Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260-279)
CHRISTINE GILBERT
CBE, MICHAEL HART
AND MIRIAM
ROSEN
10 DECEMBER 2008
Q260 Paul Holmes: You say that you
do not know, but you are the head of Ofsted. You inspected them
and gave them a good review last year and a disastrous review
this year, so surely you should know. You should be saying, "I,
the Chief Inspector, was totally misled and made to look a fool
on this; we want heads to roll and we want to know what is going
on."
Christine Gilbert: But that is
not my job. We inspect and we report; we do not employ the people
at Haringey. I would suggest, if that sort of thing happens, that
there would need to be an investigation within the council and
that the disciplinary procedures should be applied, with the outcome
of those procedures being a range of things leading either to
sacking or even, as has been said, to a criminal case.
Q261 Chairman: Let us clear this
up in terms of data, Chief Inspector. When you answered my original
question, you were a little unclear and fuzzy about who had carried
out the inspection and who they had met. Then, when you answered
David Chaytor's question, it became clear that you do not keep
those records after three months. I think that Miriam said that
you keep records of inspections for only three months. That seems
bizarre to me. How do you know that all the allegations that you
have been making about being misled are based on the truth if
you do not even have the records for the inspection on which you
were misled? You cannot tell us who your inspectors met and when,
or what they said. You cannot tell us anything about it.
Christine Gilbert: I am basing
what I am saying about misleading information on the information
in the report and letter that we have, and in the data that was
submitted. The responsibility for submitting the data—
Q262 Chairman: Could you be clear
about which data you kept, because you are saying that records
of inspections are not kept for more than three months?
Christine Gilbert: The only data
and evidence that I assume that we have are those set out in the
report or in the APA letter. May I just confirm that with Miriam?
Miriam Rosen: Yes, we have only
the APA letter.[1]
Christine Gilbert: That is a detailed
letter with facts, figures and so on.
Q263 Chairman: So how do we know
what happened if you have only that letter? You do not have any
record of what your inspectors did, who they met or what the answers
to their questions were. That is a great shock to me, because
I assumed that much of what you had said was from your detailed
knowledge of what happened in 2006 and 2007, and on your reflections
on that in 2008, but you are now telling the Committee that none
of that material is kept. Do you even know who carried out the
inspections and which of your people were there?
Christine Gilbert: Yes. The evidence
base is in the joint area review report, which is a big report,
and in the annual performance assessment letter. We do have records
about inspections and so on. That is practised right across the
piece in different inspections, although it may be something that
you want to come back to at another meeting.
Q264 Chairman: We really would, Chief
Inspector, because in the report that I read—I had to be
locked in a room in the Department to have access to it—it
was pointed out that many of the health records were totally illegible
and unsigned. Did your team pick up on that kind of flagrant misuse
of record keeping? I presume that you do not know because you
have destroyed the evidence.
Christine Gilbert: Yes, because
that sort of detail, if they had looked at it and it was significant,
would be in the reports. My point about inaccurate data can be
substantiated by looking at our reports and at the case files
in Haringey. At the moment, we still have the evidence trail for
Haringey, but the reports stand as a substantive piece of evidence.
Q265 Chairman: But let us get this
clear. What do you mean by the evidence trail? I do not know about
the rest of the Committee, but it is not clear to me what the
evidence trail is if you admit that you destroyed the records
after three months.
Christine Gilbert: The evidence
would be in the report, which refers to case files looked at,
the points made on those case files and so on.
Q266 Chairman: But that is like an
academic writing an article and destroying all their research
material. That is horrific, is it not? Should you not keep the
material, especially on safeguarding children? I understand that
there is a large body on inspection of schools, but with the sensitivity
of this matter—
Christine Gilbert: I am just talking
about the rules that we have currently for the different forms
of inspection. In inspections at the moment, that evidence is
destroyed in a certain time.
Q267 Paul Holmes: You said that the
evidence would be in the report, but the report that we are talking
about is last year's, which said that Haringey was doing a good
job. Clearly, there was no evidence in that report that medical
records were illegible, that there were no signatures or that
children were not being seen and nobody was picking up on it.
That is not in the report.
