Ofsted says county has 'considerable' amount of work to do to make sure children receive good service

Lancashire County Council’s children’s services was branded ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted in May 2015 after inspectors identified ‘serious failures’.

After the fifth monitoring visit paid to the service since then, inspectors said although some progress has been made, the quality of practice provided to children and their families ‘remains too variable’.

In a letter to Amanda Hatton, director of Children’s Social Care, inspector Susan Myers said workloads for some newly qualified social workers remain too high and complex and some are not receiving enough support.

She said: “Adoption is not considered for all children, and permanency planning does not start quickly enough.

“Managers have not yet developed robust systems to ensure that sufficient oversight of practice is provided at all levels in the organisation.”

She said actions had been taken to make improvements including securing additional staff, improving the quality of audits, ensuring that compliance with basic standards of social work are met and focusing on creating the right structure and culture to enable good practice to develop.

The vast majority of children had been reassessed in the last six months and no assessments were deemed inadequate, she said.

Ms Myers said children have positive relationships with their social workers, but this has not resulted in purposeful plans for them and some are experiencing too many changes of social worker.

“Some children have a change of social worker every six months,” she said.

“Care leavers who met with inspectors said that they had grown tired of having to get to know so many new social workers.

“For most children, permanence is not considered soon enough. Many children achieve permanence by staying in their short-term foster placements for several years, without robust assessment of need or evaluation of options.”

Inspectors saw a number of cases during the visit in which cultural needs, family history and identity needs had not been well considered for children who had ‘drifted into permanence with their foster carers without appropriate consideration of matching’.

Cllr Susie Charles, cabinet member for children, young people and schools, said: “Overall the feedback suggests we are clearly moving in the right direction, and while we still have a long way to go, we are under no illusion as to the scale of the challenge or how important it is that these changes are made quickly and effectively.

“Our staff and partners in other organisations remain fully committed to delivering the improvements we need to make and providing the best quality services to children and families.”