Education Committee

Oral evidence: Accountability hearings: children’s social care and safeguarding, HC 1508

Tuesday 13 June 2023

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 13 June 2023.

Watch the meeting

Members present: Mr Robin Walker (Chair); Caroline Ansell; Miriam Cates; Mrs Flick Drummond; Nick Fletcher; Andrew Lewer; Ian Mearns; and Mohammad Yasin.

Questions 1 to 60

Witnesses

I: Amanda Spielman, HM Chief Inspector of Education, Children's Services and Skills, Ofsted, and Yvette Stanley, National Director for Regulation and Social Care, Ofsted.

              Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Amanda Spielman and Yvette Stanley. 

Q1                Chair: Welcome to today’s session on children’s social care and safeguarding. The focus of the session will be to ask questions on Ofsted’s responsibilities as an inspector and regulator of children’s social care services and their role in safeguarding children outside schools. We will hear evidence from Amanda Spielman, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector Of Education, Children’s Services And Skills; and Yvette Stanley, national director for regulation and social care at Ofsted.

Before we begin, I want to announce that the Committee is launching a new inquiry into Ofsted’s work with schools. The inquiry will aim to assess how well Ofsted is fulfilling its role in inspecting schools and whether and how it could be improved to inform the work of the incoming Chief Inspector of Education. The inquiry will look at the impact of Ofsted judgments on schools and pupils, including the impact on workload and wellbeing for all members of the school community, and the usefulness of Ofsted inspections for schools and parents.

The inquiry will also look at Ofsted’s complaints procedure and assess how accountable Ofsted is for its work. We will explore the impact of the new education inspection framework introduced in 2019. Anyone interested in submitting evidence to the inquiry can find further information on the Committee’s webpages. Today’s session is not part of that inquiry and will focus on Ofsted’s role in children’s social care and safeguarding, as agreed by the Committee after our last meeting with Ofsted.

I want to make it clear to everyone in the room that although we were all deeply saddened to hear of the death of Ruth Perry earlier this year, it is not possible to discuss the circumstances of her passing in this meeting. Her case is before the coroner’s court, and we do not wish to interfere or unduly influence that important process. Inquests are not discussed in Parliament while they are open, as the matter is considered sub judice.

Chief Inspector, I understand you would like to make a brief opening statement.

Amanda Spielman: Thank you for letting me say a few words to begin with. We have noted your intention to open an inquiry; we welcome that and look forward to providing information. We do a great deal of work on this ourselves. We very much look forward to the opportunity to talk about the other areas of our work. In the context of the acknowledgement that you have made, I would of course like to say how sorry everyone at Ofsted was about the sad death of Ruth Perry. Our thoughts are still with her family, colleagues and friends.

Yesterday, we announced a set of measures aimed at improving how we work with schools, and particularly how we can contribute to reducing the pressure that is undoubtedly felt by school leaders around inspection. But it is fair to say that a great deal of that pressure relates to the perceived consequences of inspection; it is not just about the process itself.

I hope that what we have announced will be well received. I am aware that some people will always want us to go further. As I have repeatedly stressed, we play a vital role in the school accountability system, but we do have just one role—inspection. It does not extend beyond that. The consequences of inspection, whether they are intervention or support, sit with Government. Our work has to meet the needs of children and parents in schools, but it also has to fit within that wider accountability system. That is the background to the changes that we announced yesterday.

It is also the background to our work in social care, early years and further education. In every case, we are part of a complex accountability system, whether we work as inspectorate or regulator. In every case, we do our best to balance the needs of each part of the system while always putting the needs of children and learners first.

Briefly on social care, which I know you want to talk about today, I will speak for a minute or so about the context. We are in a world where there are increasingly complex needs in the population of children in England, and increasing volumes of work, whether we look at child protection, children in care or care leavers. Multi-agency work and health service delivery have both been affected by covid, so there is, in many cases, less support for children. There are major challenges with workforce retention and recruitment, not just for social workers but for the residential care workforce. There are significant problems with sufficiency of care places, and also the distribution around the country.

We have out-of-date care standards that are a poor fit with children’s needs, so it is hard to regulate for consistent quality and different kinds of provision, and the regulations are a poor fit with the provider landscape as, in pretty much everywhere we work, regulations were originally contemplated as essentially one location, one manager and all decisions taken in that spot, with some kind of governance around that manager’s decisions.

Increasingly, we are in a world where large groups own not just many children’s homes or many residential schools or many independent schools, but many types of provision. A regulatory landscape that does not permit some kinds of problems and issues to be addressed at the level of ownership or the level at which decisions are actually made is increasingly hard to make effective. I welcome the proposals that there should be some preliminary work on financial oversight; we are working with the Department for Education at the moment.

Finally, the work from the care review, the Government’s paper—“Stable Homes, Built on Love”—the national panel review, the IICSA recommendations and, of course, our own findings from our programme of inspection and our aggregation of our insights provide a platform for a constructive programme of reform. Much is in progress. We will talk about it today, but getting the join-up and getting the consistency and clarity of implementation will be absolutely fundamental.

In all this landscape, local authorities have been improving slowly, over the last six years or so since we brought in the ILACS inspection framework, from under a third “good” or “better” to just over half “good” or “better”. It is a slow improvement, but too many are still struggling. In children’s homes, the other biggest area we inspect, it is about 80% or just over 80% that are “good” or “better”. That is quite a significant minority that are not, which does concern me. That was all I wanted to say by way of context, but I thought it might be useful to have that.

Q2                Chair: Thank you. That is a useful introduction in setting the scene. Last year, Ofsted published its strategic priorities for the next five years. Could you expand on Ofsted’s priorities for children’s social care, the steps you have already taken and what further needs to be done to ensure that they are met?

Amanda Spielman: As everywhere, our aim is to be a force for improvement in what we do. We are not simply mechanical operators of a regulatory regime; we want to ensure that it adds value. The current strategy set last year builds on the strategy we ran from 2017 to 2022, taking into account the context as it has been shaped by the pandemic and other factors and taking our ambitions for children and learners that much further.

At the core of it, inspection that supports improvement is absolutely fundamental. We have brought the care leavers’ judgment into ILACS, and we have refreshed the JTAI model—that is our joint inspection model, where we work with other inspectorates on thematic inspections of particularly important aspects of social care.

At the moment, the focus is on the front door, looking at early help to support the thinking for “Stable Homes, Built on Love” and preparing for the JTAI in the autumn on serious youth violence. Of course, in the context of the reform programme, we will also be looking at where the ILACS model for local authority inspection may need to flex, but we are confident that we have a strong and flexible basis. We will not need to rewrite the framework entirely; it will be a question of a bit of rebalancing and emphasis to ensure that we have proper regard to policy.

In our regulation, you are of course aware that we are now registering and developing the inspection model for supported accommodation. I think it is really important to have this model in the system. There is an uneasy situation around the needs of 16 and 17-year-olds—those approaching adulthood—but it is fair to say that there are children with a range of needs, including, for example, the unaccompanied children arriving in the country at the moment, so I do welcome the introduction of that model.

We are introducing assurance visits to secure training centres—it is a small sector, but secure is very important. There are many more children who need it than currently have access to places. Getting that right and making sure that it is deliverable and sustainable is really important.

Streamlining childcare registration is a more complicated process than people think, because it involves drawing on police checks, local authority information and medical information. It is not simply a matter of filling in a form and saying, “Yes, the form is correctly filled in.” Nevertheless, we have been doing some work to pilot ways of doing more of these pieces in parallel, to help create the capacity that we know people want to bring online as fast as possible.

In our child safeguarding work, we are drawing on the learning from IICSA and the national panel work, and from our own learning reviews. For example, there is the work we have been doing on training our staff in recognising and interrogating in the context of closed cultures; strengthening the risk assessment for settings that are looking after children with particularly complex needs, such as non-verbal children; and system improvements that can help our ability to spot patterns.

One thing that is not always understood around social care is that much of the risk identification works off a system of notifications. We receive something like 35,000 or 40,000 notifications a year of incidents relating to children in care, most of them in children’s homes, such as police being called or a child becoming significantly ill. There is a whole host of things. That is two or three notifications a year for every child living in a children’s home. It is a much greater volume of information than people may assume. There is also a smaller flow of specifics such as whistleblowing and concerns.

As for what the regulator has to do, we cannot go out and inspect in the context of every notification. We would do 20 times as many inspections if we simply responded by inspecting on every notification, so we have to draw on the totality. We do follow up with phone calls; we do not ignore any concern. We follow up, but we also have to hold on to the accumulating pattern and ask, “At what point are we seeing something out of the ordinary?” It would be as exceptional to have no notifications as to have too many. So for some of the conversations we may come to later, I think that is useful context as to why this is an important piece of work.

Q3                Chair: To your point at being able to look at a group-level approach, is that something you are able to do at the moment to see whether a particularly high number of notifications are coming from a particular group or ownership?

Amanda Spielman: We have very limited ability to do that because of the regulatory model. Not only are our systems designed in the context of the law as it stands today, so we have to create extra layers of analysis and fixes to get aggregated information, but we have to join up information between different parts of our work that have fundamentally different regulatory architectures, because they originated in different places. The architecture around special schools is very different from that around children’s homes, for example.

