Agenda item

The Chair introduced a report that summarises and proposes a response to the Prime Minister’s announcement of new measures to formalise the process for removing failing children’s services from local authority control, and asked members for their comments.

Members discussed:

·         The importance of local authorities working together with Ofsted to support councils whose children’s services are currently in intervention or at risk of being judged inadequate by Ofsted.

·         The need to financially compensate local authorities who supply staff to help other local authorities with children’s improvement work, and the possibility of creating a Taskforce of top staff to do improvement work around the country to ensure that individual authorities’ resources do not become overstretched.

·         The risks of drawing up a blueprint for all children’s improvement and intervention work when different authorities operate under very different circumstances.

·         The concern that the new measures announced by the Prime Minister will replace, rather than complement, the effective work that the LGA does in supporting councils.

·         The impracticality of the short timescale in which local authorities are expected to make improvements following an inadequate Ofsted rating.

·         The problems currently facing councils engaged in improvement work, such as the difficulty of objectively assessing whether they are improving, and the issue of wealthier councils placing large numbers of children in less affluent areas and thereby exhausting their staffing capacity.

·         The potential value of commissioning research on the outputs that councils have experienced from trying different approaches to children’s services improvement.

·         The value of councils sharing with one another common reasons for failure and success, so that lessons can be learnt for best practice.

·         The important role that the LGA plays, and should continue to play, in complementing council-to-council help in the area of children’s services improvement.

Decisions

The Board welcomed the Prime Minister’s announcement, subject to the caveats outlined above.

The Board agreed to propose to the Improvement and Innovation Board and to the LGA Executive that:

·         Support for children’s services should have a high priority within the LGA’s sector-led improvement offer, given the number of councils currently in intervention and at risk of being judged inadequate by Ofsted.

·         The children’s services support offer should prioritise councils that have not yet been inspected under the Ofsted Single Inspection Framework and are at potential risk of an inadequate judgement.

·         The LGA’s political and professional networks should be used to encourage these councils to have a full Safeguarding Peer Review or Safeguarding Practice/Care Practice Diagnostic.

·         An enhanced support offer to councils should be developed to deal with any issues identified following a peer review or diagnostic that put a council at risk of an inadequate judgement at their next inspection.

·         For councils judged inadequate, the existing support offer should be retained and enhanced, with a focus on supporting them to produce a credible improvement plan and maintain sufficient progress to avoid full-scale Department for Education (DfE) intervention in line with the new proposals.

Actions

Officers to report the Board’s views to the Improvement and Innovation Board meeting on Tuesday 19 January and the LGA Executive meeting on Thursday 21 January.