Consultation: Future of children’s social care inspection, OFSTED

This consultation seeks your views on proposed changes across Ofsted’s inspections of children’s social care. It has 4 parts:

• Principles for children’s social care inspections
  This section sets out three principles that we think should govern inspections of children’s social care.
• A new approach to inspections of local authority children’s services from 2018
  This section sets out our proposals for the overall approach to inspections of local authority children’s services. The inspection framework will be based on your response to these proposals. We will start a targeted consultation with local authorities and other key stakeholders on the detail of the inspection framework later in 2016.
• A new common inspection framework for social care establishments, agencies, boarding schools and residential special schools from April 2017.
  For all establishments, agencies, boarding schools and residential special schools and residential provision in further education colleges. The framework will mean that same judgement structure will apply in each of these settings, we will evaluate and report on a set of common issues in every inspection, our methodology will be underpinned by the same key principles and we will ensure that there is consistency in what ‘good’ looks like for children and other users.
• Changes to inspections of independent fostering agencies including a proportionate response to agencies judged as good or outstanding:
  •    all agencies will be inspected at least once every three years
  •    we will return more quickly to inspect agencies that are judged inadequate (usually within six to 12 months)
  •    we will return more quickly to inspect agencies requiring improvement (usually within 12 to 18 months)
  •    we will reduce the notice period of inspection of IFAs from 10 working days to one working day.