UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 40 - ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE

 

 

Every Child Matters

 

 

Monday 13 December 2004

MR DAVID BELL, MRS ANNA WALKER, MR STEVE BUNDRED

and MR DAVID BEHAN

Evidence heard in Public Questions 77 - 152

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Monday 13 December 2004

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Valerie Davey

Mr Nick Gibb

Paul Holmes

Helen Jones

Mr Kerry Pollard

Jonathan Straw

________________

Witnesses: Mr David Bell, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, Ofsted, Mrs Anna Walker, Chief Executive, Healthcare Commission, Mr Steve Bundred, Chief Executive, Audit Commission and Mr David Behan, Chief Inspector, Commission for Social Care Inspection, examined.

Q77 Chairman: Can I welcome our Inspectors to our deliberations? David Bell, of course, is Her Majesty's Inspector, Ofsted; Anna Walker, who is the Chief Executive of the Healthcare Commission; Steven Bundred, who is Chief Executive of the Audit Commission; and David Behan, who is Chief Inspector of Commission for Social Care Inspection. We were trying to work out a collective description of so many Inspectors, and Jonathan came up with a "Gotcha" of Inspectors, which I thought was quite inventive! We are here today to share some concerns and questions with you about how the whole new system is going to work. It is new territory for us and I have already said that even venturing into new worlds of acronyms is quite difficult; but that is all right, we will learn. Certainly Steve Bundred and I have met before, Dave is a regular, but Anna and David welcome particularly - we will be seeing you on a regular basis, I take it? This is as challenging to us as to you in the sense that this is a very large added responsibility for the Committee and in these hearings we want to make sure that we do it right. So we start by asking you if you want two or three minutes each to say how you think the new system is going to work and any concerns that you have; but I will hold you to two or three minutes. Could we start from left to right, with Anna Walker?

Mrs Walker: Thank you very much indeed. As you say, I am the Chief Executive of the Healthcare Commission. The first point I would like to make is that as a Commission we buy extremely strongly into the vision that Every Child Matters, so that our work on children starts from that basis. We do also have a statutory duty to be concerned about child protection, child healthcare and child issues generally; so our work springs from that statutory basis as well. We are very committed to working with David Bell and Ofsted, to ensure that the Joint Area Review, the joint inspection activity works effectively. We are a young organisation, which means that we are building up our own methods of inspection and proceeding, but what we are clear on is that we are very willing indeed to be flexible with the way that we come at this activity in order to operate under Ofsted's lead and to help the joint inspection activity to be effective. One other very important point I ought to make is that our work on children is not just the joint work, we also have various ongoing healthcare responsibilities, inspection responsibilities, for example looking at the treatment of children under the Department of Health standards, feeding that activity into the annual rating system; where there are complaints or concerns of a significant sort in relation to children, following those up, as we did, for example, in relation to an investigation into a hospital in Wolverhampton, for maternity services. That stream of work is important; it will continue because it needs to do so under our current system. The fruit of it we can and will take into the work with Ofsted to ensure that we bring all our knowledge on health and healthcare of children to bear on that joint view activity.

Q78 Chairman: Thank you. Steve Bundred. How is your organisation going to deal with this?

Mr Bundred: As with the Healthcare Commission, we too buy into the vision for Every Child Matters. We think these are very important services and it is absolutely essential that the quality of them be improved and that the regulation of them be improved too. As a Commission we are absolutely committed to what we have described as "strategic regulation". By strategic regulation we mean a number of things, but among them we intend and aim to maximise the impact we have on the improvement of public services whilst, at the same time, minimising the burden that we impose through our activities on the providers of those services. We aim to do that in part by working more effectively and more seamlessly with other regulators and other bodies with a similar objective. So in devising the range of arrangements that will accompany the introduction of the changes, and foreshadowed in Every Child Matters, we have been particularly concerned to ensure that Joint Area Reviews fit seamlessly with the Commission's Comprehensive Performance Assessment of local authorities, where there are overlapping interests. It has not been easy to get to that point because the issues involved in both are very complex. But I am very pleased that, through the cooperation we have had from Ofsted and from other Inspectorates over recent weeks, we have now been able, jointly, to publish proposals for Joint Area Reviews and for Comprehensive Performance Assessment of local authorities from 2005, which we believe will be broadly welcomed by local government and by other providers of children's services as meeting the objective we have set of ensuring that there is a seamless split between the two and absolute minimum burden on the providers of public services.

Q79 Chairman: Thank you for that. David Bell.

Mr Bell: Mr Chairman, 4 August is a date that sticks in my mind: one, because it is my wedding anniversary and, two, because on 4 August 2003 we were given this collective commission to bring about a process for the inspection of children's services. It was something which we all wanted to do - and I am sure that you will not be able to put the proverbial cigarette paper between us on that front this afternoon - but we recognised the complexity of the task. I am pleased to say that we have got to the point at which we are now, just embarked on consultation, ready to roll from next year, largely due to the tremendous goodwill and enthusiasm shown by all Inspectorates across all the bodies involved. So I think that has been a tremendous plus. As Steve said, we have been anxious throughout to ensure that we devise a system that is proportionate, and therefore it is important to us to ensure that we make as much use of the existing evidence that we all generate individually. At the same time, we have all recognised that we cannot just keep on inspecting all that we have previously inspected. So I think all of us will be able to tell a story of different aspects of our work that have either had to change or, in some cases, disappear, so that we can do a proportionate job through Joint Area Review and, more generally, under Children's Services Inspection. In a sense that leads you to focus on what matters, and it may be that part of the questioning this afternoon will focus precisely on what matters, but we are certainly of the opinion that if we can look at some of those connection points between services we will be adding something worthwhile, because if you look at the history of "disaster", if I can put it that way, in relation to children's services it is often because of gaps between the services - that the services do not join up or connect. Therefore, looking at those connections for us is a very important part of this process. I mentioned that we have just embarked on consultation, we are consulting on the Framework for the Inspection of Children's Services; we are consulting on the annual performance assessment of local councils, children's social service and education; and we are consulting on some of the materials that Inspectors will be using on site. So I think we come before you this afternoon confident of what we have achieved so far and ready to move to the next stage of implementation.

Q80 Chairman: Thank you for that. David Behan.

Mr Behan: Thank you, Mr Chairman. We are a new organisation. Just to go on what you as a Committee know and those things you are learning about, we were created in April of this year. Our prime function is about improvement in social care. We have a number of functions that we conduct. We regulate social care services; we issue licences to operate; we inspect local authorities; we assess the performance of local councils, and our star ratings published a couple of weeks ago is some evidence of that. We also have a value for money function. As a non-departmental public body we report annually to Parliament on the state of social care.

Q81 Chairman: Which Select Committee do you normally report to?

