inspection, however, did find evidence of concrete and significant improvement in recent months.

"This improvement was initiated by a new chief executive and assisted by the appropriate decision to decouple shared leadership and service arrangements from Peterborough.”

"We know there is still a lot to do”

Councillor Bryony Goodliffe, Chair of Cambridgeshire County Council’s Children and Young People’s Committee said: “Our focus has been on streamlining our processes and providing the right support and guidance for staff to enable them to support children and their families to make and sustain positive changes.

“However, we know there is still a lot to do. Over the coming months we will continue to work closely with our staff, partners and the improvement board to ensure that children in Cambridgeshire achieve their best possible outcomes.

“The report states that the director of children’s services and leadership team focused solely on Cambridgeshire and have added momentum to the positive change which is needed across children’s services.

“We are on a journey of improvement and there has been a relentless focus on reducing staff turnover and creating a more stable workforce so that we can offer better outcomes for children and young people.”

“Not all children who need help and protection receive a good service"

The report gave the authority a number of areas to work on, including the stability and capacity of the workforce, to support manageable workloads and consistency for children, the quality, consistency and timeliness of assessments, and the consistency of support for 16- and 17-year-old children presenting as homeless.

The inspectors said: “Not all children who need help and protection receive a good service. Some children’s experiences are impacted by the inconsistent practice of out-of-hours services and the quality of assessments and plans. A small number of children are left in neglectful situations for too long and are not escalated quickly enough into pre-proceedings.”

However, the report added: “The workforce challenges have been significant, but there is now a relentless focus on reducing staff turnover and creating a more stable workforce. Staff morale and stability are much improved as a result of leaders making a significant culture shift in supporting staff to improve practice.”

“We have separated from Peterborough to drive improvements for Cambridgeshire"

Councillor Michael Atkins, Vice Chair of the Children and Young People’s Committee added: "We have separated from Peterborough to drive improvements for Cambridgeshire and we have already strengthened our ‘front door’ with the simplification of processes. Improvements have made our response to child exploitation more robust, child in need planning is now timelier and the quality of supervision of social work has improved.”

To read the report, download this PDF: files.ofsted.gov.uk/v1/file/50247204