Setting

Julian Wooster Interim Director of Children and Young People’s Futures County Hall Topsham Road Exeter Devon EX2 4OD

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Monitoring visit to Devon children’s services

This letter summarises the findings of the monitoring visit to Devon children’s services on 5 and 6 August 2026. This was the third monitoring visit since the local authority was judged inadequate for a second time in May 2025. His Majesty’s Inspectors for this visit were Steve Bailey, Christine Kennet and Tracey Ledder.

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Areas covered by the visit

Inspectors reviewed the progress made in the following areas since the last inspection:

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ Front door decision-making, including the timeliness and quality of responses to contacts and referrals.

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ Pathways between the front door, locality-based assessment and intervention teams, and the family intervention service, including referral and transition arrangements.

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ Initial responses to children at risk of significant harm, including strategy discussions and child protection enquiries.

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Areas covered by the visit

◼ The emergency duty service, including out-of-hours decision-making and handover to day-time services.

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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

Across the family intervention teams, the front door, the emergency duty service and the assessment and intervention teams, children and families largely receive a timely, well-coordinated and increasingly integrated multi-agency response from practitioners and managers who are well-equipped to undertake their roles. Leaders 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 have taken deliberate and purposeful action across these services to bring greater alignment, increase capacity, support and train staff and better shape the internal and external conditions for practice improvement across front door services.

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Headline findings

Leaders have an accurate understanding of the strengths and remaining inconsistencies across front door services. The findings of this visit closely align with leaders’ own self-evaluation of practice and the areas they have identified for further improvement. Their plans continue to be appropriately focused, with leaders having already acted before this visit to further refine services, performance measures and governance arrangements to support greater consistency and improve the help that children and families receive.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Experienced and diligent practitioners in the front door work closely with co-located practitioners from education, health, police and the independent domestic violence adviser service, contributing to timely, proportionate and well-informed decision- making, helping the large majority of children and families in Devon to receive the right help at the right time.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Managers triage all new requests for support that come into the front door without delay, providing effective initial prioritisation and bespoke case direction for social workers. Social workers then gather additional information promptly, including sensitively discussing concerns with families and exploring strengths and opportunities for support. Children’s histories and cumulative experiences are usually considered well and partner agency information is used effectively to help inform timely and proportionate decisions.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

For some children where referral information is less clear or presenting worries are more ambiguous, the additional information gathered by social workers is sometimes insufficiently detailed or clearly defined. Some social work analysis does not distil the precise nature of concerns, resulting in avoidable delay for a minority of children before clear and timely decisions can be made about the help that children and families need.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Managers in the front door are reflective and thoughtful in reviewing children’s previous histories and past interventions when decision-making, leading to generally consistent decisions about the type and level of help children and families need.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Children’s casework transitions, from the front door to assessment and intervention teams, are well managed, and children continue to receive timely, purposeful oversight of their circumstances. Receiving managers review records promptly and in detail, and allocate them quickly to social workers for assessment. Management oversight clearly identifies risk and needs and sets out clear directions and expected timescales, resulting in most children and families receiving timely visits, appropriate to their needs, to begin assessment.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

When children are referred to children’s services because they may be at risk of significant harm, social workers in the front door and assessment and intervention teams respond promptly, through well-understood and clearly embedded pathways, ensuring concerns are acted on without delay.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Managers and practitioners in the front door swiftly identify and respond to high-risk referrals, resulting in prompt decision-making and alerting of assessment and intervention teams. Strategy discussions are convened in an appropriate timescale and decisions to commence child protection enquiries are proportionate and timely. Attendance by key health professionals is inconsistent, although inspectors saw valuable contributions from health partners, including the sexual abuse referral centre and consultant paediatricians. Police and education partners attend well and their contributions strengthen assessment, planning and decision-making. Leaders are working constructively with partners to improve health attendance.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Social workers undertaking child protection enquiries visit children quickly and see them alone when appropriate. During enquiries, social workers increase the frequency of their visits and use unannounced visits when needed to develop a better understanding of children’s day-to-day experiences and levels of risk. Workers strive to work collaboratively with parents wherever possible. They help them understand the concerns about their children, offer support to help address identified risks and need and encourage the changes needed to improve children’s safety.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Concerns relating to domestic abuse, parental mental-ill health and substance misuse are explored sensitively through timely and thorough enquiries. In most instances, workers thoroughly examine children’s cumulative experiences beyond the presenting referral concern, resulting in clear social work analysis and management decision-making about the next steps to be taken to improve children’s safety.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

