Key Themes of OFSTED Inspection of Manchester 2014
Manchester has an unsatisfactory OFSTED report
Context
• It was recognised that growth in the numbers of young people, the numbers in poverty and the levels of domestic violence were creating massive demand on services.
• 108152 Children and young people (CYP) under 18 in Manchester
• 36.4% are living in poverty – that’s 39583 CYP.
• 49.3% of CYP are from black and minority ethnic backgrounds
• In primary schools 37.8% of pupils have English as a second language
• Manchester’s child population has grown at 2% a year for the last decade.
• 5349 children have been assessed as being in formal need of a specialist children’s service.
• 920 are subject to a child protection plan, 1,373 are looked after – that’s 122 children per 10,000.
Leadership and Management
• Whilst there had been some improvements, overall there had been a decrease in the quality of safeguarding between 2010-2014
• Some recommendations from the 2010 report had not been implemented.
• Management and quality assurance were criticised at all levels across children’s services and MSCB, from supervision of front line staff to senior management’s awareness of key weaknesses and leaders’ ability to affect change
• MSCB could not tell if children were being safeguarded effectively
• Troubled families work was praised and seen as a model to be emulated
• Lack of a shared protocol between the police and children’s social care for the screening and management of domestic violence, means that there are high levels of notifications of domestic violence to social care.
Social Work Practice
• Long backlogs (486 children) waiting for assessment, meant an unacceptable delay during which these children were at risk. This background has now been cleared but it was there for too long.
• Frequent staff changes limits the ability to form relationships with families – this is a theme that has also come out of a number of serious case reviews in terms of understanding compliance and evasiveness from parents. This concern was found in the 2010 Inspection.
• Lack of challenge of poor social work practice in conferences and adoption proceedings by Chairs.
• Key workers are not always attending conferences and multiagency meetings which limits the effectiveness of these meetings.
• There was a lack of specialist children’s workers, some were leaving and not being replaced, others work was being diluted and this was having an Impact on the care of disabled children.
Children in Care
• Too many children, particularly black ethnic minority children are waiting to be adopted in Manchester. Some children have not been adopted despite a plan for adoption. The pace of improvement in this service is too slow.
• A third of looked after children are not attending good or outstanding schools which is impacting on their life chances.
Early Help
• Poor understanding of thresholds contained in the threshold of need document, by some of the statutory partners together with poor engagement of other agencies in delivering early help, is contributing to high demand for social care. This is not being effectively addressed – i.e. that complex but low risk children and families are being escalated to social care un-necessarily and this is adding to the workload of already over stretched departments when they could be managed better elsewhere.
• Although there was evidence of innovative work, it was not decreasing the level of children needing child protection or looked after children.
• It is not clear that there is common understanding of what Early Help is/ means across all agencies
• MCAF was not sufficiently embedded in all agencies.
Learning from Experience:
• Concern that the MSCB and Safeguarding arrangements were not using learning from analysis of data and serious case reviews to improve practice. This has been recognised by MSCB for some time. There was particular concern about Missing from care practice and Child Sexual Exploitation processes not being well embedded,