Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
MONDAY 13 DECEMBER 2004
MR DAVID
BELL, MRS
ANNA WALKER
CB, MR STEVE
BUNDRED AND
MR DAVID
BEHAN
Q100 Valerie Davey: You recently
published Change for Children, which means that every one
of these five outcomes has spawned five aims, so we now have 25
aims as well as the original five objectives or five outcomes.
I wondered whether you are happy, whether you think those do reflect
the spirit of the original outcomes which we were set for working
on, to which you have all readily agreed. Are the additional aims
helpful? Anna, we started with health, and if you take the first
of these objectives, which is for children to be healthy, in that
context do you think the five aims that are added to that are
the right ones?
Mrs Walker: I am extremely sorry,
I am not sure I am familiar enough with those aims to comment
meaningfully on them.
Valerie Davey: Very luckily I have in
front of me a nice clear document.
Q101 Chairman: There will be different
knowledge of this, and we like honesty amongst our witnesses.
Mrs Walker: I will come back to
you on them and give you those comments so that you can put them
on the record.[2]
Q102 Chairman: We would be very grateful
for that. Who wants to take the five aims? Did Gordon Brown draw
these up? He likes five, does he not?
Mrs Walker: Five times five, yes!
Mr Behan: I thought the biblical
number was seven!
Jonathan Shaw: Perhaps they could name
them in the way that John Prescott was asked to name the five!
Q103 Valerie Davey: Which of them
do you feel happiest with? Which of these five relate most closely?
Mr Behan: I think the difficulty
with them is if we asked our children about the kind of issues
that are important to them they would probably come up with a
list like the five aims. I think the reason we have aims under
the five outcomes for children is so that they can have some meaning
in terms of the way that services are provided locally. We all
said at the beginning how much we welcomed Every Child Matters
and you mentioned Lord Laming earlier, where this came from, and
the key issues that were identified in Lord Laming's inquiry was
a need for coherence and coordination at a local level. Part of
the objective was to ensure that all local services were focusing
in a clear way so that there was that coherence and coordination
at a local level. So I think the five outcomes were designed following
quite a broad-based debate following Lord Laming's report, to
focus on those issues which children themselves feel are important
to them. I know that the five outcomes were subject to consultation
with children and young people about are these the right issues
that are of concern? So we do think that the outcomes are the
right ones to be looking at. The aims that are underneath them—and
I could not list them all, that would be a challenge too far,
I think, but I know exactly where they are in this pile of papers—are
the right issues to be having conversations about with local services,
about how needs are being met at a local level. When we go and
ask children what they think is important at a local level or
ask parents what is important at a local level, then they tend
to come out with issues that are identified in that list. So we
do think that these are the right areas. That is not to say that
they are comprehensive and will suit all children all the time.
There are children with particular needs; the parents of severely
disabled children will identify particular issues which are important
to them, which might not be important for other parents. So I
think it is about ensuring that we have some clarity about what
we are doing at a local level, and it is important that we are
clear as to how we work as Inspectorates to hold to account those
services at a local level, that we are meeting needs appropriately.
Q104 Valerie Davey: It sounds to
me as if you are all happy to be flexible. Do you think, as the
consultation proceeds, if these aims changed then that would be
acceptable? That is the indication you are giving me, that there
is a consultation ongoing, these are being looked at and you are
genuinely listening and could tweak or change slightly as it moved
forward. Is that possible?
Mr Bell: I think it is important
to make the point that the five outcomes and the activities contributing
to the outcomes are the responsibility primarily of the Department
for Education and Skills, the lead department in relation to Every
Child Matters. However, I know that our colleagues have been
contributing to the process and, as David said, I actually think
we stand as a good articulation of those things that would matter.
If you take the one on achievement it essentially covers things
like early years and attendance, support for parents, ensuring
that children achieve commensurate with their abilities and so
on and so forth. You might say could we not express that in a
slightly different way, could we express it this way rather than
that? I actually think that if you take that one and you take
the others—and none of us would sit here today and say we
have missed any major items, and if you add a commonsense test
to this it is quite helpful—if you are saying, "Does
this cover what it means to be safe, to be healthy, to achieve
well?" I think all of us would say, "Yes, that is about
right; that covers what it means in a commonsense way, to achieve
well, to be safe, to make a contribution," and so on.
Q105 Valerie Davey: The one that
interested me on each of those is the reference to parents, carers
and families, which are all going to be brought in, which extends
your remit, it seems to me, as Inspectors dramatically. Is this
going to be possible or is it part of this very positive dialogue
which is taking place with, as we have just heard, the parents
of handicapped children or others? Is that now part of your overall
framework for inspection?