Mr Behan: The Health Select Committee. Interestingly, we host the Children's Rights Director post, which has been in existence now for a couple of years and continuously reports on our statutory function. We are under a duty to work with Ofsted, the Audit Commission and the Healthcare Commission in legislation that established us, and some 16 per cent of our activity goes on children's services, the remainder going on adult services. One of the issues that we have been pursuing as part of our set up is to re-engineer the way that we operate so that we focus on the experiences of those people that are using the services - not the inputs into those services but the outcomes for individuals. Your invitation was in relation to comments about where are we and what are the key issues. We too welcome the publication of Every Child Matters and, as David says, it would be difficult to put a cigarette paper between us in relation to that commitment. One of the things we particularly welcome is the opportunity to focus on improving outcomes for all children, but, in particular, those children who are vulnerable - the 28,000 that are on Child Protection Registers, the 61,000 that are looked after by local councils, and that 300,000 who were defined legally as being in need under the Children Act. We think it is important that in the future those children remain in the focus of the way that services are delivered at a local level. The second point we would want to land is about the importance of connecting children's services and adult services, particularly around those parents who are social services' users. 60 per cent of children whose parents are known to social services are themselves defined as being at risk, and in over 50 per cent of children on Child Protection Registers the parents are likely to have a drug, an alcohol or mental health problem, and in some cases all three. So we must ensure that children's services are linked to adult services through robust partnerships. We are also keen that the kind of cultural shift that is taking place in children's services focuses on attitudes and behaviours and not overly focuses on structures. So we think it is important that there are organisational development programmes and support to staff so that the vision behind Every Child Matters can indeed be carried through. We think that the development of the workforce is an essential agenda to achieve the changes described in Every Child Matters. We know from our performance assessments of local councils this year that recruitment and retention was one of the key barriers identified by local managers for achieving their objectives, so we think that the focus on recruitment, retention and developing the new workforce is a critical part of the way that we roll out this agenda. Finally, we also think that services will change when professional staff are doing the basics well and doing the basics well together in multi-disciplinary teams.

Q82 Chairman: Thank you for that. When we have four witnesses it is quite a difficult situation to manage, so can I ask colleagues to direct their questioning to one person as the lead questioner? We will play it by ear but we cannot have a situation where every Inspector answers every question or we will not get through the remainder of topics that we need to cover. I want to kick off by saying that a lot of people think that the government is a little optimistic about the power and the utility of inspections. It seems that they are putting in an awful lot of investment in securing the future of our children, especially vulnerable children, out of an inspectorate regime. Do we have much confidence that inspection can make a difference? We did our joint inspection of pre-school, did we not, and it was abandoned as being ineffective - the two inspectorates failed to work very well together. Why would four inspectorates do better than the two that were discarded? Who would like to start on that one?

Mr Bell: If I may make a start on that, Mr Chairman? It is actually more than four inspectorates; there are a number of other inspectorates who have an interest in children and young people who are working together on this programme.

Q83 Chairman: Which other ones?

Mr Bell: We have, for example, Her Majesty's Inspector of Prisons, Her Majesty's Probation Inspectorate; we have the Magistrates' Court Inspectorate, and so on. So we have a range of other bodies that have an interest in children and young people. I do not think any of us here would pretend that Inspectorates bring about improvement in local services; it is people who run local services, people who work in local services that bring about improvement. However, I think we would say confidently that, in our own ways, individually and I think now together, we hope to be able to bring about improvement in a number of ways. For example, we will be able to identify where services are effective and what they are doing well. That helps to stimulate improvement, not just in once place but in many places. We will be able to identify where services are not doing as well - and we know from our evidence that that can act as quite a substantial fillip to improvement. I think it is also fair to say that we act as a mechanism for drawing together the views of users - and I am sure we will talk about that later as the afternoon goes on - and helping to find out what people think who are on the receiving ends of those services, and factoring that evidence in to our findings. So I think we are not overstating the role that inspection can play; we believe in it, but we also believe, as we said earlier, that we need to do it in a different way in the future, we have to do it in a more proportionate way in the future, and we probably have to do it in a smarter way in the future.

Q84 Chairman: If I can push you on this? There is also a view that here are the standards of local delivery - the local authority plus the local health delivery, the Primary Healthcare people and the Acute Trust and so on. Are they not going to feel that they are crawled over with Inspectors? One of the most common complaints, even in education, is too many inspections, too much red tape, "Why can we not get on with our job?" They now have the Audit Commission competing with it right across services, and now you have an Ofsted lead in this. Is there not going to be a fear of delivering anything because they are being inspected so much? Steven Bundred, do you want to come in on that?

Mr Bundred: I would like to make a couple of comments on that. I think from our work we have a substantial body of evidence that demonstrates that inspection works. Later this week we will be publishing the latest results of our Comprehensive Performance Assessments of local authorities, and I think they will demonstrate that in comparison with the first assessments that we did in 2002 there has been substantial improvement. But we recognise also that inspection is a scarce resource and therefore it needs to be targeted where it can have most impact. That has been very much uppermost in our minds in the discussions that we have had with David and his colleagues about the timetable that we will adopt jointly for the Joint Area Reviews, which will be undertaken simultaneously with our new corporate assessments for CPA 2005. So they will be targeted on the basis of a risk assessment, which we have discussed and which we have agreed jointly. Our Comprehensive Performance Assessments 2005 and onwards will enable us to very substantially reduce the level of inspections that we will be undertaking with individual services. There will be a reduction of some 68 per cent as compared with what we were doing in 2002/2003. It is important also to recognise that Joint Area Reviews themselves will take the place of a number of separate inspection regimes which have operated previously.

Q85 Chairman: What is the Joint Area Review going to do for you, Anna Walker? What do you see it achieving? How is it going to work? Take us through it.

Mrs Walker: Can I just go back and very briefly answer the question about whether we think inspection will make a difference because in our area it can contribute two things? Unlike my colleagues we have a statutory requirement to carry out an annual rating of all healthcare organisations in this country.

Q86 Chairman: Is that the star system?

Mrs Walker: Yes, the so-called star system.

Q87 Chairman: Are they not abolishing that?

Mrs Walker: Not the annual rating but the stars - there is a difference. And we have to do it annually. That system actually has been successful in driving some important change through the healthcare service. You can take it too far but I think healthcare managers generally consider that it has achieved something. You have to measure what matters - that is actually the trick - and within our annual rating system we are measuring and will continue to measure the activities of healthcare organisations in relation to child protection. I think that is important for contributing to the work on the Joint Area Reviews. There is another area where I think that inspection in healthcare can actually help too. I totally understand the point about regulation not being too burdensome. We have a wide roving remit to intervene where there seem to be areas of concern. What we can perhaps do as a result of that remit is, having looked to investigate a particular area, to take the learning for that area - so, for example, on maternity services or some work we are doing with the youth offending teams, the relationship between the youth offending teams and healthcare services - and ensure that we draw the lessons out of that and then measure light touch but what matters to help the healthcare organisations to drive improvement forward. So in two ways we can help: measuring what matters annually and actually learning from investigatory work we undertake.

Q88 Chairman: Most people, in terms of the wraparound total coherent service, are more worried about health than anything else, are they not, because it has historically been a problem around GPs and getting information and cooperation from that sort of area? Is that not the case?

Mrs Walker: I am not sure that it is particularly. The issues that we have been concerned about in child healthcare have been something to which David drew attention, which is this question about links between organisations because healthcare is only one aspect of what children need for well-being. So this whole question of a child who goes through a period of healthcare, how that links back into the education system and into the health of the population as a whole, are actually some of the really challenging issues that we see. So, for example - and I am sorry to come back to specifics - we carried out this investigation into the maternity services at a hospital in Wolverhampton and there were some real issues in quality of care learning, but actually the most significant issue went back into the health of the population. The question is, what can we do with a finding like that, except work with others, including not just Inspectors but local authorities and the relevant government departments, to try to bring about a change?

