Lou Williams, service director for children’s services and safeguarding at Cambridgeshire council, talks to Community Care about the ‘requires improvement’ judgment the council’s children’s services recently received from Ofsted.

The council was praised by Ofsted for taking swift action after a restructure in spring 2017 had been shown to a have a negative impact on the delivery of services to children and families.
“These weaknesses were compounded by high caseloads, making it very difficult for social workers to complete work beyond the most immediate tasks in a timely manner or to a consistently good standard,” inspectors observed.
Ofsted was optimistic that some changes implemented late in 2018 have the potential to be positive, but said that high caseload remain a threat to the council’s journey of improvement.

Williams describes the considerable journey Cambridgeshire has taken, particularly how the service approached what effectively has been a restructure less than two years after previous large-scale changes were made. He explains how the council has benefitted from the use of child practitioners and clinicians, how services for children in care and care leavers will continue to improve, and he addresses the challenge of recruitment in the social work sector and how he is optimistic that the 2018 changes to the service will have a positive impact.
The full list of questions posed by Community Care’s associate editor Sarah Dennis are:
1)How accurately do you feel that the outcome of Ofsted’s inspection corresponded with the service’s self-assessment?

2)What was the restructuring of services that Ofsted identified as having a negative impact in speed of response and support, and how have leaders responded to this in terms of what Ofsted deemed “well-considered actions”?

3)Can you tell us more about the Early Help Hub, the arrangements launched late last year within the MASH for assessing referrals, and the new adolescent teams - which Ofsted felt could be a real asset? How are these contributing to the strengthening of services?

4)How has the use of clinicians and children’s practitioners within teams been managed, and how closely involved are social workers in these cases?

5)What is the service doing to ensure that delays in follow-up visits after initial visits are being reduced, both in terms of the frontline staff and those that are providing supervision?

6)How is the service addressing Ofsted’s observation that work in preparing children in care and care leavers for independence does not include work in partnership with young peo-ple?

7)What are the ongoing challenges in terms of recruitment and retention of social workers, and how much progress has been made in increasing staff numbers and the focused use of agency staff over the past year?

8)Ofsted highlighted the size of caseloads as the single biggest threat to improvements in service. What proportionally would you say has been the rise in numbers and complexity for social workers and how is the service looking to manage this?

9)How has the senior leadership developed its knowledge of the service’s strengths and weaknesses, and what are the areas where clearer visibility is needed to continue support-ing improvement?

10)And finally, what would you say are the priorities for Cambridgeshire children’s services for improvement, how is the new leadership looking to embed these and how is it working with the frontline staff to do so?