Children’s services being undermined by demoralising inspections

Children’s services are being undermined by “simplistic, process-driven” inspection and monitoring, the head of the body that represents senior children’s social work managers claimed today.

In a thinly veiled swipe at the regulator Ofsted, Kim Bromley-Derry, the president of the Association of Directors and Children’s Services, said the way inspections were being carried out was “draining confidence and capacity”.

“The inspection and regulatory framework we are all experiencing in all our settings at the moment does not always appear to be assisting in the building of confidence in the system, but rather the reverse,” he told delegates at the National Children and Adult Services conference in Harrogate.

“Recent reports appear at times to be accelerating the perception that, in particular, children’s services are ineffective and inadequate. This is undermining the quality of practice across the whole sector.”

Bromley-Derry said that a year after the Baby Peter affair and a year before what would probably be the tightest funding settlement in memory, the profession was “between a rock and a hard place”.

The window of opportunity to rebuild the reputation of social work was short, and the next few months had to be used to regain the public’s confidence.

He suggested social workers needed to demystify their work in the way that popular TV programmes like Police, Camera, Action, which follows traffic officers on the beat, have done.

Tension over Ofsted’s performance since the Baby P scandal has already burst into the open at the conference. Yesterday John Coughlan, director of children’s services at Hampshire county council, and a senior and respected figure in the profession openly criticised the inspectorate, to loud applause and cheers from local authority chiefs.

Coughlan, who was temporarily seconded by ministers to run child protection services in Haringey council at the height of the Baby P crisis last year, accused Ofsted of “defensiveness to the point of destruction” and questioned its decision to rate as “inadequate” a serious case review report published by his own local authority.

In what was taken to be a reference to Christine Gilbert, Ofsted’s chief inspector, he said it was unacceptable that an official of the agency had last week used the term “appalling” to describe the number of serious case review reports judged inadequate, and questioned its criticism of a serious case review report published by his own local authority.

Gilbert is due to appear at a “meet the inspectorates” session at the conference tomorrow morning.