Honesty In Tackling Failing Children’s Services Long Overdue
In early 2015, soon after Buckinghamshire Children’s Services had first been judged “Inadequate” by Ofsted, Bucks Council was sharply criticised for being more concerned with “covering up its blemishes than fixing the root of the problem”. Regrettably, and to the detriment of Buckinghamshire’s vulnerable children, this reflexive and deeply ingrained emphasis on “spin” and reputation management at the expense of service improvement has continued until the present day.
During the recent local elections, in an exchange on the “Buckingham What Matters To You” Facebook page, Councillor Warren Whyte replied to a comment on the prolonged failure of Bucks Children’s Services as follows: “ ….. you’re assuming there are failures in the 3 years I was cabinet member. There weren’t. I was bitterly disappointed that we did not get an Ofsted inspection by the end of 2019/20 as it would have proved once and for all that your rhetoric is just that”.
In fact, contrary to Councillor Whyte’s faulty recollection, Ofsted undertook 2 monitoring inspections of Bucks Children’s Services in May and October 2019, and whilst identifying improvement in some areas, also highlighted significant, continuing Service weaknesses, with the December 2019 report noting that as a result of a continuing failure to recruit staff “it is difficult to consistently ensure basic practice standards. Children confirmed this, telling inspectors that they continue to experience too many changes of social workers. This, combined with weaknesses in supervision and management oversight, has a negative impact on children’s experiences and on the timely progression of their plans”.
Had there been a full inspection at that time (towards the end of Councillor Whyte’s tenure as the Cabinet member with responsibility for Children’s Services), it is abundantly clear from the December 2019 report that, contrary to Councillor Whyte’s assertions, Children’s Services would not have been removed from the “Inadequate” category.
In February of this year Ofsted carried out a “remote”, focused monitoring visit, and after release of its report in April the Council’s spin machine once again whirred into action. A Council communique, published on its website in April (in the middle of the local election campaign!) relegated two significant, continuing weaknesses highlighted at the beginning of the Ofsted report to the end of the communique, and instead selectively emphasised areas of improvement identified in the report whilst omitting Ofsted comments indicating that some of these improvements were limited in scope and required further progress.
In the April report on this year’s visit, echoing their findings from 2019 and earlier, Ofsted state that “there is much more to do. Case supervision is not always regular enough, and there are gaps in actions and a lack of analysis. Although management oversight is now routinely evident on children’s files, actions arising are not consistently followed up, leading to delays in some children’s plans being progressed”.
Nowhere in the Council communique, however, is there even the slightest acknowledgement of the importance of this statement, and of the reality that until this failing is successfully tackled some of our County’s most vulnerable children will continue to be failed by their Council, and the service that should be protecting and supporting them will continue to be judged as inadequate.
On the contrary, in the recently announced departure of Tolis Vouyioukas, Bucks Council’s Corporate Director for Children’s Services since 2017, the Council communique gushes that Mr. Vouyioukas’s “amazing contribution to Children’s Services in Buckinghamshire is well recognised”. Really! Amazing? Recognised by who? I have no wish to deny that there has been some long overdue improvement in aspects of Bucks Children’s Services, but it has been far too slow, and significant weaknesses in the Service have still not been successfully tackled after the best part of a decade.
With the election last month of a new Council, now followed by the departure of Mr. Vouyioukas, is it too much to ask that, finally, Buckinghamshire Council leaders’ obsessive concern with reputation management is replaced by an honest acknowledgement of significant, continuing weaknesses in Children’s Services, and a relentless focusing of all available resources on what needs to be done to successfully tackle these?