Q89 Chairman: But it is the case, is it not, that really frontline, before a child gets into any institutional setting, it is the Health Visitor and the GP that will probably have more knowledge of the child in the early years than anyone else? To what extent are you confident, for example, that they and you can share the data that they have?

Mrs Walker: You are absolutely right that there are a lot of healthcare activities that involve children in a major way but do not concentrate on children, and one of the issues there is to ensure that those healthcare organisations or people are actually looking at the needs of children as well as the needs of adults, and in doing that there are various elements that we can measure. We have a young patients' survey, for example, on a regular basis which seeks to get feedback from young patients about how they feel they are being handled, and we can then feed that back into the GP's surgery or the relevant Primary Care Trust.

Q90 Chairman: To David Behan, my last question before we start moving the questions around. In terms of your attitude to all this, who are you out there to protect? Are you out there to protect the average child or the vulnerable child? How do you as Inspectors think about that? Are you trying to drive a service up for everyone, particularly something that we identify in education - the average child, who has the potential to improve their performance in education? Or in terms of children are we concentrating on - I think it was announced this morning that 100,000 families in temporary accommodation, are they the people who will be the focus more than the average child?

Mr Behan: When this work has been in development - and our staff have been working together to development the approach and methodologies, et cetera - one of the questions that has been posed is how will Joint Area Reviews improve the life of a child in Middlesborough? I am not particularly clear why we have chosen Middlesborough.

Q91 Chairman: The average child in Middlesborough?

Mr Behan: In Middlesborough.

Q92 Chairman: The average child?

Mr Behan: Yes. I am not sure why we chose Middlesborough.

Q93 Chairman: Not the vulnerable child.

Mr Behan: And within that, one of the areas that has been fertile in discussion is how can we ensure that we have covered the range of children that live in Middlesborough, from the gifted at the one end to those who are excluded at the other end. So not just the average but children across the range. So there will be various streams of inquiry as part of an integrated service Inspection of Children Services. There will be ten areas and we will be proportionate in the way we select the kind of issues we look at, based on the performance assessment that we anticipate carrying out. So if there is an issue, for instance, in the safeguarding of vulnerable children in this authority then that might be a particular stream that we would pay particular attention to as part of the inspection process. We are looking to paint across the population of children in a community, not just one group; but we are concerned to ensure with those children who might otherwise be excluded, for whatever reason, that we are clear about how they are performing, we are clear about what knowledge local councils and local services have of those children, and to ensure that there are good partnerships in place working together to ensure that children that are vulnerable are not being neglected and left out. So we see it painting across the range but paying particular attention to children, and the children you referred to in the news this morning are one group and asylum seeking children are another group. So there are many groups that we need to attend to through the work. The Performance Assessment Framework, which is a self-assessment framework which will be completed by local councils, is designed to identify those areas that we need to pay particular attention to as part of the assessment process and will help us to target our resources to make sure that we are exploring with councils and local providers those areas where there are particular issues that we need to attend to.

Chairman: Thank you for that. Helen Jones.

Q94 Helen Jones: We have heard from all of you that you are all signed up to the process, but the evidence that we are getting indicates concerns about actually putting all this into place on the ground. You have different teams of Inspectors, different professional backgrounds, different frameworks for inspection; what are you doing to bring all those together into an integrated framework for inspection, and to train the staff to operate in that integrated framework? Would David Bell like to kick off?

Mr Bell: Since we began the work on 4^th August 2003 that is precisely what we have been thinking about: how do you bring together quite different traditions, different backgrounds of inspectors, different frameworks, different ways of doing business? That led us together to publish a framework, so we published last week a framework for consultation that highlights the things that we need to cover during Joint Area Review. One of the virtues, of course, is that we have all been driven by the specification, the five outcomes for children, and that has been a great unifier across the work that we have done. So we have the framework out of the consultation and that, in a sense, addresses the issue of how together we answer the questions we have about what happens for a child in a particular area. The point about training is a good one and in fact we have already had groups of our Inspectors together and they will be brought together more extensively after Christmas, to start on the training programmes together. I think that is a great virtue of this programme, that people will have an opportunity to train together and to work together in teams, and we would expect all our inspection teams to have a range of representations from different Inspectors. Just picking up on a point that David made, we will not expect every inspection team and every inspection to cover every conceivable question that could be asked. It is very important to restate the point that we will draw as far as we can on existing evidence that is around. For example, there will continue to be evidence generated from school inspection about performance of pupils; there will be evidence drawn from examination and tests results about the performance of pupils; there is evidence available about the state of childcare in an area. So we will be able to draw all this evidence and then, in a sense, decide where we are going to do fieldwork. When we have decided where we are going to do fieldwork we then put together a joint team that is able to do it. So I think we have made very good progress to get a framework ready for consultation and out, and of course the next stage is to ensure that our staff are ready to do the job on site for Joint Area Review from September next year.

Q95 Helen Jones: Thank you for that. I understand what you are saying about putting together joint teams, but I would like to ask you a little more about the training requirements because whenever we have discussed this one of the things that we come up against, time and time again, is that it is no good putting any framework in place unless you have the staff who are able and willing to operate it. Have you made any assessment of what the training requirements amongst your staff will be for this; how is it going to be funded; and how long is it going to take to do, bearing in mind you have to begin in September next year, have you not? Perhaps David Behan can answer that?

Mr Behan: We have had four pilots in the autumn of this year, where we have gone to authorities with the methodologies that have been designed, and they have been piloted in discussion rather than rolling out the full methodology. After the New Year we will be taking out the methodologies and rolling those out. So the staff that are going to be operating the new methodologies, that David referred to as going out for consultation last week, will be piloting those in a real setting in real time. Last week the Inspectors that are going to be coming together as part of those teams and taking forward the work began their training sessions. So all these Inspectors that will be working within this inspection programme from September 2005 have begun to come together to develop the methodologies and to be trained in the approaches that are going to be taken. That work has already begun, so people will be trained by the time they get to the pilots in the Spring of next year, and then people will be fully up and running by September of next year. We have begun to map out the programme so we can look at the resources required for the programme, to come on to your question about how many people will be required, so I am clear from the Commission's point of view of those inspections that we will lead on, along with David's Inspectors, and those that will support over the period September 2005 to March 2006; and then the likely resources we will need from 2006 into 2007 and 2008. So that strategic work has begun in equipping our Inspectors with the skills - our collective Inspectors, not the Commission's Inspectors - to carry out this role, and is what we are on now while these documents are out for consultation. The importance of the pilots obviously is that the experience that we have of providing multi-professional teams for inspection, we can learn the lessons from those pilots and begin to incorporate it into the programme from September onwards.

Q96 Helen Jones: I understand what you are saying, and thank you for that, but it raises two questions. First of all, what are the major difficulties that you have encountered so far in doing this; and, secondly, do you believe you have enough time, after the pilots have been undertaken, to evaluate them properly and to make any changes that you need to make?

