Setting

Jill Colbert OBE Strategic Director of Children’s Services Tameside One Market Street Ashton-under-Lyne OL6 6BH

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Monitoring visit to Tameside children’s services

This letter summarises the findings of the monitoring visit to Tameside children’s services on 11 and 12 December 2025. This was the third monitoring visit since the local authority was judged inadequate in December 2023. His Majesty’s Inspectors for this visit were Lisa Summers, Lisa Walsh and Jane Ayres.

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Areas covered by the visit

Inspectors reviewed the progress made in relation to children in care, in particular:

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ the quality of assessments, plans and planning

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ visits to children and direct work, including life-story work

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ the quality of matching, placement and decision-making

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ the multi-agency recognition and response to risk

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ the experiences of children living in supported accommodation

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ the experiences of children living in unregistered provision.

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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

The pace of improvement for children in care has been hindered by a lack of permanent and stable leadership, the breadth and depth of inadequacies across children’s services, previously high staff turnover, and a reliance on agency social Ofsted

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Headline findings

Store Street Manchester M1 2WD T 0300 123 1231 Textphone 0161 618 8524 enquiries@ofsted.gov.uk www.gov.uk/ofsted workers. Tameside is only now able to mobilise improvement planning. Creating stability and permanence at a senior level has only been very recently secured, and as a result, many of the areas for improvement identified in the inspection in December 2023 are still a feature of current practice. There are inconsistencies in the quality and impact of social work practice, including the quality of assessments, plans and planning. Sufficiency challenges are still evident, which means that some children are not living in homes according to their assessed needs.

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Headline findings

The director of children’s services (DCS) has an intricate understanding of frontline practice and has developed a secure platform to engage with frontline staff. This platform has been well used to inform revisions to the improvement plan and to build the foundations and architecture to support service improvement. As a result, social worker practice is becoming more child centred, and there is effective role modelling of this by senior leaders. The turnover of staff and dependency on agency social workers has reduced. There is now more robust oversight of children living in unregistered provision, and the systems to support timelier permanence are now in place. Many of these changes are very new, so it is too soon to see the impact on children’s lives.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Strategically, achieving permanency for children is now a clear priority. A newly established permanence tracker and weekly panels are now enabling regular senior leadership oversight and direction. These tools are providing leaders with a better understanding and oversight of the plans for permanence, as well as affording social workers the opportunity to discuss the best options for children and how to progress these. This is an improved position since the last inspection, but it is too soon to see an impact for children overall.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

There are delays in progressing permanence for some children. These include missed opportunities to complete parenting and viability assessments through pre- proceedings, delays in recognising children as living in care when they reside with their extended families, and delays in considering and progressing adoption work through concurrent planning.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Work is being progressed to strengthen care planning for children, including the recent introduction of monthly core group meetings and learning circles, which have been implemented to help social workers better understand permanence for children. Leaders know there is more to do to embed the concept of permanence and concurrent planning to avoid potential delays.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

A lack of sufficient and suitable placements means that some children are not living in homes that meet their assessed needs. The local authority recognises that too many children live out of the area away from their families and loved ones. A recently expanded commissioning team is supporting developments to increase the breadth and range of placement options. Some children remain in unregistered settings for extended periods due to placement sufficiency challenges. Practice standards are now established, which are ensuring that packages of support are implemented to manage risks more effectively for these children. There are now robust mechanisms to monitor and regularly review these children’s circumstances, with monthly oversight of the DCS or assistant director, alongside regular permanence tracking and care planning meetings. Placement searches continue in line with each child’s identified needs to secure appropriate,

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Findings and evaluation of progress

registered provision. The monitoring of these children has improved since the last inspection.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Decisions for children to move into supported accommodation are not consistently informed by up-to-date assessments, making it difficult to be assured that these homes meet children’s needs. These children are seen regularly by their social workers, and the visiting frequency is responsive to their changing needs.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

There is a shift in recent practice and social workers are now considering placing children with kinship carers when they enter care. This means that many children live with people who are part of their family network. Appropriate assessments are undertaken, and special guardianship orders are considered to secure children’s permanence. Leaders have identified that this sharp increase in demand for kinship assessments has led to delays in progressing some assessments. Plans are in place to provide additional social work capacity to address this issue.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

