Birmingham child services director failed to get damning Ofsted report toned down

Birmingham Children’s director Tony Howell attempted to have a damning Ofsted exposé of the city’s continuing failure to help children at risk of sexual and physical abuse watered down, it has emerged.

Mr Howell wrote to the watchdog after Ofsted sent the city council a draft copy of its report and asked for comments.

He took issue with the central finding that safeguarding measures by social services remain inadequate and have been for two years. But his efforts to have the more critical aspects of the report toned down were not successful.

His plea was rejected by Ofsted, which said it could not accept Mr Howell’s version of events.

The report was released this week, a fortnight after it was announced that Mr Howell, the city council’s Strategic Director for Children, Young People and Families, would be taking early retirement. He plans to leave in January, when he will be 60.

Ofsted’s findings prompted the politician responsible for turning around children’s social services to warn the council to “move out of denial”.

Tory city councillor Len Clark, who earlier this year published a damning scrutiny committee indictment of systemic failure at the heart of social care in Birmingham, said his colleagues had to recognise that throwing more money at the problem was not the answer.

Noting that the city’s controlling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has invested more than £100 million extra in children’s social services since 2005, Coun Clark said additional cash would not confront management weaknesses nor bring about different ways of working essential to cope with an ever-growing number of cases involving alleged child abuse.

The Ofsted report, based on a two-week inspection last month, found “significant weaknesses” in child protection arrangements.

Coun Clark (Con Quinton) said: “Was I surprised at their conclusion? No, I was not. It’s a dire report.”

Although Coun Clark accepted that Mr Howell had taken issue with the report, he warned: “The council must come out of denial, we have to acknowledge that the Ofsted report is fair in its conclusions.”

Ofsted’s findings were almost identical to those in his own Who Cares? report, which found that children’s social services were unfit for purpose, Coun Clark noted.

In a blistering condemnation, Ofsted awarded services for safeguarding children the lowest possible Ofsted ranking – not meeting minimum requirements.

The findings are a bitter blow to city children’s social services, which has been working under a government improvement order for 16 months.

A Serious Case Review into the death of Khyra Ishaq, the seven-year-old Handsworth girl starved to death by her mother and stepfather under the noses of Birmingham social services and education officials in 2008, is due to be published next week.

In a carefully worded press release, which made scant mention of Ofsted’s central finding that the care of children at risk remains inadequate, the city council press office quoted a selective line from the watchdog report which mentions “energetic and visible leadership” within social services.

The paragraph in its entirety, however, contains an altogether more worrying message: “Despite energetic and visible leadership which is welcomed by staff, there is an emerging sense among some front line social care managers and staff that they are isolated and detached from the exciting professional developments associated with the Brighter Futures strategy which has not yet produced services, particularly family work, essential to their work. This sense of disconnection, whether real or perceived, is generating the sense of being overwhelmed by the magnitude of the demand for services and is inhibiting progress.”

Since the Government improvement order came into force in February last year, a new senior management team has been put in place under Children’s Social Care Director Colin Tucker, and council leaders had hoped Ofsted would find dramatic improvement.

But inspectors said: “Medium-term plans to address some concerns, although important, do not address the serious deficiencies in the quality of safeguarding and protection services which are long-standing, very evident and in need of immediate action.

“Critical deficiencies remain in front line work with children and young people despite significant attempts to deliver improvements.

“The effectiveness of services in Birmingham to ensure that children and young people are safe is inadequate because of significant weakness in child protection arrangements.”

There was also criticism of the Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board, which Ofsted said had been preoccupied by undertaking 20 Serious Case Reviews into the deaths or serious injuries to children in the past four years. The board was “not yet able to fulfil its role in professional leadership”, the report found.

And while the inspectors pointed to some good initiatives and pockets of improvement, the overall conclusion was of “insufficient focus on the critical core business of protecting children and young people at the highest risk”.

Coun Clark (Con Quinton) believes the improvement notice, which remains in force, is distracting staff from delivering change.

He said: “Officers have been chasing too many targets, essentially ticking boxes, rather than addressing the fundamental weaknesses of the service. We have to move out of denial and confront these real challenges if we can ever confidently say we are protecting as well as we are able children at risk in this city.”

While praising positive aspects of the report – children in the care of the council are not at risk and most residential homes are classified as good – Coun Clark said he was alarmed that Ofsted had decided there was little chance of safeguarding services improving in the near future by downgrading the prospect for improvement from adequate to inadequate.

One aspect to be studied is what Coun Clark refers to as the capacity gap – there is a 40 per cent gap between what the council spend on social services and the productivity generated, largely through high staff sickness levels and the cost of hiring agency staff.

He announced the formation of a top-level working party to produce an “immediate re-alignment” of social services, and will report to the cabinet in November. The group will contain human resources officials as well as finance experts in an attempt finally to get to grips with absenteeism.