Setting

Alex Dewsnapp London Borough of Harrow Forward Drive Harrow HA3 8LF

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Monitoring visit to Harrow children’s services

This letter summarises the findings of the monitoring visit to Harrow children’s services on 10 and 11 February 2026. This was the second monitoring visit since the local authority was judged inadequate in January 2025. His Majesty’s Inspectors for this visit were Jenny-ellen Scotland, Monique Lindsay and Penny Ademuyiwa

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Areas covered by the visit

This monitoring visit focused on the experience and progress of children in care. Inspectors focused on:

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ The quality of social work intervention

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ The quality of assessment, planning and reviewing

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ The quality of IRO oversight and impact

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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

Since the inspection in January 2025, there have been significant changes throughout the senior leadership team, including several heads of service for corporate parenting. This has created instability, leaving practitioners feeling less confident and unheard. Political and corporate leaders remain committed to improving services for children and have invested substantially in strengthening senior leadership capacity. While decisive and proactive steps are being taken to establish a stable leadership team, these changes are at an early stage and have not yet had time to embed or improve practice. Consequently, the experiences and progress of children in care have not been sustained since the last inspection.

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Headline findings

The establishment of the children in care service as a standalone team has been a positive step that has helped to reduce caseloads and increase social workers’ 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 capacity to spend time with children, addressing a key weakness identified at the previous inspection. Emerging team stability is supporting more consistent relationships for children. Social workers do not yet consistently receive the support needed to take a holistic approach that considers the full context of each child’s life, including family, education, health, psychological needs, and opportunities for relational permanence.

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Headline findings

The limited capacity in the independent reviewing officer (IRO) service is resulting in children’s plans lacking detailed oversight and constructive challenge.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

When decisions are made to bring children into care, these are the right decisions for children and match their levels of need and risk. Although these are the right decisions for children, there is inconsistency in the timeliness with which they are made, with some children either waiting too long before coming into care or experiencing repeated cycles of entering care and then returning home before a final decision is made. This results in delay, instability and uncertainty for some children.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

For some children, gaps in joint working and care planning between the safeguarding and children in care teams mean that they transfer to the children in care service with plans that are not sufficiently considered and therefore require amendment to better reflect their specific needs as children in care. Such changes to plans, particularly those relating to family time, can disrupt children’s routines and sense of predictability and undermine the development of trusting relationships between social workers, children and their families.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Children benefit from stable and enduring relationships with their social workers and are seen regularly, and in line with their needs. Social workers speak warmly about the children they work with and show genuine warmth and care. Inconsistency in the quality and purposefulness of visits and direct work limits social workers’ understanding of children’s lived experiences and reduces the focus on their aspirations and future planning.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

When children’s records are written to them, they provide powerful, thoughtful observations that capture their experiences and circumstances in a meaningful way. These examples offer rich narrative detail that any child would value reading later in life. However, most records are written about children rather than to them, and they tend to rely on generalised statements, often lacking sufficient evidence. This reduces their value for children and weakens professional analysis.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Some children benefit from creative direct work to help them to understand their journey into care. This was an area of strength at the last inspection, but life-story work is not now consistently completed for all children who could benefit from it. For children placed for adoption, life-story materials are not always available at the point of placement, reducing adoptive parents’ ability to support children’s sense of identity and understanding from the outset. Children’s care planning does not receive consistent IRO oversight. Capacity pressures mean reviews are increasingly process driven, focusing more on the completion of agreed actions and not sufficiently on either quality or the impact of those actions on children. Many reviews are held virtually, and children do not routinely meet their IRO in advance. This limits continuity and prevents children from forming meaningful relationships with their IRO. As a result, the IRO’s ability to

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Findings and evaluation of progress

understand and represent children’s wishes and feelings is significantly reduced, effective advocacy is weakened, and the independence and challenge required for robust oversight of care plans are undermined.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

