A Letter To The Buckingham Media
9–3-’21
Dear Editor
I write with reference to the recent meeting of Buckinghamshire Council’s Children and Education Select Committee held on Thursday 4 March. My background is in education as a former secondary Headteacher and Ofsted Inspector, and the meeting agenda items of most interest to me were the last two that related to Children’s Services.
By way of context, after steady improvement in the 2000’s Buckinghamshire Children’s Services was judged by Ofsted to be excellent in 2010 and 2011. In 2014, however, after a period of sustained austerity cuts, the Service was judged inadequate (the lowest category) by Ofsted, and since then it has remained in that category.
Buckinghamshire is an affluent county with pockets of deprivation, and it has been truly shocking to witness the demise of what was once an outstanding service, and the failure of successive Council administrations, over a period now approaching seven years, to make the improvements necessary for Children’s Services to be judged, at a minimum, as good.
Given this context, and that this was a meeting of the relevant Council scrutiny committee, I fully expected a rigorous interrogation by Councillors of senior Council staff, with a particular focus on the latter’s self-assessment of progress and improvement plans for Children’s Services in the light of Ofsted’s findings.
To my consternation, given the crucial importance of Children’s Services to the lives and welfare of vulnerable children, with the exception of Councillor Stuchbury such an interrogation was almost entirely lacking. Input from Councillors was mostly confined to praise for the efforts being made by the service during what are, without doubt, testing times, and a few far from probing questions that were not followed up when they were answered by Council staff with assertions of progress unsupported by evidence.
If a crucial service has been failing vulnerable young people for the best part of 7 years, then scrutiny of the Council’s response should be anything but a comfortable experience for senior Council staff, and they should come to such meetings on top of their brief and armed with sound evidence to support judgements of progress. The lack of such evidence was drawn attention to by both Councillor Stuchbury and a guest attendee from a Buckinghamshire school, but this did not produce a response that could in any way be considered satisfactory.
In writing this letter I have no wish to downplay the extraordinarily challenging environment in which Children’s Services has been operating for the last year, and neither do I wish to suggest that significant progress has not been made. In the absence of evidence, however, I simply cannot tell.
My central point, therefore, is this. That without meaningful scrutiny, which can and indeed should at times be challenging and even uncomfortable for senior Council staff, any improvements that occur and progress that is made is likely to take longer and be more fragile than in an environment where appropriate, well-constructed improvement plans and rigorous self-assessment are put under the spotlight and effectively interrogated by elected Councillors.
Based on the meeting I viewed, and the supporting documents provided by senior Council staff that I read, I would question whether all Buckinghamshire Councillors on Scrutiny Committees have been offered and received appropriate training to enable them to properly and effectively discharge their responsibilities. It is to the great shame of successive Buckinghamshire Councils that this unhappy failure of Children’s Services has endured for so long, and it is to be hoped that, going forwards, the new Council will appropriately address the issues that I have raised with urgency and determination.
Yours sincerely
Mick O’Mahony
