By Rob Preston and Mithran Samuel
A council’s lack of social work capacity is leaving children inadequately protected, Ofsted has found, as it downgraded its children’s services to inadequate.Inspectors found “serious and widespread failures” in core areas of social work practice at Sefton council, including assessment, planning and management oversight, and said that these had not been "sufficiently understood” by leaders.
Not only had there been a “significant deterioration” in services since Sefton’s last full inspection in 2016, when it was rated requires improvement, but the council had failed to tackle failings identified in a joint targeted area inspection (JTAI) in 2019 and a focused visit in March 2021.
The 2019 JTAI, focused on the front door and children with mental health needs, said high caseloads were negatively affecting social workers’ practice and found poor planning and incomplete investigations of risks for some children.
The 2021 visit, focused on the monitoring of children on child protection plans and pre-proceedings, also found too many social workers had high caseloads and that too many children were left in high-risk situations for too long. It also found that "poor-quality supervision and ineffective management challenge contribute to drift and delay for children”.
‘Overreliance on agency workers’
Ofsted’s latest inspection, in February and March 2022, unearthed similar themes, identifying “serious and widespread failures” in safeguarding, creating delays in meeting the needs of “highly vulnerable children”, leaving them at risk of “significant harm”. This was in part due to “insufficient workforce capacity and lack of management oversight and challenge”.Inspectors found that an “overreliance on agency staff at all levels” was contributing to delays and leading to children experiencing many changes in social worker and essential work not always being completed.