For children living in residential care, some of whom are very young, leadership oversight and proactive action to support timely moves to family settings are limited. While referrals for specialist assessments are made in a timely manner, the completion of these assessments is significantly delayed for some children. Consequently, for these children, care planning is too often insufficiently informed, increasing the risk that children’s current and future needs are not fully understood or met, and reducing their opportunities to achieve stability, permanency and the goal of living in a family home.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Unaccompanied children seeking asylum routinely live in placements that meet their needs and provide good care. They are supported to maintain contact with their birth families, when this is possible, to make or maintain contact with people and places that support their cultural and religious identity, and to have access to specialist legal advice to support their immigration applications. Planning for different outcomes, such as being granted asylum, returning to their home country, and how they can be supported to access education or employment in any scenario, is not always comprehensive or aspirational for these children. This limits children’s preparedness for all eventualities and reduces opportunities to support their long-term development, stability and wellbeing.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

A small number of children live in unregistered accommodation. For these children, oversight and monitoring arrangements are insufficient to assure their safety and welfare.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

When children go missing from care, they typically benefit from coordinated responses that safeguard them well. Practitioners work closely with staff from partner agencies to understand the circumstances of missing-from-care episodes and to develop safety plans to reduce risk. Oversight by a dedicated practitioner ensures that return home interviews are consistently offered and focused on vulnerability, risk and identifying learning that may help to reduce the likelihood of repeat missing- from-care episodes.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Children’s health needs are largely understood well through timely initial and review health assessments. Some children experience significant delays in accessing routine, specialist, mental health and neurodiversity assessments. This results in unmet health needs and, in some cases, increased risk to placement stability. While timely referrals are made by the local authority, delays in the provision of health services are not consistently escalated.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Permanence planning meetings are regularly held for children whose permanence has not yet been achieved. For many children, plans lack clarity, urgency and detailed actions to secure timely permanence. Some children have a recorded permanence plan of ‘other’, which reflects a data issue that leaders have not resolved. Oversight arrangements for permanence are fragmented, weakening scrutiny and delaying children’s transition into homes that can provide lasting stability throughout their childhood and into adulthood.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Social workers report that they receive strong support from their team managers and the service manager, who are visible, accessible and provide stability and consistency. Supervision is regular, but records show variability in the quality and depth. It is mostly timely and focused on task management, process and compliance rather than reflective analysis. This limits critical thinking and reduces its effectiveness in strengthening practice or overseeing children’s experiences.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Children in care with complex needs are discussed at a panel chaired by the head of corporate parenting. Children are identified for discussion by practitioners and team managers rather than through intelligence-led data, which risks overlooking vulnerable children not on managers’ radar. Actions from these meetings are not consistently recorded on children’s records, reducing accountability and increasing the risk that decisions and agreed actions are not followed through. There is also no systematic follow-up or tracking of decisions made.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Leaders are committed to modernising the service by reducing processes that may stigmatise children in care, including developing a more child-friendly and child-led review process. Although this work is at an early stage and its impact is therefore limited at present. Leaders have also committed to strengthening children’s participation in service development and design, ensuring that their voices inform future practice and drive improvement.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

For children on special guardianship orders, there is no mechanism for the annual review of financial support. As a result, the local authority cannot be confident that payments remain appropriate or that children receive the support they need and are entitled to.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Placement commissioning benefits from strong regional collaboration and robust quality assurance. However, without an effective sufficiency strategy, leaders lack a clear analysis of current and future placement needs. This limits the impact of commissioning and reduces the availability of the right homes at the right time, increasing the likelihood of children being placed at a distance or, occasionally, in unregistered provision. After the strategic director of children’s services (DCS) left in October 2025, the managing director assumed the DCS responsibilities, supported by an experienced DCS from another local authority while the recruitment process remains active and ongoing. Since January 2026, a director of children’s social care, reporting to the DCS, has been in post on secondment. A permanent assistant director for quality assurance and an interim head of service for corporate parenting also started in

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Findings and evaluation of progress

January 2026, with a permanent head of corporate parenting due to begin in March 2026. Throughout this sustained period of instability, Harrow’s committed social workers have continued to demonstrate genuine care for the children they support, but they need the right environment and leadership stability to flourish. These imminent appointments represent a decisive step towards a strengthened senior leadership team that is essential to securing sustained improvement for children.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

I am copying this letter to the Department for Education.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Jenny-ellen Scotland His Majesty’s Inspector

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