Conclusions and Recommendations
1. The Department is best placed to lead
improvements in the quality of care and stability of placements,
but it is reluctant to take on this role. There are many bodies,
including local authorities and Ofsted, involved in the care system
and we do not expect the Department to do everything. However
there are some oversight functions only the Department can fulfil
and others where it is the best placed body to lead improvements
in care. Unless the Department steps up and embraces this role
the system will not improve. The Department agrees that it can
set statutory duties for local authorities and intervene if they
fail. But it is reluctant to accept it has a role in setting expectations
for service performance, taking an overview of the market for
care services, or using data to hold local authorities to account
and to intervene and support local authorities before they fail
Ofsted inspections. Leaving poor services to fester has meant
that the Department has had to intervene in 21 local authorities.
The Department does collect data but apart from making it available
it fails to use this data to promote what works and to support
local authorities that are struggling.
Recommendation: The Department for Education should
set out how it will lead and work with others to improve the outcomes
for children by improving the quality of care.
2. The Department has watered down its
responsibility for holding local authorities to account for their
performance. The Department's 2012 Accountability System Statement
clearly stated that it had a responsibility for holding local
authorities to account for their performance in providing services
for children in care. A week after we took evidence, the Department
published a revised accountability statement. The Department has
since written to us to explain that it had not shared the proposed
revisions with us because it judged that "the updated version
did not contain major changes" and it did not therefore believe
that Parliament would want an explanation. However, the revised
statement removes any reference to the Department holding local
authorities to account for their performance on children in care,
and downplays the Department's role in leading the sector to improve.
These are the very issues on which we had clearly expressed concerns
during our evidence session with the Department, and we therefore
regard the updated statement as a significant change.
Recommendation: The Department has undertaken
to carefully consider our comments for the next version of its
Accountability System Statement.
· In the next version of its Accountability
Statement the Department should either re-instate the reference
to its responsibility for holding local authorities to account
for their performance or at least make clearer precisely how it
is discharging this responsibility.
· In view of the Department having ignored
our obvious interest when publishing its revised statement in
January 2015, we expect the Department to publish a revised statement
in the near future, which takes account of our concerns. Therefore,
alongside its Treasury Minute response to this report, the Department
should provide us with an update and explanation of revisions
proposed in light of our report.
3. Too few children are getting the right
placement first time and too many are placed away from their home
area. Of children in care on 31 March 2013, 34% had had more than
one placement during the year, and 14% of foster children and
34% of children in residential care were placed more than 20 miles
from home. Neither measure has improved in recent years, despite
these factors being absolutely fundamental to the best interests
of the child and in ensuring value for money for the taxpayer.
Too little attention has been placed on improving commissioning
and the department has done too little to ensure that the market
works in the interest of children.
Recommendation: The Department should set out
a strategy and a timetable for improving the commissioning of
all care places, including specialised care places.
4. The quality and experience of social
workers is central to improving outcomes for children. Local authority
social workers make the key decisions about placing children in
care. But there is a continuing shortage of professional social
workers and many authorities rely on too many agency staff. The
training of social workers in too many cases still fails to prepare
them properly for the practical work they have to undertake.
Recommendation: The Department should set out
how it will attract more high calibre people to social work and
how it will ensure that training is relevant to their work.
5. The Department does not use the rich
data it does collect from local authorities about the patterns
of care for children to improve local accountability and drive
improvement across the system. Local authorities submit a huge
quantity of data to the Department about the number of children
in care, the type and number of their placements and whether each
child has had the necessary health checks. The Department publishes
annual performance tables on a set of measures, which includes
all looked-after children, but it is far from being the clear
and easily accessible information that should be available to
the layperson. The Department does publish more user-friendly
scorecards on each local authority's performance on adoption but
does not do the same for the quality of foster and residential
services. The adoption scorecards do offer local people accessible
information and the Government should build on this to provide
more accessible information on all looked-after children.
Recommendation: As it has for adoption, the Department
should publish information against its key indicators for local
people showing how well their council performs on foster and residential
care compared to others. This should be in an easy to find and
user-friendly format, to support local accountability.
6. The current system of inspection inhibits
Ofsted from playing a full role in preventing the failure of local
services. Ofsted inspects local authority's children's services
against a framework underpinned by the regulations and standards
set by the Department. The Department considers that Ofsted's
reports on inspections of children's services are the best way
to hold local authorities to account for their performance in
delivering quality care and will intervene if Ofsted rates services
as inadequate. But Ofsted only routinely inspects each local authority
every three years and, in the time between inspections, the Department
is not using the data it collects from local authorities to identify
poor performance, to intervene early or to instruct Ofsted to
inspect. Ofsted is keen to inspect children's services more regularly,
and would welcome being instructed to do so if the Department's
data indicated things are going wrong. Ofsted strongly felt that
either the Department or Ofsted should work with local authorities
to improve their performance, in the same way as agencies work
with underperforming schools.