We are working on it. We are doing our best, for example, to keep hold of the ownership picture, so that we can draw together, but it is hard to do in the current context. Yvette, you are probably more deeply involved in that than I am.

Yvette Stanley: You are absolutely right, Amanda. The other point to make is that ownership is opaque at best. Things are held by different companies with different mixes of directors and owners. Often it is because a regulatory inspector on the ground recognises a name.

As Amanda says, the regulations were established 20 years ago, when the expectation was that a person owned one or two homes. Many of them were owned by local authorities or some of the big charities. I was looking at a company yesterday that has the equivalent of 800 places in different children’s homes—that I can see—and a similar amount in foster care. Ownership changes, and people hold the asset. At that level, there is asset shifting. We are very remote from that, aren’t we, Amanda?

Amanda Spielman: There are cases where the highest level of ownership that we can see is something mid Co. Ltd or something top Co. Ltd, but from there it appears to go into possibly an offshore structure. It is very difficult for us to understand who is behind that. For example, there is a lot of private equity ownership at the moment and a considerable amount of trading.

The piece of work that was announced to look at creating stronger financial oversight in children’s homes is helping us to crystallise the kinds of information and notification requirements that might also, down the line, help provide a more coherent overview of how the system is being owned and controlled. That would ensure that regulation addresses the system at the right levels.

Q4                Chair: We see in the Welsh system at the moment a drive to remove profit motive in general. That can have some perverse consequences when it comes to the amount of provision and what is available there. The Committee has previously raised concern about private equity ownership in this space.

Amanda Spielman: I think that is fair. The point is that it is a matter of policy, and it is not for us to express an opinion on. But I do know that we do not have a regulatory system that contemplates the world as it now operates, which is why one of our strategic priorities is, as far as we can, to make sure that the work we do keeps pace with the changes in the sector.

Yvette Stanley: I want the Committee to be reassured that we try and join those dots, but both our technical system and the regulations do not make that easy for us. As an example, if we have concerns about a particular provider in a region or across regions, we work nationally and with the region to look at the inspection profile and at all the notifications coming in, and we bring things forward. But in a complex landscape, we are reliant on individuals’ knowledge and experience doing lots of heavy lifting, rather than there being a system that enables us to make the connection. When we bring forward an inspection, we have to look at what is happening in that home and give import to that. The other issues are more at the margins, but obviously, it does worry us that we cannot make the connections that we need to.

Amanda Spielman: This is also relevant in the worlds of early years, independent schools and apprenticeship provision. Colleges are increasingly in group structures, and multi-academy trusts may take decisions and act on many levels. Who controls them is clearly not an issue. Those issues flow through all our work, not just children’s homes.

Q5                Chair: The independent review of children’s social care warned that the current system is increasingly skewed towards crisis intervention and has made over 80 recommendations to reform the system. What are your thoughts on the findings of the review, and what are you hoping the review will achieve in the long term?

Amanda Spielman: The review has been really important, I think. It is a tremendous piece of work. It drew on expertise from all over the sector. The fundamental emphasis on doing everything we can to get families right is clearly the right one. Throughout my time at Ofsted, we have been reporting on how the various constraints, including funding constraints, were increasingly forcing local authorities to prioritise urgent work down the line when crises arise, and were limiting their capacity to emphasise the kinds of early help and early intervention that can potentially pre-empt. A concerted effort in the whole sector to achieve that is going to be immensely valuable.

Implementation will be absolutely crucial, as will learning from the lessons of the past. It is absolutely right to focus on families. We also have to make sure that some of the changes that have been made in the past have been needed where it has been hard to keep the focus on children, and to make sure that the optimism and determination that we rightly want social workers and everyone else who works with families to have does not cause them to lose sight of the child or children in the case. There is a tremendous amount to do to get this to where it needs to be. Yvette, do you want to describe some of that?

Yvette Stanley: Absolutely. We gave substantial amounts of evidence to the review and worked closely advising in our role as long-standing professionals, with our inspection and regulatory insights, to make a positive contribution.

I think Amanda’s point is well made. We have seen the diminution of early help, and really welcome the opportunity to put some of that back. That work—a child in need; child protection—is some of the most difficult work that we see, and we see very respectful but assertive direct social work with families to make those changes, but risk changes dynamically.

Many parents welcome the support of early help, and if we get the tone of our intervention right, more will. We also need to be mindful, if we look at many of the recent cases—Finley, Star and Arthur—these were parents who took the opportunity of covid to hide their abuse, have disguised compliance, and seemingly engage with the system. Finley was returning home. We cannot just fixate on child protection at the entry point; child protection exists along the whole journey into and out of care, and indeed for our care leavers.

It is about implementing these things with care. The trailblazers and pathfinders will be important for that. They might be anxious that we are too binary in a time of change. We are focused in ILACS, as Amanda said, on good decision making for children, so we can be nuanced but I would say, particularly given the fragility of local authorities and given our worries—in some places, it is 40% agency staff; I am sure that you will want to come back to the workforce issue later—you have to really overmanage, take great care and look out for perverse incentives and issues later on. We absolutely think that kinship needs better support. We are absolutely behind the ambitions for looked-after children and care leavers. It is why we put forward our care leavers judgment, and why we were so keen to regulate supported accommodation.

We need to do this carefully together and play our role in evaluating the impact. If something works, move faster. If something does not work, be brave and say, “Actually, that has had too many consequences at a different point in the system,” and be honest about that, because pendulum swinging in child protection is something that I have sadly seen in my too-long career. We need to always have a steady ship.

Q6                Chair: Finally, you mentioned the impact—clearly, in some cases, the tragic impact—of covid on very vulnerable children, and the lack of visibility there. Are you confident that you have the visibility that you need now, post covid, across the system, in terms of being able to get into all the relevant institutions?

Amanda Spielman: At one level, yes. It is important to remind the Committee of a point that we made to IICSA as well. Our main tool—inspection—is predicated on the integrity of leaders in the places that we inspect. It is not scaled or resourced to be a full investigation in every case; indeed, it would be disproportionate were it to be so. Where there is integrity and competence around the system—not just us but in local authorities, LADOs and all the places that form part of the regulatory system around children—the answer is yes, we do, but I do not want people to think that the system is invulnerable.

I drew the Committee’s attention in April 2020 to the risks around the loss of a line of sight to children through covid. For example, one of the mechanisms that was lost for some time was the reg 44 visits to children’s homes, which normally happen every month and in person, so somebody sees children in that home. Those became virtual by reason of covid restrictions, so one of the pieces of information that fits into the wider picture that makes sure there are regular eyes on children from different directions failed. It is really important to understand the importance of that whole set. There is no one piece on which everything depends; a set of pieces working together make regulation.

I want to add another thing, which fits with the previous one. Many children in need, and particularly children in care, have multiple needs. Something like 90% of children in children’s homes have special educational needs and something like 70% of all children in care. There was a useful supplemental report to the care review that laid out some of this.

Also, a very disproportionate number have substantial health needs. Often others in the family, including parents, also have those substantial needs. The join-up between services is crucial, so the whole of Government really do have to be behind these reports. This is not something that social services alone can carry; there has to be that coherence and join-up.

Q7                Miriam Cates: Earlier this year, Government published their response to the independent review of children’s social care. The House of Lords Public Services Committee criticised the Government’s response, basically saying that it was moving in the right direction but was nowhere near substantial enough to effect the “radical reset” that is needed. What are your thoughts on the Government’s response to that review?

Yvette Stanley: As I alluded to, we think they have the right building blocks. Pace is important in both directions; it needs to be done with care. Part of the comments were around the resources available, and it is not for Ofsted to determine competing priorities for the public purse. It all looks like it is going in the right direction. Of course, you could move further and faster with more resource. They are starting small with a small number of pathfinders. I understand that, and I understand the care experience community saying, “We need faster movement.”

As Amanda says, joined-up government needs to determine how much resource there will be and how all agencies are going to work together to support children. Amanda alluded to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children; that is joint work between the DfE and the Home Office. In terms of the disruption to children’s health services, the line of sight for children’s health services for under-threes is the health visitor, and yet we know that they have lots of vacancies.

We have a blueprint in terms of a direction of travel. How far and fast we go will be determined by resources. I would give a bit of caution around the capacity of the system, given the volume of social workers. If we invested in a huge amount of early help and sucked social workers out of child protection to do that work, we would need to be cautious about that. We need to think about the jobs we are creating, about children’s whole pathway and about the joined-up implications across Government. Of course, if it was up to me, I would put more money into children’s services.

Q8                Miriam Cates: What do you think are the chances of nothing changing in response to these several reviews?

Amanda Spielman: I think that is very unlikely, from what we have seen and heard. I am part of the national implementation board. Yvette, you are on the sub-committee. It feels as though there is real determination and grip, but also a recognition that accidentally messing things up and breaking something that is an important element of the system that is providing scrutiny, input and support from one direction and another could do more harm than good.

In terms of the pathfinder approach, I have talked more widely about how often more generally in public policy something that has looked very promising in a pilot is disappointing when rolled out at scale. Sometimes, for example, that is because it has been tested by the most enthusiastic and the most competent, and the demands of the particular policy turn out to be beyond the capacity and ability of the average operator in that system.