Mr Bell: It is important to make
the point, of course, that we are not inspecting the work of parents;
what we are doing is inspecting the extent to which services and
agencies can help parents, and the wording is very carefully chosen,
the extent to which parents are helped to ensure that their
children are physically and emotionally healthy and so on. So
the answer to your question is, yes, the inspection framework
does look exclusively at the extent to which services help parents
help their children, and it seems to me that that is the way it
should be; that it is not for local services and certainly not
for Inspectorates to usurp the role of parents, but I think it
is a legitimate question to ask how do local services help parents?
And that is an explicit requirement in our inspection arrangements.
Q106 Valerie Davey: Can we focus
on enjoy and achieve? We have five aims there which focus almost
exclusively on the educational attainment. Is that sufficient
or should that one not in fact be broader so that it does include
the enjoyment, which is there in the original aim?
Mr Bell: To be fair, it does say
it is one of the outcomes that children should attend and enjoy
school, and I think it is important that it is there. If you then
look at the activities underpinning that it talks about children
developing not just academically but developing personally as
well, and it seems to me that that is right. One of the things
that is rather interesting when you talk to young people in local
areas—and of course they will talk about school—we
know from some research that we have carried out collectively
to ascertain young people's views that they are interested in
safety. They are interested in how well lit is the area because
"I feel safe" or "I do not feel safe" if the
area is not well lit. When you consult young people—and
I am sure Steve would say more about this in the Audit Commission's
work—often they are interested in parks, open spaces, recreational
facilities, leisure facilities. Those are the sorts of things
that young people are interested in. I think one of the great
virtues of our inspection programme here is that together we are
devising arrangements for consulting young people and getting
their views, and I think all that does is build upon a distinguished
tradition that the various Inspectorates had over time of increasingly
trying to get children and young people's views. So I think you
should be quite reassured by that, that this is not just academic
attainment—important though that is—it is about the
wider quality of life and how it affects young people.
Q107 Valerie Davey: One last question.
Just focusing back on the five outcomes, is there any one of them
that you feel is going to be more difficult to attain than the
others?
Mr Bell: I would invite my colleagues,
but can I give you a very specific example, which has been drawn
to my attention? You will see that one of the outcomes is achieving
economic well-being. Those five outcomes apply. It is a bit of
a stretch for us to see how a two-year old child in the care of
a childminder, which is our responsibility to regulate and inspect,
that generating the evidence for that one might be difficult.
But to make a more serious point about it, we are not necessarily
looking in every case that you will get explicit evidence. So,
for example, I would have thought for the well-being of that young
child we are obviously more interested in are they healthy, are
they safe, are they beginning to have the right kinds of experiences
that will help them to flourish as a young child? Whereas if one
is interested in older young people clearly one would be interested
much more on the evidence around how they have been enabled to
contribute actively and to contribute to society and the economy.
Mr Behan: A clear issue there
will be the educational attainment of children looked after, where
there is one of the objectives about economic well-being for children
looked after. We know that one of the key issues to success of
children that have been looked after in later life is going through
education or into vocational education, into the employment market.
So, again going back to one of the earlier questions, it may well
be that we would look particularly at how an area is responding
to the educational and vocational needs of children looked after,
so that they can go on to be economically active, because when
you speak to groups of children looked after—and I did on
Friday afternoon—they wanted to be train drivers and doctors
just like the rest of us wanted to be when we were that age. So
I think it is ensuring that we are able to harness their ambitions
so that they can be economically active, and that may mean that
some specific activity is required at a local level to ensure
that those outcomes can be secured.
Mr Bundred: If I could follow
up on the earlier point that David made about the outcome on enjoy
and achieve? One of the inspection criteria for that specific
outcome is whether there is adequate recreational provision available
in the locality.
Mrs Walker: May I add a point
which I think is going to be very important under the "be
healthy" outcome? That is, that there is a Children's National
Service Framework, which will drive a lot of our work on the healthcare
side and we will certainly want to ensure that those issues that
have been identified on the healthcare side are brought to bear
and looked at in relation to the Joint Area Reviews. We do know
that under the National Service Framework there are some big questions
on healthcare, about whether there is enough help of the right
type for some children; whether that help is sufficiently child-centred,
needing to make a difference between treating children not just
as mini-adults but as people who need care in their own right;
and whether there is sufficient link-up with other services. Partially
that may be social care services, but one of the issues that is
actually emerging is whether a child who does need some quite
extensive healthcare help for a period of time is then properly
linked back into the education services because if they are not
then their re-entry is going to be very difficult indeed. So those
messages, which have come from a different framework, we are very
anxious to bear in on the Joint Area Reviews.