Recommendation: The Department should:
· reconsider the frequency of Ofsted
inspections of children's services to ensure early identification
and intervention and ensure that Ofsted and the Department use
available data to monitor the performance of individual providers
and local authorities in a timely fashion; and
· reconsider its own role and explore
the scope for involving Ofsted in improving local authorities'
performance between inspections, so that Ofsted and/or the Department
play a stronger role in preventing failure, and protecting vulnerable
children.
7. There is no clarity about who is responsible
for leading the identification and dissemination of good practice.
The Department accepts that there is a shortage of easily available,
good practice on what works in caring for children. Where there
is good local practice, it is not disseminated well, although
the Department considers that it shares good practice "when
it sees it". To its credit, Ofsted has taken it upon itself
to run best practice programmes with the 55% of local authorities
inspected so far that require improvement, using effective practice
identified at good local authorities. The Department has introduced
the Innovation Programme to test new practices.
Recommendation: The Department must broker agreement
(between itself, and, among others, the Local Government Association,
the Department for Communities and Local Government, and Ofsted)
about how they will share responsibility for leading on the identification
and dissemination of good practice, including that generated by
the Innovation Programme, and how it will go about spreading effective
practice.
8. The Department has recently introduced
initiatives to improve educational outcomes for children in care,
such as virtual school heads, but it does not know whether its
initiatives are working. We agree with Ofsted that the gap in
educational attainment between children in care and their peers
remains shockingly wide. For example, at GCSE level, the gap in
attainment was 38% in 2008/09, but was 43% in 2012/13. In response,
the Department now requires all local authorities to appoint a
virtual school head—to champion the educational ambitions
on behalf of the authorities' children in care—and it has
doubled the pupil premium for children in care. However, the Department
has not evaluated whether these changes are having a positive
impact. Instead, it says it will wait to see if there are overall
improvements in educational attainment, an indicator that it publishes
on a regular basis. The Department's approach mean that it does
not evaluate the impact of the spending it mandates of others.
Recommendation: When the Department mandates or
directs local authorities to take action and spend public money,
it must then take an interest in the outcomes, and develop measures
of success, evaluate progress and plan for sharing what proves
to be successful, or otherwise, with councils.
9. Without accurate, complete and comparable
data about the cost of services provided for children in care,
the Department cannot hold local authorities to account effectively
or test value for money. Many local authorities prefer children
to be looked after by their own foster parents or in residential
homes. They perceive in-house services to be cheaper than places
provided by the private or voluntary sector. But it is not clear
that local authority care is cheaper and there are wide variations
in how much a council pays for foster care—from £15,000
to £73,000 a place, a year. Higher costs are also not necessarily
related to higher quality care. The Department admits that it
does not understand the reasons for differences in costs and acknowledges
that it needs to know more. The Department believes its guidance
to councils is clear, but there is no consensus among local authorities
on how to cost services or complete data returns. The Department
and other organisations have benchmarking tools and cost calculators,
but they are not widely used and until councils see benefits from
the data they provide, it is unlikely that the quality of data
will improve.
Recommendation: The Department should work with
local authorities and the Department for Communities and Local
Government to secure reliable, comparable data on costs, and use
it alongside existing performance indicators to develop assessments
of value for money that are useful both for local authorities
and central government.
10. Finding children who go missing from
care, including victims of child sex exploitation, and then keeping
them safe is made more difficult by the lack of a national register.
Children who go missing for extended periods of time are especially
vulnerable to sexual exploitation. There is no regularly updated,
national register of missing children. The separate lists that
are held locally by the police and local authorities on missing
children do not contain the same names. With a national register,
Ofsted could more easily identify and then inspect local areas
that may be failing to stop children from going missing and keeping
them safe. When local authorities in England need to find a secure
welfare placement to protect a child from child sex exploitation,
they separately phone round homes right across the country, sometimes
including Scotland too, until they find a place. As child sex
exploitation is being more widely identified it would make sense
for one organisation to commission and coordinate secure welfare
places so that children can be placed quickly at an appropriate
distance.
Recommendation: The Department should set out
how it intends to facilitate central commissioning of secure places
for the victims of child sex exploitation and the construction
of a national database of missing children, and by when.
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