Part of what needs to be tested here is not just whether they can work in the leaders, but whether they will also work everywhere. Will they accidentally break the people who are closest to the edge in terms of capacity? Those are the kinds of issues that it is really important to get right. It is boring and it does not make for glamorous announcements, but in terms of getting it right for all children everywhere, it really matters.

Q9                Miriam Cates: That is helpful. I am not in any way criticising the role of any particular organisation. The point I am trying to make, or the question I am trying to ask, is that all of this focus of the review and the resource and the implementation strategy and things like that is essentially dealing with the problem post hoc. We have children who have already reached the point of being taken into care, which is not what you would want for any child, although of course in some circumstances, sadly, it is necessary. It seems to me that this is not a static problem. It is a rapidly escalating problem.

At the beginning, Amanda, you alluded to the fact that the children we are talking about are at the extreme end of social breakdown and of behavioural problems, but there are many children—an increasing number—now in the early and middle stages of that, often in very loving, what you might think of as normal homes, but experiencing these extreme social challenges that could end up in the social services realm.

What could we do pre the event, to refocus resources? Perhaps family help is the answer. From your position, what would you do?

Amanda Spielman: Family help is one part of it. Another is high-quality schools. One of the post-covid messages is quite how much the disruption to children’s socialisation is translating currently into difficulties in every stage of education, from nursery schools to colleges. Everyone has been finding that they are having to bring children further, from a lower starting point.

Socialisation is a long, slow process, and when that fails, those are the children who, by their mid-teens, are the most adrift from the expectations of schools and wider society, and at the greatest risk of falling out one way or another. So we shouldn’t lose sight of that core function of education as one part of that, but of course there is also making sure that family help is shaped correctly and getting to the right people enough.

As Yvette has talked about, there are the simple capacity issues. We know how many different workforces are struggling to recruit people. This is not something just about social care or education—we know that many sectors are finding it hard to draw in people. I think there is a bit of a labour market mystery at the moment.

Setting the path to the available people does matter. If we burn out everybody who is in the system by expecting more than they can humanly do, that won’t create sustainable change. I can understand the frustrations for many people in it. But we do have many established levers that do a great deal.

Q10            Miriam Cates: You have already answered my next question about the review of your frameworks, which you have said do not need a full overhaul, but you can tweak. Please do expand on that.

I want to dig into what you said a few minutes ago about how the inspection framework relies on the integrity of the leader. If, unfortunately, the leader of an organisation is a bad apple, they are able to hide information from you because you don’t have the resource to do a full investigation. Sadly, we know from experience and the IICSA report that people with predatory instincts are, obviously, drawn to work in those kind of places, at a much greater rate than in the general population—that is common sense.

How do you both manage your limited resources with acknowledging that there is a greater risk to children in children’s homes and anywhere where they are separated from their parents? How do you deal with that? Will your tweaks to your strategic priorities recognise that?

Amanda Spielman: In all our work, this point applies. In all our work, recognising any information, any intelligence, that suggests a threat to leadership integrity is a crucial flag for us. As soon as we started to doubt the integrity of leaders, we would start to look in more depth, to place less, if any, reliance on what was said and to look for more triangulation from other directions. Yvette, do you want to describe some of the situations?

Yvette Stanley: Yes. I would start by saying that our sectors also have some of the best and most brilliant people, who are absolutely motivated to make a difference—

Q11            Miriam Cates: I absolutely agree. I am saying that, sadly, people who are of the mindset that I described are drawn to work in these areas.

Yvette Stanley: You are absolutely right. What we are often asking both the providers out there and our inspectors to do is to juggle simultaneously those two things, which absolutely conflict. To go back to what Amanda said about us being part of a regulatory system where everyone has to play their part, that was very much what the national panel were saying in their phase 2 report.

We get a notification that a member of staff has allegedly done something inappropriate in terms of their behaviour with a child. We are asking the provider, “What are you doing about that?” They say they are taking firm action. It could be a matter of training or discipline; it could be dismissal. The local authority gets involved, because the local authority designated officer has the role of ensuring that they are the investigator taking it on. The police might be involved in that. So we have done a lot of work making sure that our connections are good. We have an agreement with the National Police Chiefs’ Council about information sharing when those investigations go on. We constantly strive to strengthen those things, but you are reliant on that system approach.

This is what Hesley taught us all. A while ago, people trimmed down the LADO handbook; actually, we now need to go back and say, “This is our very clear expectation.” It’s about being a proportionate regulator. And when I am taking about “the regulator”, in a sense that is the DfE, because they own those regulations—we apply those regulations—they are the regulator of local authorities.

But it is about making sure that everybody in that regulatory bit is working at an optimal level—being curious and not accepting the first answer, but being respectful. We can’t go in like a bull at a gate: “Are you sure you’ve done this? Are you sure you’ve done that?” It really is about the professional relationship that you have talked about, Amanda, isn’t it? It is about having that professional dialogue with providers—pushing them and not taking the first answer—and checking out the evidence as much as we can. But we are always reliant on that army of other people to all play their part.

Q12            Chair: I want to follow up that point about the regulator and the individuals within this as well. Clearly, in the school sector, if there is someone whom issues are raised about, the TRA will get involved. That person can effectively be barred from teaching in the future.

Wasn’t one of the recommendations of the independent review of social care to have a register of people involved in children’s homes, and would that not help to ensure that people can be effectively disbarred and unable to return to working in that space in the event that they have been found to have been behaving badly?

Yvette Stanley: Absolutely. Social workers are covered by Social Work England, and we have a close relationship with them, making sure that we join the dots when issues are found around social work practice. It was both IICSA and the national panel who suggested the registration of all people who work in care settings. That could be quite complex and costly.

The situation now is that we register the manager of a children’s home, and we are registering them not just in terms of a teacher, whereby you have your DfE number; we assess their fitness to be a manager of a particular home. Are they capable of being that person? Have they got the experience, the track record and the qualifications to be a children’s home manager, but also the manager of a children’s home that has, for example, children on the autistic spectrum or who have experienced child sexual exploitation? So we are judging them in a comprehensive way; a list is just a list—it wouldn’t change our fitness-to-practise issue. We do that in early years as well as social care.

Q13            Chair: I guess that is the managers. We will come to Hesley in more detail in a minute, but one of the things that came up there was that people who had had problems at other homes were then employed. Because there wasn’t necessarily a criminal bar, that didn’t stop them from being employed elsewhere. Should there not be an extra layer of due diligence within this?

Yvette Stanley: There absolutely is, post Soham, across all provision schools, local authority recruitment and children’s home recruitment. That is why we have such exacting standards for safe recruitment practice, including looking at employment history and collecting references over an extended period. We do interviews in person and ask very particular questions.

The DBS system has got more sophisticated. Those checks and balances are there. Of course, if someone has not been caught or—going back to Amanda’s point about integrity—if a manager who wants to get rid of someone is not clear in a reference, that is a problem the world over and not just in this space.

I wouldn’t want a register to take the importance away from that leader in a setting having the responsibility to check their people and reassure themselves constantly, because it is about that vigilance. I worry that a register might tick a box but actually reduce due diligence.

Q14            Mrs Drummond: I have a question on care leavers. I am really pleased that you have now announced that you are going to look at what happens to care leavers. A report last year from the Education Committee said that care leavers struggle greatly and do not receive the support they need. Certainly, the care leavers I have met would all concur with that.

I want to hear a bit more about your new judgment, and why that judgment wasn’t brought forward a long time ago. This has been a huge problem for a long time. Is it because you have only just been given that remit? And could you share some early findings? I know it has only been 18 months.

Amanda Spielman: I will say a couple of things before passing to Yvette. This is a really important set of young people. As I said just now, just as a disproportionate number of children in care have substantial educational or health needs, or both, so in turn does the population of care leavers. This is not a representative sample of humanity as a whole. There are many young people with really significant needs.

Also, especially because most of the unaccompanied children arriving in the country are 16 or 17, and are children in care relatively briefly, the proportion of the care-leaver population that is unaccompanied children becoming adults is growing very rapidly and will soon be a pretty hefty proportion of the care-leaver population.

Yvette Stanley: We often have a debate with all sorts of interest groups who want us to add a different judgment to our inspection. Before ILACS, we had something called the single inspection framework, where we judged things like adoption and fostering separately. It was a very big inspection—a big team, and a big burden on a local area.

So we moved to our current framework, which focuses on the quality of leadership and management, help and protection, and care and care leavers. The feedback—we constantly reflect and take feedback from the sector—was that it was more proportionate, and with our strong focus on good decision making for children at all points, it was supporting the sector, who are the primary improvers of their services.

I am a bit of a control freak and I attend all of our consistency panels for our ILACS inspections. It helps me assure myself that we are faithful to our inspection framework and we are consistent in our judgments. With only 152 local authorities reading each other’s reports, they can spot if they feel that I have used a nicer word about their mate down the road than them. That is really important, in terms of keeping a tight rein on it.