When children and families need targeted early help, referrals into the family intervention team are managed well. The service responds promptly and families are provided with a meaningful offer of support at the earliest opportunity.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Processes for triaging new early help referrals from the front door are well embedded, and roles and remits are clear and well understood. Each step at triage and allocation, including for children and families who are referred after a statutory assessment from an assessment and intervention team, is timely and purposeful. When children are referred to the service following a statutory assessment by a social worker, family intervention team practitioners and social workers work alongside each other to provide sensitively managed handovers so that families do not need to repeat information before receiving the help they require. As a result, families experience a warm and supportive introduction to the service. Family intervention team practitioners hold and manage an appropriate level of risk and need. They build trusting relationships with children and families through strong relational practice, including having honest conversations where concerns arise. They

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Findings and evaluation of progress

recognise when children’s circumstances have changed or risks have escalated and act promptly to ensure children receive the right level of help at the right time.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

When children and families need a social work service outside of normal office hours, the emergency duty service provides a timely, responsive and child-focused service. The team delivers an effective response to urgent concerns for children, as well as supporting families through proactive and planned home visits outside of office hours. Referral concerns, management oversight, social work action and analysis and recommendations for follow up are clearly recorded and readily available to the day- time teams in live time, ensuring smooth handover.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Managers provide accessible, reflective and suitably directive oversight across the front door, emergency duty service and during children’s initial transitions between services, reflecting the often-dynamic nature of work in these areas. Workers receive regular supervision that complements this responsive management oversight support. Leaders have strengthened senior leadership capacity at the front door, with increased visibility and support helping managers sustain improvement activity while remaining available to their teams.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Leaders have an accurate understanding of the strengths and remaining inconsistencies across front door services. Before this visit, they had taken action to begin refining service models, discrete performance measures and governance arrangements to drive further improvement in response to their own evaluation. While it is too early to see the full impact of these changes for children, leaders have developed increasingly mature, well-coordinated and influential improvement and quality assurance arrangements in Devon. Performance information, audit activity and external challenge are brought together intentionally to strengthen leaders’ understanding of practice, identify priorities and take effective action. While variability exists in the restorative quality of feedback provided by some auditors and moderators, the overall audit framework remains effective in identifying learning and improving practice.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

A stable and consistent senior leadership team knows its services well. Together with increasingly embedded quality assurance and improvement frameworks, this is providing leaders with stronger organisational grip and assurance. As a result, leaders are increasingly well-informed and confident in taking proportionate, evidence-informed action to support their workforce, strengthen practice, respond appropriately where performance concerns arise and influence improvement across their own services and with strategic partners. Leaders are effective in fostering and strengthening collective ownership of improvement. Their improvement priorities are understood and shared across the whole council with the chief executive, elected members, district councils and strategic partners playing an active role in governance and oversight. At the front door, leaders have established multi-agency governance arrangements that

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Findings and evaluation of progress

demonstrate a cohesive commitment to improving services for children and families, while they continue to retain clear accountability for improving children’s services with impetus.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

A culture of shared learning and professional development is well established across front door services. Practitioners value initiatives such as pod development days and regular ‘power hours’, which provide opportunities to reflect on practice, discuss professional development and strengthen team cohesion.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

Leaders have engaged practitioners and partners well in designing their family help model and planning its implementation. This work builds on leaders’ highly impactful expansion of targeted early help, which has significantly improved families’ timely access to support. Practitioners who met with inspectors understand the rationale for these changes and are positive about the next phase of improvement.

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Findings and evaluation of progress

I am copying this letter to the Department for Education.

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