Christine Gilbert: It is in the
report, because it says that core assessments and initial assessments
have got better. It makes specific reference to that. It also
makes specific reference to the case load of social workers, their
appointments and so on. The evidence is in there that led us to
reach—
Paul Holmes: Except that it turns out
that most of that was untrue, and that you were lied to.
Christine Gilbert: It was wrong,
yes.
Q268 Paul Holmes: This still strikes
me: over the years, Ofsted has dealt with schools in a very aggressive
way, such as naming and shaming—although I know that that
is on the Government's part rather than Ofsted's—or saying,
"This school's rubbish; unless you get your act together,
we'll close you down next year; bring in special measures,"
yet here, when a child has died and people have lied to you about
the process and misled you completely, you seem very relaxed and
laid back about saying, "Well, I don't know who we met, and
I don't know who should be penalised."
Christine Gilbert: Sorry, I do
not in any way want to give the impression that I am relaxed about
this. It is a really serious thing to have occurred. What I am
saying is that Ofsted does not employ the people who did those
things, and it is up to the people who employ them to take this
further. We have absolutely no role in which to do that. In terms
of naming and shaming, we are highlighting key issues that we
think are crucial to the safety and welfare of children, such
as the serious case reviews. We have done the annual evaluation,
as I said, and now, quarterly, we are publishing on the website
the names of the local safeguarding children boards, the area
that they come in and their grade. We are doing a number of things
to highlight areas of bad practice and poor practice.
Q269 Mr Timpson: Bearing in mind
the deficiencies exposed in the annual performance assessment
process in Haringey in 2007, and widening this out from Haringey,
how confident can we and you be in the rigour and accuracy of
other APAs in local authorities around the country?
Christine Gilbert: I think that
we need to be clearer about the APA being an assessment of outcomes.
As I said earlier, it is a series of outcomes and briefings that
should give us a picture about an area. I have to say that my
impression is that most councils up and down the country will
have completed their returns with integrity and with—
Q270 Mr Timpson: Where do you gain
that impression from, based on what has happened over the last
three weeks?
Christine Gilbert: From the work
that we have done. That was why I wrote on Monday to every local
authority in the country asking their chief executives to vouch
for the accuracy of the information that has come in to us.
Q271 Mr Timpson: Can we conclude
from that that you do not have confidence in APAs in other local
authorities?
Christine Gilbert: No. I generally
have confidence in them. I have far more confidence in inspection
and on-site investigation of key issues. On the second day in
Haringey, I was being told of the level of inadequacy. Miriam
will tell me that that was because all the inspectors were working
15 hours on those two days. Nevertheless, the extent of what was
going wrong in Haringey was being reported to me at the end of
the second day. That was from inspection and on-the-ground investigation.
That is why we were changing the process anyway—to get a
greater feel of what things were like on the ground. The data
are important, but they are not the whole picture; you have to
get underneath the data, which is what we are trying to do. I
will feel confident about publishing in the middle of next week,
if I get assurances from local authorities beforehand.
Q272 Mr Timpson: Did the APA fail
so spectacularly in this case partly because it involved nothing
more than a paper exercise? In all your inspections involving
children in care and children's services—not just your intensive
triennial safeguarding inspections—do you not need to see
social workers doing their job on the ground in the same way that
a schools inspector sits in a classroom and watches a teacher
perform their role teaching children? That would make your life
more difficult, given that social workers spend only about 5%
of their working day face-to-face with children, but do you not
need to ensure that you have the right quantity and quality of
people to do the job?
Christine Gilbert: I absolutely
support the need for the really close inspection of practice,
but that is not gained as easily by observing one or two social
workers as by observing teachers in schools. We need to get underneath
the practice of social work, which involves not only looking at
what social workers do, but detailed discussions with users about
what they think. We already talk to children, although not through
the APA process. We talk to children in care who have experienced
the system and so on, so I absolutely support the need for inspections
in coming to a judgment.
Q273 Mr Timpson: Do your Ofsted inspectors
dealing with social care and children's services, especially those
coming from an educational background, of which there are many,
have the expertise to identify risks and failings and to judge
whether social workers and others in children's services are doing
their job to the necessary standard to protect children?
Christine Gilbert: I do. In the
main, the people looking at social care have come over from the
Commission for Social Care Inspection and are social care inspectors.