Q108 Jonathan Shaw: In your opening
remarks, Mr Bell, you talked about inspection being process of
bringing improvement to services as well as highlighting areas
that were not doing so well. As the Chairman said, we heard from
Lord Laming last week and he was less than complimentary about
Ealing Social Services who were at the centre of the Victoria
Climbié inquiry, and he noted that the Commission for Social
Care Inspection—your organisation, Mr Behan—had given
it no stars and "getting worse". Your organisations
have been about in various guises, as you referred to earlier,
David Bell. What have you done to improve Ealing Social Services,
whether it was yourself or it was the Joint Inspectorate with
the Audit Commission? I suppose if is the case that inspection
can bring about in-service improvements how is that going to be
different in the future from areas that you would want to change
from those of the past, Mr Behan?
Mr Behan: Probably as you were
taking evidence from Lord Laming I was seeing Ealing in terms
of the Leader, the Chief Executive, the Director of Education
and Social Services to secure from them their commitment to drive
their improvement programme in relation to children's services.
I go back to what David Bell said in the introduction. Our job
is to identify where improvement is required, ensure that improvement
is taking place and then go back and measure that that improvement
is sufficient. It is Ealing Council's job to ensure that they
are meeting the needs of their local population and improving
their services. We need to hold Ealing Council to account for
that and that is what we were doing last week in terms of the
zero stars. In terms of their performance on children's services,
we judge them to be meeting the needs of most of Ealing's children
well. We were concerned, however, at the fact that it had had
four Directors of Social Services in the past 12 months and therefore
their infrastructure, their leadership, their capacity to improve
further was, in our view, uncertain. The deterioration in Ealing's
performance was not on the children's side, the deterioration
in their performance was in the way they meet the needs of their
adult population, and again we saw their capacity to improve being
poor. We do have a positive regard for the Assistant Director
for Children's Services in Ealing and think that she is part of
the solution in Ealing and not part of the problem. However, there
was not a similar leader amongst the management on the adult side,
which is why we judged their capacity to improve in the future
as being poor. So what we were doing last week was holding them
to account and that is what we will continue to do. They will
now be monitored rigorously by the staff of the Commission for
Social Care Inspection. In the arrangements that we are currently
out for consultation on, that will be a joint holding to account,
probably done by David and myself in relation to their integrated
services. But until we begin these arrangements in "anger",
so to speak, we will continue to scrutinise Ealing, and I am obliged
to report in January to Margaret Hodge, as the Minister for Children,
and Steven Ladyman, on how I am holding those zero star authorities
to account. It is clearly open to Ministers to use their intervention
powers if they felt that was appropriate, and it is open to me
to make a recommendation to Ministers that they may choose to
use their intervention powers if we think that is appropriate.
So we are driving Ealing hard in terms of their deteriorating
performance, but I do stress that the greatest cause for concern
was on the way that they provided services to meet the needs of
their adult population. Our concern on children was about their
capacity—their performance on children had not actually
deteriorated—and we had an uncertain view of their capacity
for the future, just because of the sheer volume of changes that
had taken place at a senior level, and we know that organisations
which are not well led do not have a common vision are not going
to deliver, and that is where our concerns were.
Q109 Jonathan Shaw: Thank you very
much. I think that is quite helpful to give us that clear picture.
Obviously we had just a few questions about Ealing, about which
we were rather alarmed, and I appreciate you putting that on the
record. One of the comments that was made by a couple of you in
your opening remarks about how joined up you are, how there are
no fag papers between you and anniversaries, et cetera, there
has been a concern expressed that all four of you are going to
a particular area to talk to the strategic organisations, so the
local council, the PCT, and you will see them working together
because they have a duty to cooperate. But what happens when you
find that the local authority are cooperating with the PCT but
actually the problem is that the schools are not; that there are
a number of schools in a particular area who say, "Take your
fag papers and forget it, we have a great big roll of paper between
us and that is the way we want to keep it, thank you very much,"
in the same way as GPs? So, strategically great. The vision, the
strategies are all there, but what matters in Every Child Matters
is that those people on the ground are cooperating but GPs and
teachers do not have to. So what do you do then?
Mr Bell: The Education Bill that
has just been presented to Parliament, which will bring about
some changes to the inspection system, will make one of the new
statutory responsibilities on the Chief Inspector to report on
the contribution that an individual school makes towards the five
outcomes for children that we have been talking about. So at the
micro level you have reporting on the contribution that schools
make, and I should just say incidentally on that, that far from
being a burden on schools I think most of us would say that many
schools would see things like keeping children safe, helping them
to be healthy is just part of the day job. So I do not think that
would be a huge issue. At the level going beyond the micro level—perhaps
at the level that you are talking about—I have talked in
front of this Committee before about policy tensions, and I think
we have a potential policy tension here. On the one hand we have
a strong emphasis on school-based autonomy, which I support, actually;
and on the other hand we have an emphasis on collective responsibility.