Over the course of the ILACS process, we did worry that care and care leavers’ services felt like they were not getting due diligence. Like you all, we were all really worried about supported accommodation. We are stepping up in that space as well. We were seeing poor-quality provision for our care leavers. What Ofsted looks at gets given import, doesn’t it? We thought about it, we consulted the sector and we have done about 15. One got “outstanding”, six “good”, seven “RI” and one “inadequate”—so solidly middling, I would say. There are not too many down at the inadequate end, but, absolutely, we should be ambitious for this group of children.

I can give you some headlines. Where it is good, it is about the quality of relationships between care leavers and their personal assistant, including supporting them through those transitions. Amanda talked about it taking a village to raise a child. Health and their education are important. I am sure that you all know much better than me that housing is a massive and complex issue—where you have districts, who has the social landlord portfolio and can put homes in the pot for our care leavers, who may be being educated in a different bit of the country? They are cracking that. They have good corporate parenting boards that have those players represented, and they are doing joined-up services for children.

In lots of places, we are seeing good progress in terms of going on to university or training in other ways, and a stronger response to care leavers who are pregnant or who have their own children. Not all care leavers will need support at that point, but it is a time when they might, because they are very unlikely to have had the experience of parenting that sets you in good stead as a parent.

Where it is poorer, it is actually the basics; it is the quality of the pathway plans and the quality of the relationships. We still see too many places where the number of children that people are case-holding does not enable them to develop those relationships and do that good work. There are still places where the health histories for looked-after children are not in as good a place as they should be. It is the basics.

I think that probably characterises the profile of local authorities. As Amanda said, we are nearly at 60% good or outstanding. They are the people who are doing the great work with kinship. They have the ambitions for looked-after children. At the other end, it is getting the basics right—having enough social workers and having services that can wrap around and support children. I would say it is the same for those where care leavers are struggling.

Interestingly, like adoption and fostering, you can have a wonderful care leavers service manager that, despite perhaps what is going on around it, really holds its children safe, is ambitious for them and makes sure that all its staff have a good relationship. It is going back to Miriam’s point: we attract wonderful people who go the extra mile, but they need the environment to do their best work.

Q15            Mrs Drummond: Is there a possibility, then, of sharing that good work? Is that what this new judgment is going to help with? Will it improve the services throughout?

Yvette Stanley: Absolutely. Amanda has been really strong on collecting our cumulative insights from inspection and doing research. We have a research project on good decision making for children, and we are looking at different points in the journey. We absolutely want to share that. We are humble—it is local authorities that do the heavy lifting of improvement—but we absolutely want to help them through our insights.

Q16            Mrs Drummond: You previously talked about careers. To me, that is particularly something that a parent or a corporate parent would help with. Is that part of your judgment as well? Do you look at that in the same respect?

Yvette Stanley: I know that at different points you have talked about the virtual schools. I think they are absolutely key at all ages—in the early years through to children approaching A-levels, apprenticeships and university. We see many places that are really proud and ambitious for their children, but they have those wraparound services to make sure they succeed.

I think our care leavers were one of the groups that felt isolated during covid. Some of them were at university and did not have the connections beyond the family that their more advantaged peers would have. I think that people have learned through that—they have found better ways of keeping in touch—but, absolutely, the care review is right that we need to be better parents.

Q17            Nick Fletcher: I will ask about the sufficiency of care planning, so this is really to you, Yvette. You have previously told the Committee that there are not enough children’s homes in the right places. Would you like to expand on that?

Amanda Spielman: This is something that we have been reporting year after year. It is frustrating to have to keep on reporting that, but yes, it is both about quantity—especially for the children with the most complex needs, who are the hardest to look after and get it right for—and the geographic distribution.

It is very clear that supply opens up, broadly, in the places where property is cheapest, so the economic attractiveness is greatest. That is not necessarily where the children are. A colleague mentioned yesterday, for example, that there is not a single secure children’s home within 60 miles of London. It is extraordinarily hard at the moment to get places, and especially places that are within—or no more than a reasonable distance from—a child’s home community. That challenge has not lessened in my time as chief inspector.

Yvette Stanley: I think that something like a third of residential special schools are in the south-east. No one designed this; it grows out of different policies. There was a time when we opened children’s homes near the coast to give London children some fresh air and a good environment. That is our inheritance. I think that there are niche groups of children—we saw this at Hesley—for whom there is no ideal provision, so local authorities, and parents in some cases, are left with Hobson’s choice in terms of those placements.

The care review talks about better joining-up at regional and national levels, and I would argue for both. We have to better understand the needs that we have to meet and the supply of provision, and then stimulate that supply. Ofsted’s job will be to give insights into those processes, and we stand ready if financial regulation is part of that at the end of this, but it does require joint working between local authorities.

However, it is not just about local authorities; the MoJ are the commissioners of the justice secure estate. We have reduced the number of secure children’s homes from 20-odd to 13 since 2018. That was good policy; we were expecting fewer children in the justice system, but the same number have turned up in the care system.

So, when you talk, Miriam, about the care system overheating, I do not know that local authorities are going out to draw more children in. If you add in that disabled children in 52-week settings now, in law, become looked-after children, that children in prison become looked-after children and that unaccompanied asylum seekers are now looked-after children, and deduct those from the quantum, policy has driven a growth for good reason.

However, what has not followed is health, justice, education and the local authorities saying, “If these children have come through a different path, how do we know what we will need in the future, how do we commission what we need, and how do we respond to societal and other changes?” For example, I used to plan special schools; children got cochlear implants, so I could then have inclusive primary schools with hearing loops, and my school for children who were sign-bilingual or deaf had hardly any children. Those policy and demographic changes need to be looked at by someone and planned for.

Q18            Miriam Cates: That is fascinating. So if you exclude the changes in the way that we are counting the numbers, and the increase in the number of unaccompanied asylum seekers, is there an increase in the number of children being taken into care through what you might call the traditional route—social services getting involved and taking children?

Yvette Stanley: I honestly don’t know.

Miriam Cates: It would be very interesting to know.

Yvette Stanley: My hypothesis comes from the number of adolescents that we now have in the care system. If you take the justice portfolio, with children involved in criminal and sexual exploitation, and knife crime, that is bringing children into the system.

Q19            Miriam Cates: Do you have a breakdown of the data? Could you write to us with it?

Amanda Spielman: We could write to you with a summary showing the movement over time. I think that would be useful.

Q20            Nick Fletcher: You have touched on my next question, which is about a national and joined-up approach. What would that actually look like? Is there not a live database out there with vacant places? Once you have put a child in a home, is it easy to move them? If you end up putting a child in a home 100 miles away from the parents, how easy is it to bring that child back to a home that is close by? Is that something that can happen, and have you got that live data?

Amanda Spielman: There is not national live data. One point is that many of these children have very complicated needs. There is not a neat taxonomy of children and of places. There tend to be quite complicated conversations to ascertain what a particular child’s care needs really are, and whether a particular home can meet them or, with certain changes, could meet them.

For example, one of the things that has concerned us is the loss of capacity, where, because a child has particularly complex needs, a home decides that it can only cope with that child if it leaves one of its other places unused so that the staff can concentrate on the extra needs. It is not as neat as one might hope, in terms of being able to say, “There is a place there and a child there—bingo!”

Yvette Stanley: Going back to where Amanda started, with the regulations being out of date, they do not actually tell us the nature of the children in the home. We have got the statement of purpose, but we might actually find that they are accommodating children on the autistic spectrum or who have been criminally exploited. Getting planning even for a child placement is hard for a local authority.

Going back to joined-up planning, one of the other things we have seen is an over 400% increase in children going before the High Court for deprivation of liberty, who would have been held at an in-patient mental health establishment. We are then worried that they are placed in unregistered settings. Those children may not have been open to social care at all; they may have been an in-patient for health. So we need the health database, the justice database, the local authority database and the SEND database. We then need to know which children each home is supporting. Neither of those things are in place to our satisfaction yet.

Amanda Spielman: This is one of the places where the regional care co-operative policy could potentially have the most value for the children with relatively unusual needs, who require highly specialist education and care. We need to get that kind of planning in the procurement, because these are the kinds of needs where any one local authority may only have one child or no children in any given year. It is hard to plan for that.

Yvette Stanley: It is a great place to start—those very top-end, high-tariff and complex children.

Q21            Nick Fletcher: Is the type of care mainly down to the carers themselves? They will have their own skills and education. Are we talking about the actual building and facilities? Or are we talking about both?

Yvette Stanley: Absolutely both. Just to go back to our annual report, we have been reporting on the vacancies for children’s homes managers. As the children who are in the homes have got all these different presenting needs, and probably would have been held in different places but are now in children’s homes, we need high-skilled practitioners and perhaps different numbers of practitioners. The workforce challenges are putting providers under substantial pressure in terms of meeting the needs of the children who are presenting for care.

Q22            Ian Mearns: I can’t help thinking, on the basis of the questions you have just been asked by Nick, about the work that a previous iteration of this Committee did on children leaving care and where they were housed before they left care. You talked about all the accommodation not necessarily being in the right place and not having the right capacity to care for the children because they have complex needs. Could that be a judgment that Ofsted made when looking at local authorities, in terms of where they are placing their children and how appropriate those placements are?