Mr Bell: I think it is worth repeating the point that we have not started out there yet, so it is difficult to comment. But what I should highlight, of course, is that in our different guises we have been used to doing some joint work previously. So, for example, the inspection of local education authorities has been a joint enterprise between Ofsted and the Audit Commission, and one of the predecessor bodies to David's organisation worked with a range of other Inspectorates to do work, for example, around children safeguarding. We worked with Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons on education in prisons; we worked with Her Majesty's Inspector of Probation to do youth offending team inspections, as do others. So I think we have some knowledge - and quite a bit of experience - of working together. You asked the question about difficulty. I suppose what you expect of your Inspectors is that they will come with an open mind and that they will not come along and say, "We have always done it this way in Ofsted" or "We have always done it this way in the Audit Commission," but they actually together try to work up an appropriate methodology. In relation to the pilots, I think the answer is yes, we do think that we will have time to make the amendments we require. We are not, however, naïve because once the programme begins to roll out in September we also need to be in a position, maybe after six or seven months - by the end of March 2006 is what we are planning - to look back over the first set of inspections to amend. So I think we have a very open mind about how we do this. At the same time, of course, we have to balance up a legitimate desire for change with a legitimate desire for a degree of certainty about how you are going to carry out inspections, because if you are on the receiving end of one of these inspections I do not think you would be too happy if we came along and said that we were going to radically change this, that or the other. I think the first pilots, before the whole scheme goes live, will give us a good opportunity to test out and amend as necessary.

Q97 Chairman: How are you going to choose where you go first, second and third?

Mr Bell: We have taken into account a variety of factors, and that would include the council's most recent performance in relation to education or children's social care; it would take account of the council's most recent performance in relation to the Comprehensive Performance Assessment; and it will take account of any other evidence that we have.

Q98 Chairman: Lord Laming's remarks to this Committee about a particular authority involved in the Victoria Climbié tragedy, you will take notice of them, will you?

Mr Bell: We will take account of all the evidence we have, and if Lord Laming has made observations, which he did, I am sure that will be fine. What I cannot do this afternoon - and I do not think any of us would want to do this afternoon - is to say it is one single piece of evidence, but I can assure you that this has been risk assessed as well. We have been quite clear that we need to ensure that the programme is sensitive to the risks as we assess them together. I think that has been the other virtue of putting together a joint programme; we have been able to sit around a table and say, "Where do you think the particular risks are in relation to one set of activities against another?" We have had to make a judgment about where we are going to visit first, where we are going to visit last. We are going to publish that programme, and I think it is important, as Steve said earlier, that we publish that alongside the programme for Comprehensive Performance Assessment, and that is our expected programme. But you would expect us, I am sure, Mr Chairman, to have a degree of flexibility there, that if something arose at short notice we would be able to inspect accordingly.

Q99 Chairman: So you could respond, say, to a scandalous state of affairs that was reported, or a whistleblower?

Mr Bell: Mr Chairman, I think all of us in our different Inspectorates have been used to doing that in the past already.

Mr Bundred: Not only could we, but we would think it essential to do so.

Chairman: Thank you. Valerie Davey.

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 names 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.

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 Straw: 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 of 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 Straw: 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 and are not going to deliver, and that is where our concerns were.

Q109 Jonathan Straw: 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 Straw: 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 Straw: 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 Straw: 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 and 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 we trained 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 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.

Q120 Helen Jones: I wanted to go back to something Mrs Walker said actually, because it worried me a little. When you were commenting on the "stay healthy" outcome, you talked all the time in terms of services for people who were ill. You talked about care for people. It seems to me that is not what it is about. I want to ask you whether we actually have the systems in place to look at health across the board, because this is not simply about treating children who are sick; it is about making sure they grow up healthy, and that means we have to look at how we look at the patterns that are set for children in pre-school, we have to look, as Steve Bundred rightly said, at open spaces and recreation. We also have to look - and it is a particular bee in my bonnet, I must confess - at the meals that are served up in schools. None of that was mentioned. How are we going to make sure that those types of things are catered for in the inspection framework? Schools will tell you, "It is nothing to do with us. It is not our problem. We have all these vending machines and they are making a lot of money for us. The meals - well, what can you do?" They shrug their shoulders at you a lot of the time. How is that sort of thing being taken into account? I use it as an example, because after telling us you were developing this joint inspection framework, what I then heard from you was about how things had always been done in health, and not the links between health, education, recreation and so on.

Mrs Walker: If I can come back on that, I am sorry if I was misleading. There was a particular point I wanted to make, which I will come on to at the end. The remit of the Healthcare Commission, which is a new statutory remit as we are a new body, actually includes both health care and health, which is actually extremely helpful from our perspective, because it allows it to be a driver of our work and absolutely ensure that we are not just looking at the traditional role of the health care organisation, but how they are working with others to bring about the broader health outcomes that we are after. That is our statutory remit, and over and above that, the standards that we inspect against, which are the Government's Department of Health standards, to get on to the so-called developmental standards are all about health care organisations working with others for the health of the population as a whole. So I actually feel that the framework and the drivers that we have in our system will ensure that we, as inspectors and the health care organisations, look at the wider remit. The point I was trying to make - and I am sorry if I was not clear about this - is that the national service framework actually highlights that there are within the health care system some gaps that we need to close, and we need to do that for children as well as ensure that the partnership joined-up working is going on for the broader health reasons.

Q121 Helen Jones: I understand that but I want to come back to my point. You talked about health care organisations co-operating with others. What I want to know is how, in a joint inspection framework, you look at health across the piece. It is not just about health care organisations co-operating; it is about what schools do, it is about what councils do.

Mr Bundred: Could I just add on the local authority side that the shared objective, the shared priority between local and central government which relates to building healthier and safer communities is one of the themes within the corporate assessment that will be undertaken for the CPA, for our comprehensive performance assessment, and so within that we will be looking at things like the progress that the local authority is making to achieving the decent home standard, for example. So that whole public health agenda of the contribution that the local authority is making, both through the delivery of its own services and through its leadership role in local partnerships, will be a feature of CPA.

Mr Bell: Can I just make one cautionary comment, and that is we cannot and nor should we attempt to inspect everything. You might think that is a strange thing to come from inspectorates and inspectors, but I think it is an important principle that we should not attempt to do everything that we could possibly inspect. One of the key tasks for us in judging where to put our inspection time and activity is to get to the right places, and I think one should not underestimate the general climate either. I think health is a very good example. People are talking about the health of school children, they are talking about physical activity and exercise, and they are talking about diet. They are talking about a lot of those things perhaps in a way that even three or four years ago people were not talking. I think we should see that as a positive sign, that we have people thinking, talking, doing things about health. What we cannot guarantee to do however is come behind every aspect of that and inspect it. So we have to be careful that we do not over-expect what inspection can do, even in a joint arrangement such s this.

Q122 Chairman: That leads us to some very interesting questions because, in a sense, on the one hand, the public could quite fear that your inspectorate would really in theory inspect almost everything. To give you an example of that, some of the questioning is directed, of course, to Anna because it is the health sector that has less of a history of working across the piece in cooperation. All of us, as constituency MPs, know the difficulty of that relationship with people like individual, single-handed GPs, health visitors and so on. The health system has its great strengths and also its great weaknesses. I suppose the crunch comes, Anna Walker, in terms of sharing of data, does it not, and just how that is going to work across the piece? Let me give you an example. If a GP knows that a patient is a drug addict or an alcoholic, and that might lead to the vulnerability of the children of that family, is that to be shared across the piece?

