Setting

Justine Davies Interim Director of Children’s Services Council of the Isles of Scilly Carn Gwaval St Mary’s Isles of Scilly TR21 0NA

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Monitoring visit to Isles of Scilly children’s services

This letter summarises the findings of the monitoring visit to the Isles of Scilly children’s services on 14 and 15 May 2024. This was the second monitoring visit since the local authority was judged inadequate in July 2023. His Majesty’s Inspectors for this visit were Sarah Canto and Tracey Ledder.

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Areas covered by the visit

Inspectors reviewed the progress made in improving the quality and impact of services for children in need, and children in need of protection. Inspectors had a particular focus on the following areas for improvement identified at the last inspection:

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ The effectiveness with which information shared with the local authority about children in need, or children in need of protection, is recorded, assessed and responded to.

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ The quality of social work practice to assess, support and protect children.

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ The quality of strategy discussions and subsequent child protection enquiries.

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ The effectiveness of multi-agency working, including child protection strategy discussions, in identifying risk and providing support and protection to children.

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ Management and leadership oversight of the service at both a practice and a strategic level.

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ The accuracy of children’s records, including how well they capture children’s wishes and feelings and record their histories in up-to-date chronologies, to allow full consideration of the child’s journey. Store Street Manchester M1 2WD T 0300 123 1231 Textphone 0161 618 8524 enquiries@ofsted.gov.uk www.gov.uk/ofsted ◼ How consistently and effectively the services that children receive meet statutory requirements.

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Areas covered by the visit

This visit was carried out in line with the inspection of local authority children’s services (ILACS) framework.

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Headline findings

Children who receive social work support are not receiving a consistently good enough response to meet their needs. Since the previous monitoring visit in February 2024, insufficient progress has been made and weaknesses in practice remain evident. The pace of change is too slow, with the impact being that children are not receiving the right help at the right time often enough. Risks for some children are not identified, which results in them remaining in situations where the severity of risk and need is not clearly understood. Management practice decisions are inconsistent and not always in children’s best interests. Alongside this, weaknesses in some aspects of social work practice culminate in children not always receiving the right help and protection. Pockets of stronger work are evident in relationship-building with families and more frequent visiting to children, but there has been some deterioration in the standards of social work practice and management. This

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Headline findings

specifically relates to understanding levels of risk, the appropriate application of thresholds for intervention, and the quality of multi-agency working.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Against the backdrop of inconsistent and often weak practice, and limited progress, the local authority has taken some important steps at a more strategic level that are necessary preconditions for progress. While important, at this point, these changes have not translated into significant change in the quality of services experienced by children and their families. Leaders have been working intently with improvement partners to address the shortfalls identified at the judgement inspection last year. They are making use of the Department for Education, Local Government Association and sector-led improvement partners to create an infrastructure that has the potential capacity to support stronger strategic challenge and objective oversight. As a result, the structures and processes in place to support the oversight of the quality and impact of practice by leaders are now very different to what they were in July

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Findings and evaluation of progress

2023. This creates a stronger foundation to build upon, with the potential to make a difference to children’s lives. At this point, the impact of these arrangements is not sufficiently improving practice.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Children’s services have the solid backing of the Council of the Isles of Scilly, including a very engaged and child-focused lead member. The chief executive officer, appointed earlier this year, is fully appraised of the improvement journey. There is strong commitment from the council, including financial investment, to improve children’s services. The children’s services improvement plan is comprehensive, and crucially considers the complex planning required, particularly due to the unique characteristics of the Isles of Scilly. Plans includes a review of service level agreements, active recruitment following decisions about leadership realignment and increased staffing. However, this backing and strengthened improvement planning has not translated into making enough positive difference for children. For example, while very recent, it is positive that social work capacity has been increased, with

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Findings and evaluation of progress

leaders securing accommodation to combat the recruitment challenges faced, due to the geography of the local authority.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

