Children's home run by Horizon Care Limited in Cannock Chase

Good

The children’s home provides effective services that meet the requirements for good.

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The children’s home provision is good because:

 Children are settled, enjoy living here and want to stay until they are grown up.  Staff are nurturing, well organised and provide children with a wide range of positive experiences.  Staff provide good-quality individualised care and ensure that children have active lifestyles.  Children feel safe and trust staff to protect them.  Children make good educational progress because staff engage effectively with children’s schools. This includes staff advocating for the child when necessary.  Children’s views are listened to and the manager helps each child to understand their plans and to maintain relationships with their families.  The manager is a warm and engaging role model for children. She makes time for each child and applies a therapeutic approach that enables children to make meaningful progress.  Young people are well prepared to make their transitions into adult life and experience the right amount of ongoing support from the manager.

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The children’s home provision is good because:

 There are a few shortfalls in practice. Children struggle to get on with their peers and can exhibit bullying and uncontrolled angry outbursts. Staff have not received therapeutic care training and the manager’s review of the care quality has not clearly identified key issues. Some staff do not hold the required qualification for working with children.

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Statutory requirements

This section sets out the actions which must be taken so that the registered person(s) meets the Care Standards Act 2000, Children’s Homes (England) Regulations 2015 and the ‘Guide to the children’s homes regulations including the quality standards’. The registered person(s) must comply within the given timescales.

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Requirement Due date

The registered person must ensure that individuals who work in a care role have the appropriate qualification for their work two years after the date on which the individual started working in a care role in a home. (Regulation 32 (5)(a)) 27/02/2017

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Recommendations

To improve the quality and standards of care further the service should take account of the following recommendations:  Ensure that the registered person decides what each review should focus on, based on the specific circumstances of the home at that particular time and any areas of high risk to the children that the home is designed to care for. They will also consider what information or data recorded in the home will form part of the evidence base for their analysis and conclusions. There is no expectation that the registered person will review the home against every part of the Quality Standards every six months – registered persons should use their professional judgement to decide which factors to focus on. The review should enable the registered person to identify areas of strength and possible weakness in the home’s care, which will be captured in the written report. The report should clearly identify any actions required for the next six months of delivery within the

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Recommendations

home and how those actions will be addressed. The whole review process and the resulting report should be used as a tool for continuous improvement in the home. (‘Guide to the children’s homes regulations including the quality standards’, page 65, paragraph 15.4)

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Recommendations

 Ensure that ’staff take every step to ensure that individual children and young people are not subject to discrimination, marginalisation or bullying from their peers by virtue of their gender, religion, ethnicity, cultural and linguistic background, sexual identity, mental health, disability or for any other reason. (‘Guide to the children’s homes regulations including the quality standards’, page 39, paragraph 3.12)

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Recommendations

 Ensure that staff have the capacity and competence to build constructive, warm relationships with children that actively promote positive behaviour. This provides the foundations for managing any negative behaviour. Staff should have the skills to respond to each child’s individual behaviour. Where necessary, staff should manage conflict, maintain constructive dialogues and react appropriately if challenged by a child in their care. (‘Guide to the children’s homes regulations including the quality standards’, page 39, paragraph 8.14)

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Recommendations

 Ensure that children are supported to develop understanding and empathy towards each other. Positive behaviour and relationships should be reinforced, praised and encouraged; poor behaviour should be challenged and discussed. The development of safe, stable and secure relationships with staff in the home should be central to the ethos of the home and support the development of secure attachments that, where appropriate, persist over time. (‘Guide to the children’s homes regulations including the quality standards’, page 39, paragraph 8.11)

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Recommendations

 Ensure that the registered person enables staff to access appropriate facilities and resources to support their training needs, and understands the key role that they play in the training and development of staff in the home. (‘Guide to the children’s homes regulations including the quality standards’, page 53, paragraph 10.11)

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Recommendations

 Ensure that staff understand their important role in encouraging the child to reflect on and understand their history, according to their age and understanding. Staff should encourage children to keep appropriate memorabilia of the time spent living at the home and help them record significant life events. (‘Guide to the children’s homes regulations including the quality standards’, page 62, paragraph 14.5)

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Information about this children’s home

The home is registered to provide care for two children who have emotional and/or behavioural difficulties. The home forms part of a large social care company.

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Recent inspection history

Inspection date Inspection type Inspection judgement 24 February 2016 Interim Improved effectiveness 21 December 2015 Full Outstanding 10 March 2015 Interim Sustained effectiveness 21 January 2015 Full Outstanding

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Good

Children are settled, enjoy living here and want to stay. Two boys have been here for many months. Most weeks they thank staff ‘for a good week’. One child said, ‘This care home is my favourite place that I have been to. I met my best friend here. I really enjoy it here and I don’t want to leave.’ A young person who lived here for a few years, before moving in March 2016 to independent living, said, ‘It was the best that I could ever ask for – they helped with everything. They keep in touch and I go there when I can.’