Mrs Walker: There is, of course, huge confidentiality about the position of an individual patient but it is often the case that we have a lot of information that we can aggregate and which actually then does tell us something about drug misuse in a particular area or obesity in a particular area or issues about children's health which we can then use to ask questions about that health care organisation's activity and we can use, with the setting of targets which can reflect local needs and can encourage improvement in the system - because, as I am sure you know, from 2005-06 the strategic health authorities are going to be looking at local targets with the local organisations, and our job will be to monitor against those targets. Those targets, I think very encouragingly, are explicitly to be not just about health care issues but to be drawn up alongside local authorities so they take account of the health needs of the population as well. There is something else actually that we are trying to put into the system, which is about encouraging health care organisations to look more broadly at the health, one way or another, of the population, and that is that for the first time from 2005-06 the assessment of the health care organisations is not going to be just a question of our assessment of that organisation, but it is going to take account of the views of local partners as well, so the patient forums, the local authorities, the strategic health authorities are actually drawn for the first time into the arena of whether that local health care organisation is performing for the broader needs of the population. In a sense, there is a bluntness in the instrument, but what we hope is that it is encouraging it in the right direction.

Q123 Chairman: We can see, Anna Walker, that that is a good answer in terms of how you are going to drive up systemic improvement - we can understand that - but it does not really answer the question I asked about sharing information and what is going to be a protected piece of information about an individual and what is going to be shared. Earlier in my questioning I asked about the difference between protecting the average child and the vulnerable child. We all know that one of the real problems is how quickly you can flag up that a child is vulnerable, and in my experience as a constituency Member, it is the health visitor who has access to domestic property is a crucial one, whereas a social worker will very often be kept at the door. That has certainly been my experience historically. It is A&E when a child is brought in with unusual injuries. If all this inspection is not going to end up with any shared information, at what stage does a GP, a health visitor, a hospital doctor say "I think social services ought to know about this"? What is the improvement in the system if they cannot do that?

Mrs Walker: Our own code of practice and those of the GPs and the health care workers is to share that information when they believe that there is an issue that actually does need to be investigated and pursued. That is our own role, set out in our code of practice for how we deal with this question of confidential information, because in some cases we recognise that the issues are such that that confidentiality may need to be breached for broader purposes.

Q124 Chairman: Where is that code of conduct?

Mrs Walker: That is our own code of conduct, something that we have actually consulted on, making it clear that when we do believe that we, as an inspectorate, are in receipt of a piece of information which we believe needs to be acted on, we can act on it even if there is a breach of confidentiality, but we will try to protect information about particular patients or circumstances where we can.

Q125 Chairman: So in order to get that information, would that individual case have to be put to you?

Mrs Walker: No. What is most likely to happen actually in our particular case is that somebody comes to us with some serious concerns about a particular case, and we get that through complaints and also through procedures for whistle blowing activities for staff. Those issues we will take very seriously indeed, and we will investigate or pursue as necessary if we believe - our phrase, and I am sorry because it sounds so bureaucratic - that there is patient safety at risk. Our whole system is geared to ensuring that we act as we can.

Q126 Chairman: How would that work in a school, David, in terms of a child that was coming to school and there were clear signs of something pretty disturbing going on in the home background? How bound are you by the sensitivity of that information?

Mr Bell: We have quite a lot of experience of this, Mr Chairman, particularly in our early years work, where often complaints are brought to our attention. We make the general point that we are not a child protection agency. However, we have information and we are prepared to work with those that are responsible for child protection. So, to take your specific example, if, say, during the course of an inspection - and this would be very unusual on a school inspection - an inspector picked up some information, their responsibility would be to feed that information to the head teacher, who in most cases would be the designated person responsible for child protection, who has certain responsibilities to inform local social services. Similarly, in relation to our work in early years, if a parent phoned up and made a complaint and we felt that complaint was beyond a complaint just about car parking outside the child minder but actually raised some very serious issues, we have established protocols within Ofsted about how these are dealt with, and we certainly have a within-the-same-day notification to the local social services authority where we have a child safety or child protection issue. I think it is important that the inspectorates, whilst not child protection agencies per se, have in place systems for doing it. The other comment I was going to make about this whole issue is, Mr Chairman, I hope you will be reassured to know that in one of the elements of our framework that we are consulting on, one of the ways in which we will judge the effectiveness of the management of services for children and young people is the extent to which they work co-operatively with partners to share information. It is a key issue for us in the inspection system. One is to look at the individual child or person concerned, but you would see what shared protocols there are, what the procedures and information flows are, because if they are unclear or people are uncertain about them, that should cause us some concern, in particular the sorts of examples you have described where information really does need to be shared between agencies.

Q127 Chairman: You can see why the Committee wants to probe this, because the creation of the Children Act is very much related to a particularly tragic case - not entirely - and the public would feel cheated if we had set up a whole new framework that actually did not address the ability to be more sensitivised to when those sorts of vulnerable children were really at risk.

Mr Bell: We need to be sensitivised to them, and I think that the way in which we have put this together demonstrates how sensitive we are to those gaps in services, those information flows. What I would want to say though, Mr Chairman, is that on inspection, however effective our services are in local areas, we can never give an absolute guarantee that a child will never come to harm again. What we try to do at service delivery level and inspection is to try over time to identify the greatest risks, and then seek to minimise those risks, hence the priority given to information sharing, because that appears from some of the headline cases to be one of those areas that is of most vulnerability.

Q128 Chairman: But we do know that sharing of information is the key to this, is it not? All the history shows sharing of information and knowing across the piece. There are areas of confidentiality that make that difficult and that is of concern to all of us that want to avoid another tragedy. They will occur. We are human beings. There will be others, but what we are trying to push you on is that in a sense we know in institutions, in pre-school settings, in anything that is institutional, your remit will run. What about the more marginal areas, the work that Professor Pascal has done in Birmingham about children that disappear because they are in refuges, that are very difficult to track? Do you have a competence over places like refuges? How does that operate, when you get to the difficult things for bureaucracies to follow?

Mr Bell: This week, for example, we commented on those young people who disappear from the education system, and actually, one of the points we made this week is that these young people become more and more vulnerable because they are often wandering the streets, and, if they are below 16, they are certainly not under the care of any educational establishment. It is in a sense by definition harder if they are outside the system, and what we have tried to do is to bring in services. To give you a specific example, when we carried out some work looking at alternative provision for key stage 4 youngsters between the ages of 14 and 16, we were quite surprised how much of that was unregistered, and we made the point about that. Some people said, "That's just bureaucracy. These agencies are providing good services." I would actually argue it is far more than bureaucracy, because if you do not have registered provision, there is no requirement to say who is there, and if you do not know who is there, how do you know what is going on? So I think it is important that, if we can identify those different sorts of services that provide, we have them within the orbit not of bureaucracy or regulation but in the orbit of sight, so we can see them and we know what is going on.