The process of learning from audits is still fragmented and the numbers completed remain too low. This means that, for children, services are not always reviewed or updated to meet their developing needs. Leaders’ understanding of the extent of practice weaknesses is consequently only partial, although they have rightly identified the need to establish and make consistent use of a functional quality and performance management framework. The framework is currently not developed to enable managers to have a clear understanding of the quality of practice, and to then translate individual and collective learning into tangible impact for children.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Working relationships with partner agencies are not working well enough, leading to inconsistency in how effectively families are supported. Leaders and managers have made concerted efforts to improve multi-agency working as they recognise the importance of this. Positive examples include the implementation and positive impact of the new virtual school headteacher role in relation to the virtual school’s extended duties for children in need, and the regular multidisciplinary meetings instigated by senior managers to encourage closer working relationships. However, there is more work to do, both in terms of policy and operational work. The joint protocol to reflect statutory guidance for children aged 16 and 17 years old, who may be at risk of homelessness, has not been updated. More widely, confusion still exists for staff in partner agencies regarding roles and responsibilities, in part due to the early help

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Findings and evaluation of progress

offer not yet being updated and clearly understood. This is a critical part of the service for children and families in the Isles of Scilly when considering pathways for children in need, particularly given recent changes in statutory guidance. More recently, multi-agency training for lead professionals has started to be rolled out. While impact is limited at this early stage, this training is aimed at supporting professionals to coordinate and provide effective early help support for families.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Thresholds for intervention are often not appropriately or consistently applied when there are safeguarding concerns for children. In some situations, when there have been grounds to consider using child protection processes to investigate whether children have suffered, or are at risk of, significant harm, this has not been done. Conversely, other children have been the subject of strategy meetings when their level of risk does not warrant this.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Few children go missing but even despite this, visits made to children after they have gone missing do not clearly address what is expected from a return home interview. Links are not made to potential concerns regarding extra-familial harm and exploitation, despite policies and procedures being in place. The quality of assessments is variable; while some capture children’s needs sufficiently, most still fall short of this standard. Better assessments have started to capture more of the child’s voice, and children’s wishes and feelings are better understood to inform analysis. Partner agencies’ views are mostly sought to contribute to an evaluation of children’s experiences. However, overall, assessments have not been completed in a timely way, or updated in line with children’s needs, to enable prompt care planning for children. Managers have identified this problem and have started to address it.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Children’s plans, and the records of meetings held to review those plans, do not always adequately reflect information from assessments of need and risk. The role of social work intervention is not always clear in understanding how children are supported to have their needs met. Actions in plans do not generally have timescales attached to them and this limits how effectively progress can be monitored and delay avoided.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

There are some positive examples of social workers building positive working relationships with children and families. In these cases, children and parents have been given enough time and support to establish effective relationships with their social worker. There has been effective focus on ensuring that regular visits happen. Direct work is undertaken to help the social worker to understand the child’s circumstances and experiences but, at times, the important issues and risks are not always addressed. Most records of visits are written to children sensitively. Some records show language on children’s records which is not child-centred.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Children who may be young carers are not being identified as such. Statutory duties of young carer needs assessments are not specifically being undertaken, nor is a whole family approach being routinely used to ensure that children are receiving the right support for them and their family member. Despite this, some children benefit from attending a sibling and young carer group.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Supervision is mostly regular and contains some discussion and reflection. Drift and delay are identified in children’s planning, as is the need for records to be updated. The absence of a sharp enough focus on needs, risks and outcomes means that supervision is not currently having enough impact on progress for children. Supervision records show limited actions and timescales to provide clear guidance for staff, to track progress for children and to improve practice standards.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Staff work hard and care about the children and families they support. In the absence of sufficiently clear and consistent guidance and oversight, this is not consistently translating into effective services for children. Leaders have started to implement training on a model which supports the organisation’s ethos and values. This training is being rolled out for local authority teams and partner agencies to support a more unified approach to services for children. I am copying this letter to the Department for Education.

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