Ofsted to stop giving council children's services overall rating from April 2026

Ofsted will stop giving council children's services a headline rating from April 2026, chief inspector Martyn Oliver has confirmed.

As a result, local authorities will no longer be graded as outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate from that date. However, they will continue to receive such ratings for their performance on supporting children who need help and protection, children in care and care leavers, and in relation to leadership.

The move will be accompanied by reforms to the current inspection of local authority children's services (ILACS) process to ensure it aligns more closely with the government's children's social care reform agenda, Oliver told sector leaders yesterday.

The 2026 changes will be followed by a consultation on a new inspection framework for children's services that will come into force in 2027, said Oliver, in a speech to the National Children and Adult Services Conference (NCASC) in Bournemouth.

End to single-word headline rating

The end to single-word headline ratings was a product of the Big Listen, a largescale consultation exercise carried out by Ofsted after a coroner found that its inspection of Caversham Primary School, Reading, in November 2022, contributed to headteacher Ruth Perry’s decision to take her own life.

Respondents to the consultation told the inspectorate that the overall rating was simplistic, often punitive and failed to take account of local authorities' context.

However, 46% of social care professionals surveyed as part of the process backed single-word judgments, compared with 29% who did not.

The removal of the headline rating comes in the wake of councils showing significant improvement against this metric. Currently, 26% councils - 40 of the 153 - are graded outstanding overall, up from 20% in March 2024.

Ofsted aligning inspections with reforms

Ofsted made changes to the ILACS last year to align it with the children's social care national framework, the statutory guidance published in December 2023 that sets out the key objectives for the service and is the basis for the current reform programme. These changes included emphasising councils' role in helping wider family networks to support children.

Oliver told NCASC delegates that next year's changes would further align ILACS with the national framework, anticipated changes to the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance and the Families First Partnership (FFP) programme guide. The latter provides the blueprint for three elements of the reform agenda:

1. Multidisciplinary family help services, which work with families across targeted early help, child in need and child protection to provide relationship-based support, as early as possible, to help them towards them staying safely intact.
2. Multi-agency child protection teams, which bring together specialist social work, education, health and police professionals to carry out councils' child protection functions, with a view to improving the effectiveness of safeguarding practice.
3. Family group decision making meetings, under which family networks are given the opportunity to meet and formulate plans to address welfare concerns or safeguarding risks regarding a child.

Focusing on keeping children with families

"We will do our utmost to make sure that ILACS focuses more on supporting family networks and aiming to keep children with their families, wherever it’s possible and safe to do so," said Oliver.

"This means recognising the value of family help, maintaining family connections and kinship care, and supporting children as they return to their families after periods of being in care."

He said there would also be a greater focus on fostering - a key priority of children's minister Josh MacAlister - and multi-agency working, with an Ofsted 'task and finish' group set up to determine the specific changes, in dialogue with sector leaders and government.

Ofsted will then consult on developing a children and families services inspection framework that will be implemented in 2027.

New assessment framework for children's services

On this, Oliver said: "Through consultation, we want to find a tool that works for social care – a tool that helps us to give a set of assessments: highlighting where brilliant, meaningful work is being done, and pinpointing where things are not as good as they can be.

"A tool with more nuance, that allows us to better determine and call out whether an issue is an isolated one – or it’s part of a bigger local or regional failing."

He said the changes would be backed up by improved training for Ofsted's inspectors, to ensure they are "experts in the government’s reforms". This will be supported by an advisory reference group, including sector leaders and representatives from the pathfinder councils that have been in the vanguard of implementing the reforms.

"They’ll be tasked with challenging our inspection policy thinking and practice – ensuring we’re being rigorous, bold and deeply informed in our decisions," Oliver added.