Mr Behan: It is a fact that the current guidance that all authorities work under in relation to sharing information is working together under the Children Act, and that lays out quite clearly the duty that individuals are under to share information where they think the safeguarding of a child is an issue. What Lord Laming's report in Victoria Climbie exposed are the issues about that being implemented at a local level, so one of our roles as inspectorates is to ensure that we are focusing on precisely this group of children that you are exploring in your questioning to make sure that those children are indeed being protected, so, as David said, we will look at the arrangements for partnership that are in place, particularly the new arrangements for replacing child protection committees, and safeguarding boards which need to operate a local level will want to know that they know the children that are in those communities that are at risk and that there are robust plans in place to deal with them. As David said, never say never, but what we are looking for is to ensure that people are clear about those and, as you said, what the Victoria Climbie case identified is children that previously had not really been seen by authorities: a child from Africa into France and then from France into England. I think what that has done is heightened the awareness of how systems need to operate at a local level. Our role as an inspectorate is to ensure that we are clear in the way that we are working with authorities at a local level about how they identify the children in their area, asking questions, not just about children that may disappear but children that we know about, children that may be involved in prostitution, for instance, all those groups, to make sure that there are partnerships in place locally that are working to develop those services. I think that is a distinction I would draw between our role as inspectorates and what the local services need to be doing about sharing information. If as part of our inspection activity we are looking at a particular case or indeed speaking to a child or an adult, and there are particular concerns reflected to our inspectors, then again, we have protocols to share information about what that child or that adult share with us. One of the things behind Helen Jones's question took me back to the debate that was going on around the time the Green Paper was being developed on the back of Lord Laming's recommendations, and it was about the importance of services intervening early and developing preventative services. So to go back to the outcomes that we were talking about earlier, there is a number of outcomes in there about preventing suicide, about preventing children being absent from school, which are all designed to ensure that the appropriate preventative action is being taken to ensure that there is that web of services at a local level designed to prevent some of the problems that might occur to children. Again, our job is to ensure that partnerships are in place, and they are aware of the needs of children, and preventative strategies are being adopted, not to intervene when problems have become acute and chronic but to intervene at an early stage to ensure that children are not passing through services, particularly vulnerable children, so that we are getting that fabric of services around them. A lot of the debate about how local partnerships will operate through early years work, for instance, are designed to identify problems that might occur at a later stage and begin to weave that web of services that there needs to be at a local level. One of the questions we might ask as inspectorates on a children's inspection would be about the fabric of preventative services that are being developed at a local area and whether it is related to the needs of the local population so that services can be targeted and directed. As my comments suggest, I think this is one of the key areas. We need to make sure that we are looking at vulnerable children as well as at all children through the inspection activity we take forward.

Q129 Valerie Davey: It seems to me that if as an education service we have lost 10,000 children off our books, then all the sensitivity about the issues you are talking about becomes almost irrelevant. Victoria Climbie was known: she was known to social services, she was known to the church, she was known to the school, and we failed her. What about the children who are not known, and what about this 10,000? I do not think we can go on. I can remember coming into national politics in 1997, when there were 13,000. It is give or take that figure still. What are we doing about those 10,000?

Mr Bell: It is an issue that we do look at and we will continue to look at in the future under this framework, what local authorities and schools are doing. It comes right down to that level. What is the institution that knows those children best? It is the local school. Every child has to be registered either on the books of a school or in a pupil referral unit. What tends to happen in some cases, sadly, is out of sight, out of mind. Do not forget we are talking about some of the most damaged and difficult young people, and if they do not turn up at school, sometimes people think "Thank goodness they are not here," because it is less hassle for everybody else, including students and teachers. People do feel that, and what happens is these youngsters drift off, and then after a while there is a referral to an education welfare service, and actually, it then becomes more and more difficult. We should not lose sight of the number of young people, certainly of 15 plus, who are away from home and are actually out all together. So it is not a case of somebody can go up to their house and knock the door and say "Why is such and such not at school?" Many of these young people just go elsewhere. I think the issue starts all the way back that, however difficult a young person is, it is the school's responsibility to alert those services that are going to do something alongside the school as soon as possible. I agree with you. I think it remains one of the most alarming aspects of our education system that so many youngsters just drop out of view.

Q130 Valerie Davey: So the outcome of staying safe is fundamental, and the less we know that children are safe, then we cannot actually implement the other outcomes.

Mr Bell: It is a bit like school attendance, when we say "If you don't turn up, you won't learn." If we do not know where you are, how can we tell if you are safe?

Q131 Chairman: I was just pondering on some of the answers we had, Anna Walker, from you. I have a note from one of our special advisers that the Royal College of GPs has indicated they would be prepared to share sensitive information about particular cases within the primary health care team but not beyond that, and especially not to the sort of database envisaged by the Children Act. Is that an accurate reflection on the situation?

Mrs Walker: I am not aware of that position. I am again very happy to take that away and come back to you on it, and to see whether that position is consistent with the statutory requirements.

Q132 Paul Holmes: The emphasis in Every Child Matters is on integrated inspection teams. What exactly will one of those look like in practice? How many people will there be on it? Exactly a quarter from each organisation, or what?

Mr Bell: Not necessarily as arithmetically precise as you describe it. A team might be somewhere between half a dozen and eight people. We would certainly expect representation in the main from CSCI and Ofsted. There will be somebody from the Audit Commission as well, and crucially, going back to what Steve said earlier, they will act as a bridge between the joint area review work and the wider corporate assessment work, and in some ways that is the sort of practical embodiment of the integration that Steve has described. In our inspections, based on what I said earlier, we will deploy inspectors from other inspectorates, including the Healthcare Commission, depending on the circumstances of the area. So, for example, we might be in an area where there were specific issues around juvenile justice, and therefore we might call upon our colleagues in one of the criminal, justice inspectorates. We are not going to be absolutely precise in every circumstance. Part of our rationale for this is that you have bespoke inspection teams to deal with particular circumstances, but that is broadly how it is going to look.

Q133 Paul Holmes: So do the various organisations envisage that they will have specific inspectors who are trained to do this type of work and they will not be working on other projects?

Mr Bell: We have had quite a big debate about this around the table. I think our view as a steering group of chief inspectors looking at this was we did not want people just to dip in and out with no specific training, one week here, one week there. I think it is important, particularly for those that will be doing this for the majority of their time, to have a substantial training and experience in it. Of course, circumstances will dictate. Sometimes you have to do it, but certainly from CSCI's perspective and Ofsted's perspective, we are likely to have a cadre of people who will be doing this for the bulk of their time and we think that is the right way to do it, because this will require specialist expertise and we think it is important we devote sufficient resource to doing it.

Q134 Paul Holmes: Why the difference then from Ofsted's point of view? ATL, in the evidence they have submitted, have said - and they will be reassured by what you have said, I think - that the current practice of using contracted-out casual labour for school inspections has made it more difficult for Ofsted to get consistency of expertise and judgment. Why adopt a different approach for this type of inspection?

Mr Bell: The ATL certainly framed that in a particularly pejorative manner, it has to be said. The point is that we want to use in the main full-time inspectors working on this business. That would be consistent in fact with what we have done in our previous lives. For example, when we work with the Audit Commission on LEA inspection, although we use some people as additional inspectors, in the main it is the full-time staff of Ofsted, and it is the full-time staff of the Audit Commission. It has been the case in the work we did previously for the social services inspectorate. In the main, we use our full-time staff. You might say that still does not answer the question of why there is one approach in one sector. There is simply an issue of numbers. You have 24,000 schools to be inspected. We have 150 upper-tier authorities to inspect if one is looking at the council functions, and therefore it is more do‑able to do it with your own staff. Certainly I know that historically, the different organisations have had additional inspectors to join their teams, although these have often been people who have been quite experienced and built up an expertise in this kind of inspection activity. There is one other comment I would make about this - we have made it twice before and I think we should make it again - there are certain things that we will no longer be doing as discrete inspection activity, and we think that is part of our contribution to making the inspection system more proportionate. There will no longer be a freestanding local education authority inspection, there will no longer be a connection service inspection, there will no longer be a 14-19 area inspection, and my colleagues will be able to cite the things that they will not be doing. That is very important if these arrangements are going to be proportionate, and we think that is a vital principle, and it is an important way of reassuring people that we are not going to over-inspect them.