I think in the vast majority of cases there will not actually
be a tension because schools who want to help vulnerable young
people, vulnerable children, will want to cooperate with local
services that are available to them. However, there is no hiding
from the fact that schools do have a high degree of autonomy and
may choose, for whatever reason, not to cooperate or to collaborate
in the same sort of way with other schools or the local services
more generally. That is the way in which we have constructed policy,
and I think we have to recognise that that is there and trust—and
I think it is not just a finger in the wind, it is a real expectation—that
schools will see the virtues of cooperation and collaboration
with other services for the sake of the children in their care.
Q110 Jonathan Shaw: May I ask Anna
Walker to talk about GPs?
Mrs Walker: Our annual rating
systems will actively encourage cooperation between relevant local
partners—the so-called Department of Health developmental
standards are actually all about cooperation between different
parties. The idea behind that is to actively encourage that sort
of partnership. Where we would potentially like to be over a period
of time—and because our systems do not begin until March
of next year and we are going to have to phase them in and there
is a bit of a journey for us to go—is that when we give
our annual ratings we will do it on the basis of partnership working,
so people will only be able to get positive ratings if they are
working well in partnership. That is one aspect and that is, if
you like, the encouragement of improvement in partnership working.
The other element we will aim to do in our annual rating is to
look at local outcomes. What are the factors in the local population
in relation, for example, to sexual health or to tobacco control;
or, to take an example of some work that we are about to begin
with the Audit Commission, on obesity? If those indicators are
high then our objective would be to go back in to talk to the
PCTs, the hospitals, the GPs about why that was happening. The
outcome alone being high would not necessarily condemn a particular
PCT. What you have to do is to get behind that information to
ask the questions because it may be that there are problems with
the local population, and then the issue is what are the PCT and
the GPs' surgeries doing about it? We believe that the combination
of improvement, together with analysing the outcomes and asking
questions, is the best way that we can contribute.
Q111 Jonathan Shaw: Will the inspection
assist in building capacity to improve services? Perhaps Mr Bundred
could answer that?
Mr Bundred: The corporate assessment
which we will undertake for the combined purposes of our Comprehensive
Performance Assessments and the Joint Area Reviews will comment
on the capacity of the local authority in its partnerships and
in its leadership role across partnerships, and in that sense
it will go beyond what Comprehensive Performance Assessment currently
does, and we believe will help to raise capacity in that way.
Q112 Jonathan Shaw: Mr Bundred, do
you think the 2005 framework is capable of contributing to making
more important outcomes in practice? Is it going to deliver this
framework on the ground?
Mr Bundred: This comes back to
the earlier question about the training and skills needed to deliver
this on the ground. In the case of the corporate assessment element
of JAR and CPA 2005 we have already undertaken some successful
pilots of that element—and we are now in our final stage
of consultation—and this is a process which has been under
development throughout the past year. One of the things, however,
that we have recognised is that it is capable of being delivered,
it is capable of being assessed but it does require some higher
order skills of our Inspectors than we have required in the past.
So there will be an intensive training programme for the people
that we will be putting on those assessments. We are fortunate
too that we have learned some lessons from CPA 2002 when we attempted
to assess all 150 authorities delivering the range of services
that we are talking about here in a single year. That strained
our resources considerably. We will not be repeating that for
this exercise; this exercise will be spread over a longer period
and it will therefore enable us to put the training in place and
to ensure that we have the best people on the assessment teams.
Q113 Chairman: Steve, you have been
a Chief Executive of a local authority and, interestingly, of
my introductory questions the one you did not answer is how those
departments and those local authorities that were going to be
inspected and possibly inspected, inspected and inspected would
feel about the new regime?
Mr Bundred: I think the answer
to the question is that we have asked them what they will feel,
and it is in response to some of the things that they have said
to us that we have decided that it would make better sense for
us and for local government for the two processes to be run in
tandem, rather than have one set of assessors from the Audit Commission
coming along to make an assessment and then a joint area review
coming along perhaps only a few months later to ask many of the
same questions. Much of the effort that we have been making with
David and his colleagues and with others over the last few months
as we have been developing this process is about how you can get
those two together. So I think the answer to your question how
local authorities view this is that they would view it as a process
that does recognise their interests and their demand for less
inspection. They see the value of inspection, they see the value
of these assessments and they recognise that they are helpful
in driving improvement, but they also experience the burden too,
and I think they would recognise that we have done everything
possible to minimise that burden and again, as I said in my opening
contribution, one of the consequences of the introduction of joint
area reviews is that some of the other inspection regimes that
they currently experience will be abolished.