For instance, when we did that previous report, we looked at the plethora of London boroughs that were housing their children in Margate. It was not because they wanted them to get sea air. The neighbourhoods where they were housed were full of a whole range of complex difficulties, with high crime rates, drug taking in the locality and all the rest of it. The imperative that was driving local authorities in London to place youngsters there was cost.

Does Ofsted not have a responsibility to make a judgment about local authorities’ duty of care and corporate parenting, in terms of where they are placing those children? I was a councillor for 27 years and deputy leader of the council, and I took my corporate parenting responsibilities very seriously. I really think we should be looking at this, because if local authorities are moving kids 100 miles away just based on cost, that is not what a parent would do.

Amanda Spielman: I totally agree, and these are things that are considered and form part of the judgments we make. Yvette, do you want to describe that?

Yvette Stanley: Absolutely. We ask for a proportionate amount of information in advance of turning up for inspection, including lists of children. We will look at distance and at specific children. We know that it might be difficult placing a child with mental health needs or who has been criminally exploited.

We will try to annoy the local authority by finding exactly the children who are hardest to place and seeing what has happened with their journey. As Amanda said, if a London authority needs a welfare secure place for a child, it will be a long way away. If a child has complex special needs, it will be— We have to taper the judgment by looking at a range of children and doing a best fit.

If they have placed children in unregistered settings, we look at it, and we comment on all those things. We will say something along the lines of, “They have a small number of children in unregistered settings, but they are actively trying to move those children and get the place to register. It is because they have exhausted all other options.” We then want to know that they are really on it and that they are scrutinising the children, meeting them regularly, visiting and taking action if there are any concerns.

If I speak to local authorities, they will say that part of the problem is that providers are worried about getting a poorer judgment if they take complex children. They will tell us that providers are cherry-picking children. I have certainly been in a local authority where it is bidding for a place for a child, and the money is going up; I know that that happens.

Providers will say they cannot get the staff, and the children are more complex. The sufficiency problem is the issue. When two elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets hurt. The children are getting the impact of the fact that we just do not have enough children’s homes, and we are not working together nationally and regionally to make that better.

Q23            Ian Mearns: You mentioned the power that providers have in that shortage market, in that they can cherry-pick the children they take, which means that some youngsters with even more complex needs are probably left looking for places that do not exist or cannot meet their needs effectively.

Of course, all those youngsters with complex needs not only have to be housed and looked after; they also have to be educated to the best of anyone’s ability. We must never forget the capacity of any locality to fulfil that need, particularly if it is outside the borough where the children originally come from. In terms of the cherry-picking, how often is this happening and what engagement have you had with the Department? Surely the Department have to have much more than just a weather eye for that, in terms of the sufficiency, the capacity and the quality of places.

Yvette Stanley: We work closely with the Department. We will give them our insights on what we are seeing on inspection. We are in dialogue with them about what financial regulation might look like. I personally attend several cross-Government groups where we are trying to get the answers for these children, and their provenance might sit in different bits of Government.

For example, DOH have a task group. Their success criteria is keeping these children with mental health needs out of hospital; my success criteria is having them somewhere safe and decent and meeting their standards in the community.

Those conversations are working. With the care review, if we could focus some regional working with some of these most complex children— We do see local authorities and their partners working really hard—I see providers working really hard to accommodate children—but perhaps they do not have the staff to meet those needs.

Amanda Spielman: To your point, I think this is a good example of where the regulatory focus sometimes needs to move up a level or two. Remember, the typical children’s home in this country only has around three to four children. Many are even smaller—two or even one-bed.

In the context of a two or three-bed children’s home, it is extraordinarily hard to come to a definitive conclusion at that level that that home has been cherry-picking and has not been taking children it might have taken. If you look across an entity that operates 37 children’s homes, it is much more likely that you can see a pattern in who is being taken and who is being refused places that says that this does not stack up overall. That lets you say that the proper prioritisation is not happening, and that some kind of leverage should be exerted to change the approach to admissions. Trying to do it at the level of the individual home is really, really hard.

Q24            Ian Mearns: But in those shortage situations that we have talked about, when you have those bigger entities doing that cherry-picking—you have said it yourselves—there is also an element, which you have referred to, that they are charging what they want.

Amanda Spielman: I will come back to the financial piece, but at the level of the individual case, if a children’s home manager tells you that they have assessed an individual case thoroughly and fairly, and considered their staff and any other staff they might be able to recruit locally, and they do not believe that they can responsibly provide for that child, it is really, really hard for anyone directly to contradict or second-guess that decision. That is why we should be getting up a level so that you can say, “Any one may be justified, but collectively the pattern shows a bias that you cannot account for.”

On the financial side, as you know, we have no powers to look at what is being charged and how the service being provided relates to what is being charged. We have expressed our concerns; we do believe that some level of market oversight is necessary.

The first step that was in the Government response to the care review contemplates a system of voluntary financial oversight, which will help to get to first base in collecting enough information from enough providers to be able to properly understand how the market is working and how the economics are driven. It would be good to have a better map of how the very substantial amounts of money spent on care are distributed across both entities, and also between children with different kinds of needs to help to prioritise regulatory efforts where they could potentially add most value in building capacity.

Q25            Ian Mearns: But some of these larger providers are corporate entities and we can see what they are declaring in terms of surpluses or profits.

Amanda Spielman: You can, but if you are looking at a provider that has 53 adult care homes and 37 children’s homes, you cannot unpack the different activities from the financial statements.

Q26            Ian Mearns: The problem, from the perspective of the local authority that is commissioning the service, is that anything that it is overspending on is an opportunity lost for spending on something else. And there are lots and lots of children, particularly upstream, where early intervention would really come in handy.

Amanda Spielman: We completely agree, and we are profoundly uncomfortable with the current state of affairs. In adult social care, the CQC does have some market regulatory powers, so there is a visibility and some levers that simply don’t exist at the moment in children’s social care.

Q27            Ian Mearns: I think you might have a role in doing inspections of the DfE to make sure that the putting together of its policy is appropriate to meet the current need—but that’s another matter.

The next thing I want to come to is workforce issues. There are significant recruitment and retention issues in the social care workforce. Between 2021 and 2022, 35% of permanent care staff in children’s homes left their role. To what extent is this affecting the quality of care for children, and how has it impacted on their overall wellbeing? I did note earlier, Chief Inspector, your labour market mystery moment. I say it’s a mystery; I have a funny feeling it consists of pay, workload, conditions of service and availability of other, more lucrative work. I would guess that’s the mystery solved just about there.

Amanda Spielman: I referred to a mystery, because it is extraordinary quite how many sectors are simultaneously reporting inability to recruit. I absolutely recognise the challenges and difficulties for staff working in this sector at the moment. Yvette, do you want to address the question?

Yvette Stanley: Absolutely. We certainly know that there are homes that have beds that they have held empty because of the recruitment challenge. We are seeing a pattern in which we are registering new homes and they have a registered manager, but when we inspect nine months later, that person has moved on. They are being poached to open other homes.

We are seeing roles with substantial financial benefits growing in, say, the QA—quality assurance—part of some of the larger groups and people being sucked out of the sector to do those jobs. So it is absolutely about stabilising the workforce. Pay is part of that, but there are also qualifications and training and support.

To go back to the point about wonderful people, there are people who have dedicated their lives to these roles. They are not seeking promotion; they are absolutely loving that care work. But it is hard; it is challenging. And if the children are coming with more complexity, those people need more support around them. I’m talking about things like the quality of child and adolescent mental health services; the wraparound services that hold children safe are also issues in terms of workforce.

Q28            Ian Mearns: Have you seen any evidence that anybody at a strategic level—for instance, within the Department or between this Department and the Department of Health—is doing any strategic workforce planning for the future?

Yvette Stanley: There are certainly groups that I’m aware of that are looking, in both those spaces. Social Work England is the regulator for adults and children—

Q29            Ian Mearns: That sounds a bit amorphous: groups are talking about it. Is anybody actually getting down to it—rolling their sleeves up and getting into it?

Yvette Stanley: Our role is to provide insight, so we wouldn’t necessarily be at all those meetings, but I have certainly been involved in the DfE’s work to look at the use of agency staff, which is more in the local authority domain. I think that is really important.

We talked about line of sight, and eyes on children, early on. We have agencies providing teams of social workers who come in and are willing only to take much lower case loads and not to do some of the home visit work. You are then ending up with a two-tier workforce. So I absolutely stand behind the DfE’s work to look at the use of agencies. They have had a workforce strategy, but it is heavily focused on child protection—social workers. I do think we need to work together on the care sector. As well as the Waitroses—other supermarkets are available—that appear to be taking care staff, investment in the health service moves people out of adult and children’s social care into other bits of the health service. Again, we need joined-up workforce development so that one person’s growing is not to the detriment of somewhere else.

Q30            Ian Mearns: So that is a challenge for the Department to do some strategic thinking and planning about that, but obviously it is not within your remit to examine the work of the Department. I understand that.

Amanda Spielman indicated assent.

Q31            Ian Mearns: Will you make any recommendations to the Department, as an inspectorate, about the shortcomings of the workforce provision at the moment?

Yvette Stanley: We have certainly talked and given our advice that we need a workforce strategy for the care sector as well as the social work sector. We need to look at the qualifications, and also the training and support to get those qualifications. If you are in these lower-paid jobs, funding, training and so on becomes an issue, doesn’t it? We have absolutely been making those points.