Q135 Paul Holmes: Steve said earlier that they had already started training inspectors for this role, and David Bell said the same, and you are going to expand that after Christmas. How joined up is the training? At the moment is it separate training for separate institutions?

Mr Bell: No. We are bringing the people together to train jointly. We think it is terribly important. Steve might want to talk about the corporate performance assessment part of CPA, because obviously that is separate, but certainly Steve's colleagues will be part of joint area review as well, and they will be part of that training. No, it is a very important principle that the people that each of the inspectorates are likely to use come together and train together. That is terribly important. It would just miss the point if we went off and trained our own people completely separately.

Q136 Paul Holmes: So the training that both of you referred to as already having begun is joint training?

Mr Bundred: The training which has already begun in relation to corporate assessment has not been joint training yet, but those people who will be undertaking corporate assessments will additionally receive joint training for the role that they will play in the joint area review.

Q137 Chairman: What about early years? You have two levels of inspection at early years already. You do two different kinds of inspection depending on the early years setting.

Mr Bell: That is driven by legislation. We have Children Act inspections, which are the functions that Ofsted took over in 2001. In fact, we have three inspections actually, because we also have what are called section 122 inspections, which is where nursery education has an education component previously started under the nursery voucher scheme, and thirdly, we have section 10 school inspections, which also covers the early years. The Government's child care strategy which was published a couple of weeks ago by the Chancellor lays out a medium term intention for regular reform in this area post 2005 and we are all for that, because I think it is fair to say that the legislation is overlapping.

Q138 Chairman: You do not think inspection in early years is good enough yet?

Mr Bell: I think there are confusing overlaps. So, for example, we can turn up at a school which provides both child care and its normal business, and actually by legislation have to report separately. Under our new arrangements for school inspection we are going to make that a single inspection activity. It is something in fact we have not actually discussed this afternoon, but one of the other dimensions of children's services inspection is that we inspectorates already have to work together, for example, in residential boarding provision. As far as we can, we are aiming to inspect together at the same time, so that we avoid the burden of a provider saying, "Last week I had them, this week I've got you and I've got somebody else next week." I think there is regulatory reform still to come on this one, absolutely, and we are up for that.

Mr Behan: There is a whole raft of our work about the regulation of services which we also think needs to be reviewed. We have recently issued a consultation document to look at the changes in the regulatory framework. The examples are we would regulate children's homes, independent fostering agencies, independent adoption agencies, so there is a similar need to get coherence about our inspection and regulatory activity across the piece, which sits next to the questions you are asking David about in relation to early years services. So we have begun the process of how we carry out the joint area reviews and integrated inspection, but we need to incorporate into that the judgments about how we regulate services at a local level and get even further coherence. Some of that requires changes to minimum standards in the regulatory framework itself and in some cases primary legislation. So it is important we carry those discussions back to government about how we can look at the regulatory framework to ensure that there is coherence. There are some areas where we have duplication around the licensing function of fostering services; we are responsible for licensing local authority fostering services and independent fostering services, so we could go into a local authority and ask them about the fostering services immediately following having been in currently to do a children's inspection. We think that is a layer of overlap and duplication which is not necessary, so to get a more elegant fit of the way we carry out these functions is important. There is much more to do. We have begun a process of reform and modernisation but there is more to do.

Mr Bell: I think there are some important questions to ask about where we should stop regulating, never mind eliminate overlap. For example, one of my colleagues says that I should get out of the Whacky Warehouse. I do not think they mean me personally, but if you go to the Whacky Warehouse creche facilities, up on the wall you will see my signature saying that this Whacky Warehouse is suitable for use, so says Ofsted. If that is the kind of couple of hours maximum creche facility, you might see it on the Ikea ball park or whatever, is there a question about whether the state should be regulating that kind of activity? That opens up all sorts of other questions. People say, "It's not as safe as it might be if you are not regulating it." I think there is a very serious debate to be had about the future of regulation and where we regulate and being more intelligent, to use an expression that Steve cited, and get out of regulating things that perhaps we should not be regulating.

Chairman: That may be true, Chief Inspector, but the fact of the matter is that when we did our early years inquiry, what was evident from that - and Helen and Val will remember this - was that what was of great value, reasonable high quality delivery at the earliest stage, even in terms of the setting of the Whacky Warehouse, was that you picked up problems early on. In the case that we were looking at, special educational needs problems could be looked at and moved on much earlier in a child's development. I hear what you say but I think we have to have a longer conversation on that before we would be fully convinced. Even in terms of the vulnerable child, the earlier you notice the child is vulnerable the better.

Q139 Paul Holmes: Ofsted's empire grows and grows: schools, FE, nurseries, play groups, child minders, Whacky Warehouses and now you are the lead organisation covering everything from health to social services in this respect, yet like all the rest of the civil service, you are supposed to be getting rid of 20 per cent of your staff. Can you take on all the extra functions and get rid of one-fifth of your staff?

Mr Bell: The important thing to say in relation to children's services is that we are collaborating with other organisations, and it has been a serious consideration for all of us. It is not just Ofsted that is subject to these reductions; my colleagues here in all the inspectorates are subject to the same requirements. The other financial pressure, if I can put it that way, probably comes from the centre of government, saying what is all this going to cost? Is it more burdensome than it used to be? We have devised a system that we have to be able to fund within our existing and future budgets. That is the case for Ofsted; we factored this into the budget reductions that you have described. I know my colleagues have said exactly the same. They will fund the contribution that they are making to this, and they are going to have to fund that against a reducing base, because all of us are having to make reductions in line with the Chancellor's spending programme.

Q140 Paul Holmes: Their silence presumably means they agree with you. They are all happy that they can do this within the framework of losing staff and within existing budget levels as well. Is that going to affect the balance of what an inspection is? How much of it is desk-based analysing of information and how much of it will be going out and interviewing people?

Mr Bell: In the best sense, you have a desk element. Do not forget, as we have said, we draw upon other field work that has previously been collected. If one looks on a desk at the findings of institutional inspection, that in itself has been derived from inspectors on site finding that out, so in a good sense you are drawing upon existing evidence. We have said that, as far as field work is concerned under joint area review, that is likely to be either in areas where we have insufficient evidence generated by a previous inspection activity, or where we have particular concerns. You would expect us to do that, to use our scarce inspection resource wisely and sensibly. Going back to the point, we cannot and should not inspect everything that we could conceivably inspect when looking at children's services. We have to be smart in making those decisions.

Mrs Walker: Health care is a huge remit, and quite clearly we do have to take decisions to match the resources that we have available. We are very clear that these issues relating to children, the joint area reviews and some activity of our own in relation to children is extremely important for us. The second point I wanted to make was that you talk about this balance of analysing information and visiting, the more traditional inspection. We believe that the only way we are going to be able to carry out what we need to do going forward within the resources which, quite properly, the Government is saying there is a limit to, is actually to use the analysis of information precisely in the way that David describes; analyse the information and visit where you have a concern or you think there is a gap, and we believe that only in that way can we get it where it matters.