However, moving to different areas of our remit, over time there
will be scope for inspectors trained and equipped to look more
generally at, for example, boarding schools, rather than having
two sets of inspectors going in at the same time, which happens
now. Over time, we might well breed a different sort of inspector
with the breadth to do that. However, the people looking at social
care certainly have a social care background, and those doing
the APA were one education HMI and one social care inspector.
We have not lost expertise in social care and we value it very
much. In fact, we will be extending it to look at what we need
to do with the new comprehensive area assessment.
Chairman: Andrew wants to come in on
this point.
Q274 Mr Pelling: I might have misheard,
but I thought that our witness said that most local authorities
provided true information. How widespread then is the misinformation
being provided to Ofsted?
Christine Gilbert: We do not know,
which is why I wrote on Monday to all chief executives asking
them to give me assurances that the information submitted for
this year's APA was accurate.
Q275 Mr Pelling: By definition, chief
executives are straightforward, direct and honest, but can any
measures be employed to judge whether Ofsted is being widely misinformed?
Christine Gilbert: The only way
to get underneath that is through sampling and checking, which
needs to be built into our proposals. Any chief executive or director
of children's services knowingly supplying wrongful information
could be sacked—questions were asked about that earlier.
That is the ultimate end of any disciplinary process. That is
in terms of the council; whether it goes beyond that is something
else.
Q276 Mr Heppell: The JAR would not
have happened if it had not been for the Baby P case—we
are agreed on that—and it is only because of the JAR that
the failure of the data has been identified. I find it a little
worrying that you say that chief executives will be asked to say
that the data is okay. You said that the only way in which you
could ensure that the data for all the authorities was accurate
would be to do some sampling. Have you done any sampling?
Christine Gilbert: It would not
be our job to do the sampling because very little of the data
comes back directly to us. The data comes to us from the Department
of Health, and a lot of it comes from the DCSF and from Government
offices and so on, so it comes at us from different ends and contribute
to the assessment. The sampling would not be our job, but I am
raising this with other inspectorates. Although I am talking this
morning about the social care data, the Department of Health was
finding similar things in its approach.
Q277 Mr Heppell: So are you recommending
that people do sampling?
Christine Gilbert: As inspectorates,
we need to look right across the piece, because there is an increasing
reliance on self-assessment and you need checks on how people
are assessing themselves.
Mr Heppell: So you are recommending that
they do sampling, but as far as you know, no sampling is going
on at present.
Christine Gilbert: Some data are
checked by the Audit Commission and so on, but we need to be clearer
about who is doing what in the checking of data, and whether we
ask the Audit Commission to do it, as part of its consideration
of a local authority's work, or the district auditor for that
particularly authority. When I was in a local authority, the district
auditor, which happened to be the Audit Commission, regularly
checked a whole range of data.
Q278 Fiona Mactaggart: Chief Inspector,
I am looking at four people. You are the one who has been doing
all the work, but as I found out from your biographies, we have
before us three teachers and one accountant. By saying that, I
am trying to highlight my concern that at the most senior leadership
level of Ofsted, the social care experience that might have helped
to avoid this situation is not there.
Christine Gilbert: I was for five
or six years—I cannot remember now—a chief executive
of a local authority, and social care was high on my list of priorities.
For instance, I always attended the corporate parenting panel
and all those sorts of things, so I have close experience of social
care and I considered it an important priority, as did the members
of that local authority.
Q279 Fiona Mactaggart: Who is the
most senior member of your staff whose initial history was in
social care and social work?
Christine Gilbert: Michael would
have elements of social care in the work that he has done, as
would the divisional managers—the members of the senior
civil service. In September, we issued the plans for the reorganisation
of Ofsted. The Committee will remember me saying last time that
I did not want to change the structure that was established when
I was appointed until we had been through one year, or until we
had run business as usual and got a sense of what we needed to
do in the new merged organisation. We have a different structure
planned for next September, which has a director of social care
and a director of education and care.
1 Note by witness: Please note that, following
further review, further evidence from the 2007 Annual Performance
Assessment of Haringey's children's services has been found in
Ofsted's records. A hard copy of the inspectors' evidence Notebook
was retained, containing those elements that relate to the Staying
Safe judgement. Back
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