Amanda Spielman: We have also discussed and recommended considering the operation of the agency social work model and social work teams. It is very concerning when we hear that people are barely signed off and they are already off to an agency. There are also considerations in the NHS in the context of agency nurses and other staff.

This is a problem across Government where models emerge that are not contemplated by either professional, funding or other regulatory models. The problem is to consider how they are best controlled and regulated. If unchecked, they can potentially have harmful consequences for the people who are the recipients of the service.

Q32            Ian Mearns: But also, agency staff, as with supply teachers in schools, are expensive.

Amanda Spielman: Yes.

Q33            Ian Mearns: It is sucking money out of the system that could be better spent on permanent staff, quite possibly.

Amanda Spielman: It is sucking money out of the system. It is worth pointing out another aspect, which is that it makes life harder for the authorities that have got the hardest job to do. People who live in that authority don’t by default go and work for that authority’s social services if they can get an agency job where they are working mostly remotely and driving to another authority 100 miles away because they only need to go once a week. For the areas that most need good staff, that can suck them dry of the people they need.

Q34            Ian Mearns: Is it not also incumbent on these umbrella companies, which have many elements of provision under their umbrella, to have a responsibility to be part of the training process?

Amanda Spielman: Potentially so, but there is no lever at the moment. We can’t test, for example. I have no idea how well some of those companies may be using flexible allocation of staff around their own provision, including potentially between types of provision.

Q35            Ian Mearns: Yvette mentioned that there was poaching going on. The trouble is that quite often it is the public sector that spends the money on the training, and then the poaching takes place when the private sector sucks people out. It can do that; that is the way the model works when there is more demand than supply.

Amanda Spielman: You are absolutely right that there is a potential system contribution there, which at the moment is hard to tap.

Chair: Caroline, do you want to come in on the workforce point?

Q36            Caroline Ansell: Yes, thank you. I recently met with the management team of adolescent care home providers in my county, and they raised a number of concerns directly associated with Ian’s line of questioning.

One was, if I may go a little retro, about that cherry-picking notion. They put the challenge that one of the issues with providing for the most complex children and young people, as you referenced, is that there needs to be far greater support and recognition. In your Ofsted reporting and your approach, to what extent do you recognise that context? It can be a disincentive if a provider’s Ofsted rating is potentially on the line if it takes those complex and more challenging children.

I’m afraid that they also made the point that they saw that there was a drive for those children to be rather more likely to be placed in deregulated homes because of that.

Additionally, I’m afraid that they said that their experience of inspection, which had previously been very positive, had changed in recent years. They saw that as part of their challenge on recruitment and retention—not for anything other than perhaps the manager category. They said that they could account for the loss of managers through that Ofsted experience.

Amanda Spielman: Can I make a couple of points? First, so often what people talk about gets telescoped into “Ofsted requirements,” but we apply the Department for Education’s requirements through our inspections. Particularly for the children with the most complex needs, there are high aspirations embedded in the expectations that are set through policy and guidance. That is what we take with us.

Q37            Caroline Ansell: Does the Department sufficiently recognise the challenge of providing for those children, then?

Amanda Spielman: We all endeavour to make sure that the expectations are applied proportionately. There is no question that the children with the most complicated needs are the hardest ones to get it right for. They are the most complicated. You need the most staff and the most training. We spend a lot of time looking to make sure that that is right.

How to get the balance right is a perennial conundrum—on the one hand, to meet everybody’s expectations of what these children, for whom life can most easily go wrong, should get and, on other hand, to ensure that providers can confidently say that it is no harder from a regulatory point of view for them to get a given outcome. We are constantly working to get that balance right. But we cannot step back and say, “We won’t apply the expectations here because the provider said it’s a bit difficult for them.” It is a really difficult one to get right.

Q38            Caroline Ansell: If there is a disincentive to take the most complex and challenging children, does that mean that we do not have the balance right? Is the balance off?

Yvette Stanley: If you look at the profile of children’s homes, 80% are good or outstanding. Our secure children’s homes had a little dip, but they are on an improving trend. We absolutely see people going the extra mile and providing really good-quality experiences for some of the most complex children. That is true. I also know that it is hard and that it is sometimes not easy to get wraparound services from health and other places for those children. We acknowledge all that.

Is it right, then, that some providers go, “I’m going to open something that is unregistered and has no line of sight?” That cannot be right, can it, for the children with the most complicated needs? We are narrating that happening. We can see how and why it is happening, but it absolutely is not the right thing for children.

Q39            Caroline Ansell: Can I stress that this challenge has come from a registered provider that is rated by Ofsted as good and outstanding? They have made a public statement to the effect that they do not validate Ofsted findings because they did not subscribe to the experience, the reports or the findings. They are good and outstanding, in your estimation.

Yvette Stanley: I am probably aware of those cases. You may want to talk later about complaints. I think we had something like 70 last year across thousands of inspections. I would always say to a provider, “If at the end of the inspection you are not happy, go through our process and raise it, and we will have a professional conversation about what you feel went wrong with it.”

I always want our regulatory inspectors to work respectfully. They come from the sector—a third of them have come from the sector in the last two years—so they are people who absolutely understand that heavy lifting, the role and the responsibility. If occasionally we do not get our tone right, let us know and we will address that. We train people. We constantly go, “How do you deliver these really difficult messages kindly, but without losing those ambitions for children?”

We do our best. The pressures on the sector are making everybody tetchy with each other. Your cherry-picking is my careful selection of children. I am having the conversation with local authorities and providers in the DfE. We are all in this space because of the fault lines about lack of sufficiency.

Q40            Caroline Ansell: Finally, one last point of clarification. Are those with the most complex needs disproportionately represented in the unregulated part of the sector?

Yvette Stanley: From the 500 or so unregistered cases that we have seen, they are children of high complexity, many placed by the High Court because there is no other provision for them, which puts them in this legally placed but unregistered and therefore unlawful provision. It is a difficult legal dilemma.

Q41            Ian Mearns: On inspections of local authority children’s services, the most recent inspection outcomes, from last year, found that 46% of local authority children’s services either required improvement or were inadequate. That accounts for nearly half of children’s homes that were inspected. What are the common issues arising from these inspections that require improvement from local authorities? Why do you think so few local authorities have improved since 2021?

Amanda Spielman: In a year, we inspect local authorities on a cycle. I don’t think there are enough that you can say that a change from year to the next—

Ian Mearns: It is just the ones inspected in that part of the cycle, yes.

Amanda Spielman: —is a reliable indication of a national change. More generally, we have seen a pattern of very slow improvement over the last six or seven years, but still a substantial minority that are “requires improvement” or “inadequate”. The pattern shifts. Some have improved and some, sadly, have declined.

Yvette Stanley: And remember that, through ILACS, we operate a more regulatory approach. Inspection is our tool, but it is a regulatory approach. We have focus visits. If we find something widespread in the system, we go back to those places. It is skewed on the basis of risk, which can change your profile.

Broadly, we see most local authorities improving, perhaps a grade, or improving within a grade; we can see stronger practice. Where they are not improving, we see high levels of agency staff and turbulence at leadership level. They nest in a council that has not committed to children and is not giving them the environment to do the best practice. They have not got enough social workers.

We talked about the importance of housing and health, and the relationship with partners might not be strong. They haven’t got a strong practice model. Social workers do not feel safe and supported in taking difficult decisions. You have to tackle those environment things before you can do what the better places are doing, which is the great work with kinship carers and the good relationship-based work that keeps a family focus, but is child-centred and making a difference for children. The environmental factors are absolutely the prerequisite to getting to those places where you can do that best work.

Q42            Ian Mearns: But you will be aware that the capacity of the local authorities to invest in those environmental factors has been diminished over the last 13 years as the revenue support grant has been withdrawn, and there has been no balance in the council tax system, so some authorities are much worse off than they were, and some are a bit worse off but not that much worse off than they were. When you make your judgments about local authorities and their provision, you have to consider the context of the resourcing that has been taken away from local government.

Yvette Stanley: It wouldn’t be right, would it, if we had different standards and expectations for children’s experience, but we absolutely understand that difficult context. I spent 30 years in local government, and as a chief officer I knew that my demand for more money meant less for another colleague. I understand that, in many local authorities, 80% of spend is on adult and children’s social care, so they are between a rock and a hard place. Our role is to go in and assess how well they are doing with the resources they have.

Some people do a lot better with slimline resources because they are child-focused and have managed to stabilise their team. I went from Camden, one of the best-funded local authorities in London, to Merton, which was at the bottom end of London, and we still provided a good service. It was harder, and we didn’t have some of those wraparound services, but with good, focused work and the right culture in an organisation, you can make a substantial difference.

Q43            Ian Mearns: You mentioned the whole-village context and what that means for a child, and a local authority across its whole range of services helps to provide the environment of the whole village. Of course, its capacity may be undermined through the withdrawal of so much money. My local authority, in real terms, is working on about 52% of what it had in 2010. That is a staggering context. It is not recognised widely, but that is the actual context. In terms of providing that whole village—that whole environment—that really undermines the capacity of a local authority to do that work. Do you agree with that?

