Today Ofsted announced its report after it found Bucks Council's children’s services still required improvement following a previous inadequate rating in 2017.

While no children were found to be at immediate risk of serious harm in the new report, the result is far from outstanding.

The inspection was carried out between December 6 and December 17, 2021.

Cabinet Member for Buckinghamshire Children’s Services, Councillor Anita Cranmer said: “Ofsted did confirm that all services are effective and that all children in Buckinghamshire are safe. That is a wonderful thing.”

The services need to improve by the next inspection in 36 months’ time.

What needs improvement? 

The inspectors judged four areas: the overall effectiveness of the service, the impact of leaders on social work practice with children and families, experience and progress of children who need help and protection, experience and progress of children in care and care leavers.

Their overall effectiveness was judged as ‘requires improvement to be good’.

This includes, for example, a reduction in a high rate of re-referrals and assessments that result in no services being provided for children and families, improvement in the quality of social workers’ direct work with children and improved support for homeless children aged 16-17, Ofsted's report found.

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At a press briefing today, Cllr Cranmer was corrected for saying that the services were not in fact rated “improving to good” but “improvement required to be good”.

Cllr Cranmer denied complacency regarding the low result and said they can promise Bucks residents they will vigorously improve the service as required.

“We are not complacent. We are pleased that we are requiring improvement to be good, that is a long way away from inadequate and we’re pleased that in all four areas that we have to concentrate on we’ve started to concentrate on earlier.”

 

Corporate Director for Children’s Services Richard Nash added: “This gives us an opportunity to pause and look over our shoulders for a moment and see how far we’ve travelled as a service.

“To be twice failed in the county the size of Buckinghamshire and then to improve, which is no easy feat in the midst of world wide pandemic, is an achievement. But none of us are content with where we are.

“Reason for optimism is in the trajectory we’re on. Nevertheless, they have come to their judgement and we accept that in full.”

Why is the rating not higher?

The first reason was definitely Covid, Cllr Cranmer assured.

She said: “We had many more cases come in through Covid. Our numbers of children in need had gone up quite a bit.

“The number of children subject to a child protection plan has gone up by almost 300, we now have got 740 children on this type of plan when we used to have far less. So that’s one reason.

“The other reason is social workers’ interaction with children was extremely difficult at the time of Covid. They were not able to go out and do visits sometime and that was very bad for the social workers and the children.

“Also the news at the time we had our inspection was quite disastrous in terms of paying attention to children’s care.

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“There were two very high profile child deaths and Ofsted would be looking at us with a hypercritical eye because anything like that, obviously, colours your thinking.”

Mr Nash said: “There’s room for lots of optimism and should the inspection have happened in six, twelve to eighteen months I’m sure it would be likely we’d be better than ‘requiring improvement’.

“However, if you look at the content of the report it is still very strong in our view."

What next?

Cllr Cranmer said: “It is not just our intention but our determination that the service will be good.

“In three years time when we’ll be inspected again we’ll have a wonderful, glowing Ofsted.”  

Bucks Council children’s services will take in 60 newly qualified social workers in the next 12 months in an attempt to improve retention and recruitment of social workers, Mr Nash said.

Cllr Cranmer said: As part of our improvement journey, we will continue to adapt and improve the support we provide to children aged 16 and 17 years who present as homeless."

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