Adoption services scrutinised by councillors after 'good' Ofsted rating
Adoption services by Sandwell children’s trust were scrutinised by councillors this week, after Ofsted rated the provisions as good.
The report, discussed at this week’s children’s services and education scrutiny board at Sandwell council, noted “a trajectory of service improvement” after Sandwell children’s trust – previously rated as inadequate – was moved up to requiring improvement to be good.
Two good ratings were received for the children’s trust’s fostering service adoption services – the latter the subject of a scrutiny review this week.
Jacqui Smith, the chair of Sandwell children’s trust, told the scrutiny board she was “very pleased” with the results.
She said: “We were rated as good, and while there was nothing that was a ‘must do’ or ‘problem’, there were areas for improvement around encouraging and gathering feedback from children.
“So for example ensuring that the life story books were personalised for each and every child along with the later-life letters. We also must ensure timely introduction of children to their adopters, the training and assessment of prospective adopters, and feedback from the doctors about their experiences in the adoption process so that we can learn from that.”
Ms Smith added one of the challenges for Sandwell, like many borough in England and Wales, is the recruitment and retention of social workers.
“There is a particular issue for the recruitment and availability of social workers in child protection. And in court work, some of the most pressured and specialised areas of work, the result for us has been that we’ve had to make use a very high cost project teams in order to ensure that we don’t have children who are unallocated, who don’t have a social worker looking after them.
“We have some very excellent agency, social workers within the trust but we also of course, if somebody’s agency, they can leave with a very short notice period and we sometimes suffer from that as well.
“There has been work across local authorities there is a memorandum of understanding between local authorities across the West Midlands. The trouble is because everybody is under so much pressure, that they take that many authorities and to be honest us in relation to some of what we’ve had to do to keep children safe, sometimes breach the provisions of that a memorandum of understanding. So it is a national and systemic problem that needs to be solved in that way.”
Steven Gauntley, director of operations at Sandwell children’s trust, presented a variety of statistics related to improvements in child safeguarding.
The number of referrals to the children’s trust had reduced from 580 per 10,000 in February 2022 to 474 per 10,000 in February 2022. The number of single assessments – where social workers investigate all contacts where it is judged that a child protection concern might exist within 45 days – was at 88%. Last year, the figure was a shocking 56.5%.
The number of child protection plans, had reduced from 409 in March 2022 to 365 in February 2023. Mr Gauntley said: “I think it’s fair to say over the years, there was kind of too many inappropriate referrals and we were managing it to kind of to higher levels.
“But working with our partners, those child protection inquiries are now within kind of national sort of kind of parameters so these children are subject to the right child protection plans.”
The number of children in care had reduced slightly from 848 per 10,000 to 811 per 10,000 between 2022 and 2023. “We’re slowly reducing the number of children entering care so there’s, there’s more children now exiting our care than actual actually entering our care. And again, when we compare to local England averages, we have fewer children entering our care than those kind of local and national comparators,” Mr Gauntley added.
Councillor Liam Preece asked the board if they were confident that had the capacity to support the increasing number of care leavers in Sandwell.
In response, Mr Gauntley said: “Wherever that need is, we will deploy workers into those areas. So absolutely, we will maintain our responsibility in relation to supporting our care leavers.”
