Written evidence submitted by Ofsted [JRR 01]
Background
In a response to a question from Bob Blackman MP, Debbie Jones stated that ‘We [Ofsted] very clearly believe in improvement through inspection, so anything we can do to throw light on that area we would do’. As requested by the Chair of the committee this memo sets out more detail on what this involves.
Ofsted’s local authority improvement role
Ofsted has a clear responsibility to support local authorities that require improvement, and our commitment to do so is supported by legislation that requires HMCI to perform his functions with a view to improving services.
Ofsted supports improvement through the process of inspection generally but we have also developed a specific improvement offer to local authorities that is separate to inspection. This offer comprises two distinct strands that are separately targeted at local authorities judged to be inadequate or who require improvement to become good. Both strands share a common goal: to support authorities in their work to deliver sustainably good services to children and young people. In addition we are piloting a new intensive improvement offer.
Improvement Planning Seminars
All local authorities judged to be either inadequate or to require improvement are invited to attend an improvement planning seminar led by Ofsted. In delivering this improvement work Ofsted draws heavily upon contemporary research and the evidence built up during inspection. We share examples of good practice and, recognising that a key factor in local authority improvement is an effective and achievable improvement plan, all of our improvement work begins with an Improvement Planning Seminar. During these seminars Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMI) who took a lead role in the inspection provide and clarify the detailed inspection information to help the local authority to focus its plan appropriately. Feedback from the sector about the effectiveness of these events has been very positive.
Getting to good seminars
In addition, over the past year Ofsted has delivered a series of 28 ‘getting to good’ seminars, aimed at local authorities judged to require improvement. We target these upon identified need and at the moment we are covering the following themes: Improving the experience of care leavers, Providing effective early help, Applying thresholds to help protect children and Achieving permanence. These have been chosen as the most common areas of social care performance that held back authorities from achieving good grades in their most recent inspections. In the coming year they will be supplemented by four more seminar topic areas which will focus upon the findings from our thematic and local authority inspections.
The seminars, which run twice a year in each region, provide a learning forum and reflection time for senior managers to consider the changes they need to make to improve their services. Formal evaluation of the seminars by participants is very encouraging. The overwhelming majority of attendees indicate that they found the events to be relevant and useful in helping them identify the common factors in organisations that do not improve and identifying or amending the priorities in their improvement plans.
Improvement work in local authorities judged to be inadequate
For those local authorities judged to be inadequate we have now completed two pilots based on a more intense improvement offer. These comprise not only the Improvement Planning Seminar, but also monthly monitoring of case work. Cases are specifically selected to enable the impact of key aspects of the local authority improvement plan to be tested for effectiveness. Every quarter there is a review of progress that the local authority is making and a report is presented by Ofsted to the Director of Children’s Services and the local authority improvement board. Following the forth quarterly review a progress inspection takes place to test more comprehensively whether the authority is making satisfactory progress.
This aspect of our improvement work offers intensive support to the local authority but also, through its unequivocal assessments of progress, it properly affords public assurance as to whether the authorities concerned are taking suitable action to afford the children and young people the protection and quality for service they require.
Early signs from those authorities that have been involved in the pilot exercise are that this work has been successful in supporting their improvement programmes. The local authorities concerned report that the HMI involved have been able to help local authorities and improvement boards to develop and focus their improvement work on appropriately prioritised areas at a time when the authorities themselves were experiencing differing degrees of organisational change. If these encouraging messages are supported by the formal evaluation process that is underway, we intend to roll out this part of our offer across the country from April 2015.