The quality of assessments is inconsistent. Stronger assessments are detailed, informed by a breadth of partner information, and the analysis of children’s history is demonstrating a more robust understanding of children’s needs. Weaker assessments do not analyse children’s histories sufficiently to support an understanding of their experiences and how these experiences are impacting on their lives. For some children, current risks are not robustly explored and understood to inform resultant plans, in particular when child exploitation is a feature. When children’s circumstances change, assessments are not always updated to inform care planning.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Most care plans are too broad. They do not define what is specifically needed to meet children’s needs and to help them to reach their potential. Timescales to complete actions are sometimes unclear, and some plans do not reflect the richness of work being completed. Electronic templates have recently been amended so that there is now a clearer focus on children’s plans for permanence.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Plans are regularly reviewed through well-attended multi-agency looked-after children reviews. Nonetheless, the quality of these meetings is inconsistent. Changes in independent reviewing officers (IROs) mean that some meeting minutes are delayed or absent on children’s electronic records. Some children meet with their IRO before meetings. This is helping children to understand their plans and supporting them to influence critical decisions about their lives. Most minutes are written to the child. In stronger practices, IROs take the opportunity to congratulate children on their achievements.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Social workers advocate well on behalf of their children, using the dedicated child and adolescent mental health service to fast-track appointments to assess and support children’s mental health and emotional needs.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Family time is mostly thoroughly considered, and children are supported to see those people who are important to them. Thoughtful decisions are made about what is in the child’s best interests, informed by children’s wishes. For a small number of children, contact plans lack sufficient detail so these are left for children and carers to organise. As a result, this is creating uncertainty and sometimes distress for children and their families.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Where children are at risk of harm, the response for some is not sufficiently robust, child centred or timely. The timeliness and quality of strategy discussions are inconsistent. Some discussions fail to consider children’s history. Poor recording means that it is sometimes unclear if all relevant partners attend meetings, and, as a result, decisions are made with incomplete information. Some strategy discussions lack curiosity and risk indicators are not fully explored. There is insufficient focus on both the immediate and ongoing safety for some children, potentially leaving them at risk of ongoing harm.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Social workers speak about their children with care and compassion and know them well. Most children are seen regularly, with visiting frequencies mostly responding to changes in children’s circumstances. Social workers make good use of observations to understand children’s lives and children’s views are well captured and acted upon, where appropriate. A small number of children are not seen alone as part of these statutory visits. As a result of competing social work demands, children are sometimes seen by duty workers. This could impact on children’s ability to share their worries and experiences. Leaders are working to make visits more purposeful so direct work with children is completed.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Supervision with social workers is now taking place more regularly and is providing opportunities for greater reflection and guidance. Better examples of supervision are written to the child. They consider children’s views, wishes and feelings, and they reflect on significant events since the last supervision session. This is helping social workers to think about their practice and to agree next steps. Plans are in place to strengthen further the quality of supervision through training in January 2026, as supervision is not consistently improving children’s experiences.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

A refreshed and appropriately targeted improvement plan is providing a more methodical and systematic approach to improvement. Leaders have a greater and more accurate understanding of performance through a revised data report. This is providing meaningful data and clear targets which are being used to test the impact of the improvements. Leaders continue to strengthen the accessibility of performance information, and it is planned very soon for managers to have live data to help manage workflows and workloads.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Audit tools have been reviewed and strengthened to include appropriate areas of social work practice, including evaluating the response to risk, through the newly introduced practice and impact reviews. Reviews are mostly thorough and reflective, identifying strengths, deficits and corrective actions. Social workers told inspectors that they felt reviews are more collaborative to support their learning and the introduction of a ‘closing the loop’ meeting is ensuring that more tasks are completed.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Feedback from children and their families is not routinely sought and this limits an understanding of their experiences and how services can improve. When serious shortfalls are identified about the management of risk for children, these do not always translate into timely and robust actions to mitigate the concerns.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Leaders continue to prioritise recruiting a permanent workforce. Current human resources processes are overly complex and are not fully aligned with the specific recruitment needs of children’s social care, resulting in insufficient support for this critical area.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Social workers reflected on how the increased stability in management was making them feel safer, less anxious and more settled. The approach of senior leaders is more collaborative and engaging. Leaders are more visible and readily accessible to support more consistent decision-making, and as a result morale is much improved.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

I am copying this letter to the Department for Education.

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