Q114 Jonathan Shaw: David Bell, do
you foresee a formal interface between your inspectorate and the
Children's Commissioner?
Mr Bell: I would hope so, because
it would seem to me important, and it will be an important part
of the Children's Commissioner's work to look at how inspectorates,
alongside other public bodies, carry out their duties in such
a way that gathers the views of children and young people. I think
we have quite an encouraging story to tell already, and in our
separate inspectorates, in our separate inspections, we do seek
the views of children and young people. We have made it a high
priority for development work in this system of inspection and
we want to continue to look further at how we involve children
and young people. So whilst it is early or even pre-early days
in relation to the Children's Commissioner, I would hope that
all of us, singly and collectively, would talk to the Children's
Commissioner about how we might more effectively use our work
to gather the views of children and young people.
Q115 Jonathan Shaw: One last quick
question about common assessment. I think you are having a contribution
to that. Are you getting that done quickly enough in order for
practitioners on the ground to be able to use it, so when the
new regime comes in it is going to be fit for purpose, the people
who are going to be doing these joints assessments?
Mr Bell: I suspect there will
not be an exact match because local services—and I think
we have to go beyond councils in this respect—for children
and young people are progressing at different rates and they are
choosing to do things in different ways. One of the comments that
David Behan made earlier was that we are not going in presupposing
a particular organisational structure for local councils in particular,
and that is an important point because we are not going in to
say in September 2005 "Do you have a director of children's
services?" Some authorities have chosen to do that, some
have not. Our focus has to be on outcomes, and I would have thought
that people working in services will start to orientate their
work towards those outcomes for children, perhaps in a more overt
way than they have done previously, and therefore I do think that
the inspection system will start to reflect that pretty quickly.
I am encouraged by that.
Q116 Jonathan Shaw: So the message
is: do not look to the inspectorate for a blueprint of how to
shape your services; have the confidence to do them yourself?
Mr Bell: I think that is a very
important signal. We made the comment earlier that our focus has
to be on outcomes, and I think that is terribly important. What
we may find—and this again would be based on previous experience—we
might be in a position to inform the minister and others about
systems or structures or approaches that are working better than
others, but it is very important to say we are not going in and
saying, "Show us the organisational blueprint, right or wrong."
We are saying, "What outcomes are you securing for children
and young people?" That is what matters.
Q117 Jonathan Shaw: People want to
develop services for children and get it right, but is that more
important than getting it wrong? That is the worry and the concern
of the culture change.
Mr Bell: I hope that people will
not feel inhibited by inspection but will feel the need to create
services appropriate to their local needs.
Q118 Mr Pollard: I am taking a keen
interest in EBD schools, and I have eight in my own local authority
and I visited one a few days ago, and we know that they are not
achieving on at least three out of the five outcomes, enjoying
and achieving, making a positive contribution and achieving economic
wellbeing, just by their very nature. Would it not be better if
we started where we know that failures are already occurring,
not through any fault of the system but where we are, and therefore
added value might lead to huge improvements in that particular
area, where we are failing in my own area 500-600 children every
single year?
Mr Bell: I think we can, in a
sense, have complementary systems. We will continue to have institutional
inspection, and that will be the same, very much so, for David's
organisation, and we will continue to identify difficulties and
that will lead at the level of individual institutions to intervention,
should that be required, so I think we can continue to do that.
We are not taking our eye off that ball, if I can reassure you.
At the same time, we may find—and this, I think, would be
likely—that sometimes schools serving the most vulnerable
children and young people stand in isolation from other services
that might help, and one of the ways in which we can use our joint
inspection activity is to see where that might be so. We continue
to work at the level of the individual institution to bring about
improvement. At the same time, you look at the wider range of
services to identify what improvements might help that individual
institution to bring about better outcomes for children.
Q119 Mr Pollard: If we do look at
these EBD schools in any serious way, it would seem to me that
there could be a massive question about allocation of resources.
I wonder whether that has also been taken into account in the
thinking, particularly from the Audit Commission viewpoint. Perhaps,
Steve, you could think about that.
Mr Bundred: Yes. Again, one of
the changes that we are making in the new approach to comprehensive
performance assessment 2005 are some substantial changes to what
is the use of resources element within CPA, a much stronger focus
on value for money within that element, a specific judgment by
auditors on the value for money being provided by each local authority
and a stronger role for that use of resources block within the
overall model.
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