Setting

Brenda McInerney Director of Children’s Services Swindon Borough Council Watt Tyler Building Euclid Drive Swindon SN1 2JG

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Monitoring visit to Swindon Borough Council’s children’s services

This letter summarises the findings of the monitoring visit to Swindon Borough Council’s children’s services on 19 to 20 May 2026. This was the sixth monitoring visit since the local authority was judged inadequate in July 2023. His Majesty’s Inspectors for this visit were Nick Bennison and Joy Howick.

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Areas covered by the visit

Inspectors reviewed the progress made in the following areas of concern identified at the last inspection:

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ The quality of child in need and child protection plans for children, including plans for disabled children

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ The quality and impact of children subject to a letter before proceedings and the quality and impact of pre-proceedings interventions, such as family group decision-making meetings

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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 local authority has not made sufficient progress since the ILACS inspection in 2023 to improve the experiences of children who receive help and protection from the family safeguarding service. Too many children experience delays in receiving the support that they need to reduce risk or to receive help. They also have too many changes of social workers, making it difficult for social workers to establish trusting relationships with children. Some social workers are unable to offer proactive and responsive interventions that meet children’s needs, due to high workloads. 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 Disabled children receive a stronger service that is supportive and responsive to their needs. While social workers working with children with disability are experiencing large workloads, these are well managed by their managers, enabling them to have a greater and more positive impact in children’s lives.

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Headline findings

Since the last monitoring visit in November 2025, the local authority has appointed a permanent director of children’s services. The director understands the areas for development across the service and has implemented measures and strategies to accelerate the improvement journey. These have only recently been in place, and it is too early to evaluate their impact.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Children receive help and support that is proportionate and reflective of the level of risk they are experiencing and/or their needs. Children on child in need plans and child protection plans who are receiving a service from the Family Safeguarding Teams (FST) do not receive timely support that reduces risks and helps to improve their lives. Most experience significant drift and delay in the progression of their plans. Disabled children with complex health needs receive a stronger service from the Disabled Children’s Team (DCT). Disabled children have plans that are being progressed in a timely way, which means that most are receiving help that reduces risk and gives them the support they need.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Children supported by plans are experiencing too many changes of social worker. Within the DCT, these changes are managed well. This ensures that there is a continuity of support as social workers change. In the FST, changes of workers happen too often and there is a lack of management grip and oversight of the impact of these changes. This means that children, and their families, experience a lack of continuity in service, leading to some being unwilling or resistant to establishing trusting relationships with their social worker. Multi-agency meetings to review children’s plans are irregular, which leads to plans that drift and important supporting work for children being delayed.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Disabled children are regularly visited by their social worker. Using direct work, workers gain a thorough understanding of the child’s world. This ensures that they can respond quickly when children’s needs and circumstances change. Some children in the FST service who are at risk of harm do not receive the level of oversight from their social worker that they need. There are significant gaps in time between some social work visits to children. This means that social workers are not monitoring the child’s progress, risks or understanding the impact of changing family dynamics on the child. When children are regularly visited by their social worker in FST, most workers undertake work that does help them to understand the child and their family. This means that for these children, the FST service is more responsive to their changing needs and levels of risk. Most children’s plans give clear actions that address risks and create helpful

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Findings and evaluation of progress

packages of support to meet need. Some plans are succinct and helpfully crafted with time bound actions, while others are too long for children and their families to easily follow. Support from the child’s extended family network is well considered in plans. When social workers are actively progressing plans, extended family members are quickly involved in the planning. This helps to mitigate known risks and supports children to remain living within their family network.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Children who are at risk of domestic abuse receive timely help from specialist workers in FST. Workers provide intensive, coordinated support to children and their parents to help reduce further risk. Children are well supported and helped to work through their trauma, and parents are helped to make important and necessary changes to their negative patterns of behaviour.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Children experiencing cumulative harm and neglect wait too long to receive effective interventions from children’s services. Many children experience intervention that is short term and ineffective, leading to them experiencing repeat child protection plans without any significant change.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

When risks escalate or do not reduce for children, some are appropriately stepped into the Public Law Outline (PLO) process in a timely way. For some children, this proactive decision-making takes too long. Many children experience delays in the PLO process. This impacts on how quickly plans that help to reduce risk and achieve better and improved outcomes for children are progressed.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

There is strong, cross-party political and corporate support for children’s services and the improvement journey. This is evident in the active engagement of leaders in the improvement board. The recent establishment of the Children and Education Scrutiny committee has enabled greater cross-party scrutiny of children’s services work. There has also been significant financial investment in the service to support a reduction in social work caseloads.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Senior leaders in children’s services know their service well. They are open and transparent about the areas of strength and weakness and acknowledge that rapid improvement is required. The embedding of the new IT system is providing leaders with a greater and more accurate overview of performance data. A new performance monitoring framework has also been implemented, which provides leaders with an enhanced oversight of performance. While leaders have welcomed these improvements, this performance scaffolding is not having the impact it needs to quickly drive sustained improvement in social work practice.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

The quality assurance framework has been reviewed and revised. The importance of gaining parental views on their experiences of social work intervention now has a greater and more central focus. This is starting to lead to a fuller understanding by leaders of the impact of services for families. Equally there has been a strengthening of the audit cycle, ensuring that actions from audits are being completed. However, there is not enough audit activity being undertaken. This limits senior leaders’ ability to identify trends and themes arising from practice. Audits continue to be too compliance focused and are not consistently giving leaders an understanding of the quality and impact of social work intervention on children and their families.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

There is regular management oversight of practice within the FST and DCT service areas. There is, however, a difference in the quality of this oversight between the two areas. In DCT, supervision is reflective and creates clear actions for workers with timebound actions. This, and regular management oversight, ensures that plans for children are progressed. In FST, managers supervision is not reflective and lacks the ability to challenge and change plans in line with children’s needs. This means that managers are unable to reduce drift or create a change in intervention that positively impacts on the child. Senior leaders know that this is an area of significant weakness for FST and action has been taken to reduce the number of supervisees overseen by each manager in FST. It is too soon to evaluate the impact that this change will have on the help and support being provided for children.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Staff turnover within both FST and DCT remains too high. This is impacting negatively within the FST service. The workforce development plan rightly focuses on the recruitment and retention of social workers. There has been increased support from corporate services to promote Swindon as an employer of choice to social workers and to increase the timeliness of the recruitment process. There has also been an extension of the Academy’s role in supporting social workers beyond their AYSE year. These measures, however, have not positively impacted on vacancy levels or turnover of social workers in FST or DCT.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Social workers in FST and DCT are working with too many children to enable them to be fully effective. Social workers in FST are being allocated to children who have complex and high needs, and some have experienced delay in their plans being progressed. This complexity and high volumes of work mean that most workers are being reactive in their practice and respond to emergencies rather than offering positive impactful interventions that positively change children’s circumstances. In the DCT service, the impact of high caseloads on children has been less significant due to the strong management oversight of the work within the team.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Social workers are committed to their children and wanting to make positive changes in their lives. Positively, they report how they feel cared for by their teams and by managers at all levels in children’s services. There is a wide training offer for social workers in Swindon. The offer does support them in their role and work with vulnerable children. However, due to the workload demands in the service, social workers cannot always prioritise their learning needs or access the offer.

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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

Yours sincerely Nick Bennison His Majesty’s Inspector

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