Yvette Stanley: We see the context being different in different places, but I absolutely recognise that.

Amanda Spielman: We have also commented—we talked about this earlier in the session—on the drift away from early help work over time as local authorities have had to focus on their statutory work, and the funding has contributed to that.

Chair: We are running out of time, so I will go to Nick. I ask that you keep questions and answers as short as possible for the next few questions, please.

Q44            Nick Fletcher: In March 2021, the Doncaster Safeguarding Children Partnership agreed to initiate a complex abuse investigation into three specialist residential settings run by the Hesley Group, all in my constituency. The national review into safeguarding children with disabilities and complex needs in residential settings found that Ofsted had rated Hesley’s children’s residential settings as good, but the emergency inspections identified that there were serious and widespread issues. How do you explain these serious oversights in safeguarding children within those settings?

Amanda Spielman: It is a complicated picture at Hesley. As you referred to, there is a police investigation, and I don’t think any charges have yet been made, so none of us knows the full picture, but it seems clear that there was some terrible abuse of children, which is of course shocking and deeply unwelcome.

The system clearly didn’t work as well as it should, so there are lessons for all the agencies involved, including Ofsted. The covid shutdown was a contributory factor, but only a contributory factor; some of those eyes were taken off children. It is also a clear example of a case where management integrity had gone. There was deliberate concealment of substantial amounts of information.

Our final investigation showed, essentially, that there were at least two sets of books. The notifications that were being made to us were only part of the picture. There was a great deal of information that we should have had but that was withheld; that would have changed our risk assessment and our likely action.

That failure of integrity, the poor flow of information to us, the suspension of routine inspection by Government because of covid, and the loss of other lines of sight, meant that we were slower than we should have been to pick that up. Although individual incidents had apparently been satisfactorily explained by managers when we followed up on them, nevertheless the aggregate picture suggested that something was more deeply wrong. It took a whistleblowing complaint in March ’21 to prompt that emergency inspection, which went with an extra level of scrutiny because doubts had been raised about leadership integrity. That immediately made the referrals in relation to the serious failings that were found.

It is a shocking case, and I have apologised for the delay. I do believe that we could and should have put together that emerging pattern a few months earlier than we did.

Q45            Nick Fletcher: I think one of the concerns with the review is that there have been a number of complaints dating back to 2015 and these complaints included serious concerns about possible abuse of children and the conduct of staff. This was back in 2015, so it was five years before covid; there was no covid to worry about then. Serious concerns about possible abuse of children—

Amanda Spielman: This is where the picture I have explained is relevant. There are two or three notifications of serious incidents involving children for every child in the system every year. This was an exceptionally large set of homes—I think there were nearly 70 children there.

Nick Fletcher: There were 100 children at three settings.

Amanda Spielman: A normal pattern of notifications would have anything up to a couple of hundred notifications a year of concerns as normal for an institution of that size, including quite a number of serious incidents. Case by case, as far as we can tell, we followed up on every incident. The homes had a chequered inspection history. There have been many points between 2015—I think it was in 2019 that we judged the homes to be “good” for the first time in a long time, and they weren’t then reinspected before routine inspection was suspended.

There had been a great deal of testing of complaints and apparent management action. For example, if a complaint or concern was raised, we would check it. Management would say, “Yes, that did happen and this is what we’ve done. We’ve sacked that staff member, we’ve retrained the other one and we’re confident we’ve done the things to put it right.” This is the normal pattern in relation to a huge proportion of these notifications: you check, and the leaders have done the right thing in relation to them.

We do not visit every children’s home dozens of times a year every time there is a notification. We have to hold those risk assessment thresholds. What is the point that it triggers, “Something is definitely wrong here. We have to go back in between normal inspections to take a deeper look”?

That relies also on information from other directions. These were unusual homes. In terms of two of the things that we have trained people in, coming out of this case, one is around closed cultures—this was a large facility employing several hundred staff, but in the main from a very small area, so a lot of people were related or closely acquainted with another and perhaps less willing to whistleblow than they might otherwise be.

Also, there are the particular needs of children with communication difficulties. Most children in care are teenagers who are absolutely able to tell someone if they are unhappy with the way they are being treated. Many of the children at Hesley were unable to do that. So it is about getting some extra intensity into the risk assessment in those areas.

We did go back and reinspect all the other residential special schools in the light of that case and we did not find concerns at that level. We did not give every school a “good”; there were some “RIs” and a handful of “inadequates”. But the pattern was relatively normal. We were very concerned to establish whether there were any others in that situation.

Q46            Nick Fletcher: I know we are running out of time, Chair, and this inquiry is obviously still ongoing, but I believe that there was a huge turnover in staff at that place. Didn’t that ring any alarm bells? Do you inspect homes where the residents are non-verbal more often than other homes? Do you think you should, having heard what we have about the Hesley Group?

Amanda Spielman: On the first point, I do not think that we have notification of every change in staffing, so I don’t think we would know between inspections about unusual staff—

Q47            Nick Fletcher: Would that be picked up in inspection, though, because I think there were hundreds of changes?

Yvette Stanley: We absolutely would. The challenge with Hesley was that it looked like they were taking firm action on staff that were not up to the job, so there was a reasonable explanation for some of the turbulence. We did ask exactly those questions.

I will go back a bit. Hesley would not meet the standards of registration for a children’s home registering now. It was historical provision. The nature and size of the rooms and the homes, and the fact that it had been marbled into a relatively closed community, makes the safeguarding of those children particularly challenging. That is partly why we are saying that you need to update the regulatory standards so that they are based on the risk to the children, not the historical nature of the provision.

You are absolutely right: non-verbal children were far away from home, but we had letters from parents saying, “Don’t close Hesley; I love it. It’s our child’s forever home.” These things are really difficult. Amanda mentioned the patterns and volume of notifications. I looked at the last 50, and 20 involved injuries, or allegations of injuries, to children, but that is not uncommon with children with these presenting needs. Nine allegations were of assaults on staff by children. Again, that is not unusual, given the presenting needs of these children.

That all being said, as an organisation, we have scrutinised every decision we took. Given what we knew, was what we did reasonable? It absolutely was. We took proactive action. Do we wish we had joined the dots, as Amanda said, a bit sooner? Absolutely, but we are really pleased that the phase 2 report said that the regulatory system needs to change.

We were reliant on the local authority designated officer to investigate all the staffing complaints. People were moving, people were disciplined and people were sacked, but were they the right people? We view that from a distance. Absolutely, we are keen to work with all the players to make sure that the regulations are up to date, and fit for the children’s needs and the level of risk, and to make sure that everybody is playing their part. As part of that, we have done a lot of work with our staff on the closed culture issue.

Amanda Spielman: On the second part of your question, in the regulatory system, there is nothing baked into the framework of legislation about the level of need of the children. That deserves looking at—whether there is a categorisation that should have a higher degree of regulatory protection around it. Of course, that goes straight to the kinds of problems that Caroline described: as soon as you do that, it is harder for providers to meet regulatory expectations. There is always going to be a tension there. Getting it right is a tough one.

Q48            Nick Fletcher: Thanks for that. I hope that when the inquiry comes to an end, you could speak to me about that.

Amanda Spielman: It will be very helpful for us when investigations conclude and findings are published. Like most other people, we simply do not know what is being uncovered.

Q49            Mrs Drummond: The review mention a detailed action plan. Will that help spot these issues in the future?

Amanda Spielman: Yes, I believe so. I have talked about the closed culture training, the children with particularly difficult needs, and the reinspection of all residential special schools in the light of that case. Those were the main pillars of the action plan. Are are bits I am forgetting?

Yvette Stanley: We work on a regional structure. We have eight regions, and we have pooled staff together. We have looked at the regulation and inspection of 59 similar organisations, to make sure that we pitch this right, as Amanda says, when it comes to doing the right thing for children and getting the regulatory bit right.

Amanda Spielman: We reviewed the list of all the provision that we inspect and regulate that caters for children with these kinds of needs, to make sure that we understood, across all residential special schools and children’s homes—whatever the type of provision—that our risk assessment recognises and takes account of that.

Yvette Stanley: We have the CQC alongside us for some of our inspections, and we deeply love having them alongside us on these. One of the sad issues is: how does a non-clinician judge whether children are being underfed or over-medicated? With the best will in the world, when it comes to some of the things that have been uncovered, our inspectors would need clinicians alongside them to be able to evaluate those sorts of things. Apologies; that is a bit upsetting.

Q50            Mrs Drummond: You would hope that would be in the regulations. When you go into a faith school, you need someone who knows about faith. When you go to a special needs school, you need someone who knows about special needs. Presumably, that would be the right thing to do on this school.

Amanda Spielman: When we go to a faith school, we do not inspect the faith provision. We leave that to the relevant faith.

Q51            Mrs Drummond: But with special needs, you would try to get a specialist.

Yvette Stanley: We absolutely do. As I said, we stand on the shoulders of our workforce of long-standing practitioners, and they are experts. On the Hesley point, they employed all their own health professionals—not just educators and care workers. There were not health services that were scrutinised by the CQC in the same way. It was a closed culture, in terms of all of the professions.