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Good

Staff are nurturing, well organised and provide a wide range of positive experiences to children. Children enjoy many varied activities. Their bedrooms are nicely decorated and personalised. Staff plan indoor activities carefully, so that children are not bored and are helped to remain calm and in good daily routines. For example, staff often involve children in crafts and colouring. Children find this calming. Both boys enjoy sports and social activities in their spare time, including football, hockey, youth club, trampolining, cinema and meals out. Staff use their knowledge of the local area to help children to access clubs and venues that enable them to be part of their local community. However, staff have not yet begun to pull together memorabilia of children’s varied activities. This missed opportunity means children are not able to look back or celebrate their positive experiences and the progress they have made.

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Good

Children make good educational progress thanks to good working relationships between staff and schools. Children sustain good school attendance and, for one child, this has seen a huge academic achievement. Staff talk to children about their schoolwork and their behaviour in school. They encourage children to work as hard as they can and they praise them for every success. Staff make sure that they know about and attend school events and parents’ evenings. Children know how much staff want them to do well. This gives children the confidence to see a future living here and then a future as young adults in the locality, just like their peer who left the home in March.

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Good

Children’s views are listened to well. Staff help each child to understand their plans and maintain relationships with their families. The home’s independent visitor said, ‘The team are very proactive in ensuring that children can access records kept about them. When completing in-house reports, the staff team will share information that they have documented to gain the views and feedback from children.’ Wherever possible, the same staff take children to see their relatives each time that they are scheduled to meet. Staff make sure that arrangements are well organised. Staff help children beforehand, during and afterwards. They use their positive relationships with children to help them talk about the feelings that arise from seeing their relatives. This really helps children to understand and cope with their situation. One child’s social worker said, ‘Consistency for [child] is managed very well, if he is worried, he will write to the manager and ask her

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Good

questions.’ Overall, children make good emotional progress because staff provide them with a secure base.

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Good

Staff provide good-quality individualised care that promotes children’s progress. Long-standing staff provide children with a great deal of nurture, which is balanced well with high expectations of age-appropriate behaviour. For example, experienced staff give children their undivided attention and help the children to have a good daily routine. They make sure that children eat and sleep well. They expect children to take care of their personal hygiene and help them to learn to do things for themselves, but they are very alert to children’s moods and particular difficulties.

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Good

Children are slow to make psychological progress and they continue to struggle with peer friendships. Psychological assessments and the provision of therapy are delayed. For example, one child has been here for over a year and staff have only just received an in-house therapeutic action plan for him. Children are not receiving any community-based therapy and staff are not trained in therapeutic care practice. Staff practice is not applied in accordance with the therapeutic action plans that the organisation’s clinicians have provided. This means that staff are not giving children enough of the right help to understand how to make and maintain friendships and engage in socially acceptable ways. In addition, staff turnover has increased since the last inspection. This has meant that children have positive relationships with only a few staff. One child commented that his favourite staff have all left. He said that his current favourite is the one remaining member of

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Good

staff that he has known the longest. These issues make it harder for children to get the support that they need to develop understanding and empathy towards each other.

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Good

Children feel safe here and trust staff to protect them. They like being here and do not go missing or harm themselves. No allegations have been made about staff. Staff manage children’s behaviour generally well and give them plenty of individual time and attention. Staff invite local police community support officers into the home on a regular basis to help show children the friendly face of policing and give them advice and information about safe social behaviour. Similarly, staff work closely with children’s schools to ensure that children’s behavioural difficulties are understood and consistently responded to by all the adults involved with them. Within the home, staff and the manager are safely recruited and use safe and robust systems for checking that the home is a safe environment. When young people are preparing to live independently, they receive very good support to manage their own safety, both indoors and when out in the community. This

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Good

means that young people continue to live safely and behave well when they start to live on their own.

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Good

Staff listen to children and create an atmosphere in which children can air their views and complain if they feel unfairly treated. The manager makes herself available to children and talks individually with them on a daily basis. Staff rarely need to use physical intervention to prevent serious damage or harm. If they do, they use the minimum holds that are needed. A social worker said, ‘They support [child] positively with his challenging behaviour, but he clashes with the other boy.’

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Good

Staff address bullying by keeping children apart and by using child-friendly work materials with them. Staff talk to children about what behaviour they expect and they remind children of this in weekly house meetings. Staff recognise the particular triggers that make it more likely that children will have uncontrolled angry outbursts. For example, they have worked out that children are more stressed and anxious before and after seeing their relatives. They know that children show more unwanted behaviour at these times. However, staff do not plan in enough detail about how they will help children in advance of likely trigger points. Staff’s day-to-day therapeutic behaviour management practice is still underdeveloped. They do not use empathic commentary as they talk to children in accordance with the advice of the organisation’s clinicians. This means that children are taking longer to overcome their emotional and behavioural difficulties. Despite

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Good

this, a social worker said, ‘Coming here has been a good move for [child] because they manage his behaviour better and give him stability.’