Chairman: Some of us might feel that the policy that says a 20 per cent cut right across the piece regardless of the service might also come from the Whacky Warehouse.

Q141 Mr Pollard: I remember, David Bell, you said some time ago that you were starting a lighter touch with your inspection, yet I can remember when you first started with nurseries and play groups, I had a group come to my surgery and said it was like the Gestapo going round. I did report that at the time, much to the disgruntlement of your colleagues. Is it likely that you will be able to maintain a light touch in this new regime, bearing in mind that you are starting a new process that nobody really knows about just yet?

Mr Bell: It is a big question, and it really has exercised our collective minds when we have been putting this together. We recognise that we have to and we want to, under the instructions of the Minister, to do field work in every authority in this first round of joint area reviews. That will help us to establish a baseline, but I should say it will not be the same field work in every place. We will use that evidence base to determine how much field work, so right away you will have proportionality in children's services. To take an example, if you have, via the evidence that Ofsted and the Commission has, evidence of high-performing education and children's social services functions, and you have a range of other evidence, including corporate performance, suggesting that an authority is doing well, it will be a very light touch experience. We are not starting off with a one size fits all. I think we are all very clear, if for no other reason than we cannot afford it to be a heavy touch everywhere. I would like to hope to persuade you that we would not choose to have a heavy touch everywhere. I think it is about strategic regulation, smarter regulation and, in a sense, going where we are going to have most impact and most value..

Mr Bundred: The only thing I would add to that is that there is also a commitment on all our parts to evaluation. So as well as piloting the approach, we will have some independent assessment of whether we have achieved the objectives that we have set ourselves such as the ones David has just outlined.

Q142 Chairman: Where is that independent assessment coming from?

Mr Bundred: That is yet to be commissioned.

Mr Bell: We have not commissioned it yet. We are going to do it as an independent assessment, so we will do our own internal "What has it felt like?" in the back of the pilots, and we have committed some inspectorates to commissioning external evaluation probably after the first year or so.

Q143 Chairman: Who will do that?

Mr Bell: I do not know. It could be a university. It could be a policy organisation. I genuinely do not know.

Q144 Chairman: It is an interesting question: who inspects the inspectorates? At the end of the day, who does? Is it the Department? The Department for Education and Skills is the lead department. Who at the end of the day says, "Come on, all this inspection is not working" and pulls the rug? It will be the Department, will it not?

Mr Bell: Chairman, I seem to recall we have had this conversation on previous occasions with this Committee.

Q145 Chairman: There is more of you. You are growing like dragon's teeth.

Mr Bell: I think the Department, possibly Departments, will have a view on this, and clearly they are expressing views, whether it is the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister or the DfES. They are looking to the outcomes of inspection, but I think we just felt that it was important to have an external commissioned evaluation that will be able to get our experience of doing the inspection as well as find out about the experience of those being inspected.

Q146 Chairman: The Children's Commissioner cannot say, "Look, you are not doing a good job," can he or she?

Mr Bell: The Children's Commissioner may have a view on how well we are meeting our objective laid out in this framework to solicit the views of children and young people. In fact, I would be very surprised if the Children's Commissioner did not want to comment on that. I would have thought they would be looking at the inspectorates to determine how well we are doing our job in that regard.

Q147 Chairman: So the Commissioner could blow the whistle on you?

Mr Bell: I think it is very possible the Commissioner could say "You are not doing enough for children and young people" via this process.

Q148 Mr Pollard: I was pleased, as we all were, to hear that children were consulted about the five outcomes. That was excellent news. Are you going to involve children in the inspection bit?

Mr Behan: I think it is a really important question. It was at the heart of how I would have answered Paul's question, because whilst we want to be light touch and proportionate, it is also important where we visit that time is spent with children, and indeed parents, because often some of the issues are about how parents are supported to parent. So we can ascertain their views about their experiences of services. That will be a key criterion for whether services are delivering positively and meeting the needs of people by asking people that are using the services. We need to be quite careful that when we do the field work, we are not just focusing on the strategic issues, but we are focusing on the way services are delivered at a local level, and when we are looking for the evidence about how well those services are delivered, that time is spent with people that are using the services about their experiences of services. So we are not just asking front-line staff or senior managers but we are asking people that use services. We have spent a lot of time in designing the methodology to ensure that we have activity going on to speak to children and to their parents about how services are being met. The children's rights director in the Commission will need to work with the Commissioner on this, because the children's rights director by statute has a responsibility to be aware of what is happening in regulated services - that is boarding schools, children's homes, fostering services - and the children's rights director carries out a lot of consultations during the year abut children's experiences of services. We have just published a report on Safe from Harm, and a report on children in boarding schools and what children think of boarding schools. So I think it is important that the children's rights director and the Commissioner work together and do come back to us as inspectorates about what children are saying about their expectations of services, about the qualities children expect to see in services, and making sure that we in turn are asking local authorities the right kind of questions about the way that they are meeting needs at a local level. I think this is a really important relationship and we are clear that we can judge services as being effective where children, young people and their parents are saying "These are good services; they are meeting our needs."

Q149 Chairman: Interestingly enough, some of the people that we are talking to or talking about in our prison education review at the moment, we get the sense that we are asking people what they thought of the service, because they are the very children we talked about earlier that disappear out of the system at an early age. David Bell, you must feel a bit worried about all this because, in a sense, you experimented with consulting with parents and you do not think it works, because on two fronts you are changing the method or giving up on parents, are you not?

Mr Bell: Certainly not.

Q150 Chairman: Inspections are not going to include parents in future, are they?

Mr Bell: That is not correct, Chairman. What we are not going to do under short notice inspection is have a parents' meeting, but as we are already finding through our pilot inspections, parents are continuing to make their views known to us. So for example when a letter goes out, even at short notice, informing parents of an inspection, they are able to make their views known, and we have found on a number of different inspections carried out so far that parents have been in touch. We are absolutely up for involving parents. It is worth remember that Ofsted was set up to provide that information to parents. We have a question mark based on our evidence of increasingly limited attendance at parents' meetings in advance of inspections. We have the evidence that that is not as effective as it was ten years ago, but we are absolutely committed to continuing to get the views of parents and have those views inform our inspections and our inspectors.

Q151 Chairman: The new Education Bill also takes away some aspects of parental involvement does it not?

Mr Bell: Are you referring to lay inspectors?

Q152 Chairman: Yes.

Mr Bell: Mr Chairman, again, on this point, I find it hard to be persuaded that if somebody has done 250 inspections as a lay inspector that they are actually a lay person inspecting. You may be a highly competent inspector but I think it is hard to argue that you are a lay person bringing a unique perspective. We want to ensure that the best inspectors continue to inspect, and some of those people who have been designated lay inspectors I am sure will come into the new system, but I think we can capture the views of lay people. We have been consulting on this issue recently. I think we have to do it differently to make sure that we get those views and continue to get those views to inform inspections.

Chairman: David Bell, David Behan, Steve Bundred, Anna Walker, we have learned a lot. I hope you have enjoyed the hospitality of the Select Committee, and we will be seeing you again. Thank you very much.