Q52            Caroline Ansell: This is a timely point to ask about joint inspections, given your point about clinical experience and expertise. On phase 2—the recommended joint inspections—how many joint inspections have Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission proceeded with? Going forward, will there always be joint inspections for settings where there are children with significant health needs?

Yvette Stanley: We have to get agreement from the DfE and DoHSC on having the CQC alongside us, and they would have to be resourced to do that. We are actively having those conversations. We already have the CQC alongside us on our joint targeted area inspections, where we look at the front door and other thematic issues, and when it comes to our secure children’s homes.

Looking at the closed culture, if you have health professionals operating out of a secure children’s home or a secure training centre, you absolutely want professionals on your team who can evaluate the clinical response, as well as the care and the education response.

Q53            Mohammad Yasin: Moving to unregulated and unregistered accommodation, I am sorry to say that my constituency has been a hotspot for unregulated children’s homes. I am so pleased that the Government have listened to our calls for action, and that unregulated accommodation will be banned. From October, it will be regulated. Ofsted has said that it plans to begin inspecting supported accommodation in April 2024. Are you on track to fulfil this, and do you anticipate any delays to these inspections?

Amanda Spielman: As far as I know, we are on track. Everything has been lined up. We have received a number of applications, and we are processing them. We think we are ready and will be inspecting as planned, and the consultation has been valuable. I do not think that will fully address the problem of unregistered children’s homes.

We have looked at nearly 600 just in the last year, and in over 90% of them, it has been clear that as the regulations stand, they should have been registered as children’s homes. We have sent warning letters. Some of them will have closed, and we are still processing the remainder. Under 10% of them are services that are more properly characterised as supported accommodation. The registration pathway is very welcome, but the deeper problem will still be there.

Q54            Mohammad Yasin: If those 10% do not co-operate, what will happen?

Amanda Spielman: If the 10% or so that could properly register as supported accommodation now that the pathway exists do, that is great, but the other 90% who are running children’s homes will not be solved by the supported accommodation regulations.

This is about how we get to the place where there is enough capacity in the system, because essentially you cannot get some registered provision out of the system while local authorities and the courts can legitimately say, “There is literally nowhere else for this child in desperate need to go.” There has to be legal capacity for the levers to operate and squeeze this provision out of the system.

Yvette Stanley: We heavily scrutinise local authorities on their use of unregistered accommodation, and their action to get the children out of it, or to push the provider to register. We have also looked to our own offer.

We now have the capacity to register linked children’s homes—ones that are close together, so that there is an umbrella for four or five children with one manager. That puts capacity in. There would be a competent manager who could run a small group. That would be the legal route for some of these. Unfortunately, some of the frequent fliers of unregistered provision set something up, look after a child for a short period, and then move swiftly on.

Q55            Mohammad Yasin: Thanks for that. You have stated that you will develop a system that places the interests of young people at its heart. How do you plan to achieve this?

Yvette Stanley: In terms of supported accommodation?

Mohammad Yasin: Yes.

Yvette Stanley: We have had discussions with young people who are in supported accommodation about what “good” would look and feel like to them—their ambitions and aspirations. We obviously have to balance that with what good practice looks like for the provision. It is very different provision.

Amanda talked about children’s homes. They are typically three-bed children’s homes—a family terraced house type of thing. Supported accommodation is hostels. It is houses in multiple occupancy and Mr and Mrs Smith down the road who have a spare bedroom. We are thinking really hard about an inspection regime that covers that diversity, but we are absolutely listening to young people about what they need on the journey to independence.

If I had 100 young people in a room, half would say, “We want to be independent more quickly”, and half would say, “I want more support.” We need to encompass the fact that children will be on all points of that continuum. We might see supported accommodation that could register as a children’s home, but we do not want to over-regulate that sort of provision. That needs careful work. We are designing it, taking into consideration the views of the sector, local authorities as the commissioners, and children and older young people who are likely to be in that provision. Look out for our consultation in the summer.

Q56            Mohammad Yasin: The CMA report and the care review have raised the point that many registered homes are reluctant to accommodate children with complex needs, because they are worried about their Ofsted rating. Have you found evidence of this happening?

Amanda Spielman: First of all, the worry about the Ofsted rating is essentially a concern about the exceptions for those complex children, as translated through inspection. This comes back to points that Caroline and Nick made:how do we ensure that expectations are set at a level that society is satisfied are sufficiently ambitious, but also operationalise them in a way that is doable? That will continue to be a challenge, not least because it typically cuts across regulatory regimes in health, education and social care, and a web of different types of provision to which different standards apply. This is a complicated world. We want to do everything we can to ensure that children get the care that is right for them.

Q57            Mohammad Yasin: I understand that, but is there any evidence that this is happening?

Amanda Spielman: In what sense?

Mohammad Yasin: When you do an Ofsted inspection and provide your report, is there any evidence? 

Amanda Spielman: We do a great deal of surveying, and we do post-inspection surveys in every remit. We publish that information in our annual report. A very high proportion of people inspected in every remit—I think over 90% in every remit—report, after the inspection is done and dusted, on whether the inspection will help them to improve. Of course, that does not mean that every inspection is perfect, or that we get everything right every time, but given the stakes in inspection, that is pretty encouraging.

Given the contentious politics some of the time around inspection, I think that is a remarkably good outcome for what we do. We constantly monitor and look for feedback on the impact we are having and whether we are emphasising the right things. That applies to some of what has been picked up earlier in this hearing about care leavers.

The emphasis changes over time; sometimes different issues come to the fore. Something that was a big issue three years ago, and took up quite a large piece of an inspection framework, may now be well under control, and everyone may be pretty much on top of it, so it may be right to swing the lens round and say, “The world should be looking a bit harder at this.”

We also try to be dynamic in the way that we aggregate our insights, and to inform the policy conversations that happen in DfE. We continue to give advice on the implementation of social care reform. We are trying to ensure that we surface what we see, so that we not only contribute at the level of individual inspection, but inform as much as we can all those who have to make policy or take it forward.

Q58            Mohammad Yasin: Can you take any steps to encourage regulated settings to accommodate children with complex cases?

Yvette Stanley: Absolutely. We have done blogs about what we want, which is good, careful work with children. We understand that their progress will not be linear; we understand that there might be episodes that you have to respond to.

The profile, as Amanda says, is that we have an enormous number of homes that do absolutely jolly well with these children. We think that if we can offer the “single child and multi-hatted manager” model, that absolutely speaks to the fact that you can regulate something that is small and bespoke for an individual child, albeit that we would have some safeguarding worries if there was too much of that provision. We are doing what we can within the regulatory framework that we have. We are signalling to the sector that we understand that the needs of these children are complex, and the response will need to be complex. Hopefully it will respond to that.

Amanda Spielman: We are constantly responding to the whispers that can go round a sector, which are out of all proportion to the true likelihood of inspection throwing up a problem. I will not get into specific cases, but in the context of the schools remit, about 99% of schools are currently judged effective for safeguarding.

The anxiety in the sector about safeguarding judgments seems to me to be out of all proportion to the implied threshold for being judged effective that that percentage represents. It really is a very, very small minority of schools that are not able to show us that they meet expectations for keeping children safe in education.

Where we see anxiety getting out of balance, it is a constant challenge for us to do what we can and ask the various kinds of sector stakeholders—representative groups and so on—to use the levers that they have, as well to help to bring perceptions in line with reality.

Q59            Chair: You mentioned childcare registrations. You said that you are reviewing and improving the registration process for those wanting to provide childcare. Is there a timeline for that? When we will see detail of the changes?

Amanda Spielman: We have completed a pilot; I think I read about it in my executive board papers in the past week. My aim is to reduce very substantially the current published target. The average time at the moment is about 13 weeks; I would like to make that a lot shorter. What we have seen in the pilot says that we can make real progress.

Q60            Chair: On childminders, we heard some concerning evidence, particularly from some of the think-tanks, about the perceived burden of inspection, though I have to say that when we had our childminders engagement group, they were a little more positive about the impact and approach of inspection. Is there scope to make any changes there that would be helpful to address the childminder recruitment and retention challenge?

Amanda Spielman: Yes, and we have been very fully engaged in the wider Government policy discussions about childcare. A policy decision taken a dozen years ago—not by us, by Government—was to create as much parity as possible in regulatory terms between nurseries and childminders, but there have been some unintended consequences in both directions. In my view, those are very different entities.

Recently, we have done everything we can in the wider framework to make sure that inspection is not burdensome. As with all inspections, it is framed as a professional dialogue— something that is “done with”, not “done to”. From childminders, as from other people we inspect, the feedback is pretty strongly that they find it supportive.

We recognise, however, that a routine inspection cycle operating in the same way as it does for nurseries is not necessarily the best fit, given how childminders come into and move on from this occupation. We are therefore very open to developments in regulatory policy by Government in this area.

A version of the EYFS has been published for childminders, which I think will be helpful. The two main policy instruments that we apply in the inspection of childminders are the EYFS and the childcare regulations. The EYFS as drafted is very much framed on the assumption of an institution able to do certain things, but it is quite hard to translate that well to an individual childminder. The change in that regulatory instrument will help us to make sure that the inspection conversations are as directly relevant and valuable as we can make them.

Chair: Thank you. We will conclude the session on that note.