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Good

The manager is dedicated, efficient and child centred. She has suitable experience and qualification to manage a children’s home and has worked her way up through this home. Since the last inspection, she has assumed sole responsibility because the other jointly registered manager has moved on to other roles within the organisation. The manager ensures that the home operates in accordance with its statement of purpose and she keeps all records under regular review. The manager provides warmth and consistency for children in the home. She also provides appropriate continuing support to a young person who has moved to independent living since the last inspection. The manager is available to children and has forged close and helpful attachments with them. This means that children confide in her and trust her, even when they have had a bad incident with their behaviour. The manager talks insightfully and helpfully to children on such

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Good

occasions and helps them to make amends, gain confidence and learn better ways to cope with their emotional problems. The manager works well with social workers, personal independence advisors, school staff, police and health professionals. She is a clear, inclusive communicator who makes a good contribution to each child’s care plan. This helps children to feel secure. For example, when children are unsure about changes to plans about having therapy or seeing their relatives, the manager and the social worker work openly to make sure that children understand. One child’s social worker said, ‘Me and the manager talk before [child] gets home if I am doing a visit. The manager then sits in and hears what me and [child] are discussing which helps. Sometimes, [child] writes the manager notes and asks her questions. Together we give him clear answers.’

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Good

The manager is a good role model to her staff team and supports them well. She supervises and appraises staff with good insight and bears in mind the views of children. She oversees and monitors records effectively and adds good-quality insights and advice to staff about how to carry out their practice. She makes good use of models of therapeutic working in an effort to upskill staff’s understanding about the complex difficulties behind children’s presenting behaviour. However, staff have not had full access to all the support and training that is necessary to upskill them sufficiently to provide a therapeutic care practice approach.

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Good

Since the last inspection, a number of long-standing staff have moved on. One member of staff has been working for many years in the residential care of children, but has not completed the required qualification. Children have sometimes been involved in choosing new staff at second interview. Children also tell the manager what they think about individual staff members’ qualities to inform staff appraisals. Nevertheless, the quality of children’s relationships with staff has been compromised, because many staff have only worked with them for a short period.

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Good

The manager is well organised and conducts reviews of the care quality in a timely way, using the format given by the organisation. However, her reviews do not focus on the most important issues affecting the home in recent months. Reviews contain too little analysis of care practice.

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What the inspection judgements mean

The experiences and progress of children and young people are at the centre of the inspection. Inspectors will use their professional judgement to determine the weight and significance of their findings in this respect. The judgements included in the report are made against the ‘Inspection of children’s homes: framework for inspection’.

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What the inspection judgements mean

An outstanding children’s home provides highly effective services that contribute to significantly improved outcomes for children and young people who need help and protection and care. Their progress exceeds expectations and is sustained over time. A good children’s home provides effective services that help, protect and care for children and young people and have their welfare safeguarded and promoted. In a children’s home that requires improvement , there are no widespread or serious failures that create or leave children being harmed or at risk of harm. The welfare of children looked after is safeguarded and promoted. Minimum requirements are in place. However, the children’s home is not yet delivering good protection, help and care for children and young people. A children’s home that is inadequate is providing services where there are widespread or serious failures that create or leave children and young people being

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What the inspection judgements mean

harmed or at risk of harm or result in children looked after not having their welfare safeguarded and promoted.

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Information about this inspection

Inspectors have looked closely at the experiences and progress of children and young people living in the children’s home. Inspectors considered the quality of work and the difference that adults make to the lives of children and young people. They read case files, watched how professional staff work with children, young people and each other and discussed the effectiveness of help and care given to children and young people. Wherever possible, they talked to children, young people and their families. In addition, the inspectors have tried to understand what the children’s home knows about how well it is performing, how well it is doing and what difference it is making for the children and young people who it is trying to help, protect and look after. This inspection was carried out under the Care Standards Act 2000 to assess the effectiveness of the service and to consider how well it complies with the Children’s

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Information about this inspection

Homes (England) Regulations 2015 and the ‘Guide to the children’s homes regulations including the quality standards’. procedures set out in the guidance ‘Raising concerns and making complaints about Ofsted’, which is available from Ofsted’s website: www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ofsted . If you would like Ofsted to send you a copy of the guidance, please telephone 0300 123 4234, or email enquiries@ofsted.gov.uk .

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Information about this inspection

regulates and inspects to achieve excellence in the care of children and young people, and in education and skills for learners of all ages. It regulates and inspects childcare and children’s social care, and inspects the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass), schools, colleges, initial teacher training, work-based learning and skills training, adult and community learning, and education and training in prisons and other secure establishments. It inspects services for children looked after and child protection. If you would like a copy of this document in a different format, such as large print or Braille, please telephone 0300 123 4234, or email enquiries@ofsted.gov.uk . You may reuse this information (not including logos) free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government Licence. To view this licence, visit www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence , write to the Information

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Information about this inspection

Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email psi@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk .

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Information about this inspection

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Information about this inspection

Store Street Manchester M1 2WD T: 0300 123 1231 Textphone: 0161 618 8524 E: enquiries@ofsted.gov.uk W: www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ofsted

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