Outstanding: Ofsted’s verdict on Kent’s Children’s Services

In a report issued this morning, Ofsted has rated Kent County Council’s children’s services as Outstanding - the highest ranking and one held by few councils across the country. This follows an inspection in May under the Inspection of Local Authority Children’s Services (ILACS) framework.

It has been a long journey of improvement. A little over a decade ago, KCC’s children’s services were found to be Inadequate. The hard work of improvement has taken place during an era of funding constraints, rising demand pressures on children’s services across the country, the pandemic and, for Kent, the arrival, especially in 2015-16 and 2020-22, of large numbers of Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children. 

Ofsted rated Kent’s children’s services against four criteria:

- The impact of leaders on social work practice with children and families - Outstanding 

-  The experiences and progress of children who need help and protection - Good

- The experiences and progress of children in care and care leavers - Outstanding

- Overall effectiveness - Outstanding

Ofsted found that children are at the centre of KCC’s practice; that social work and early help teams work effectively and understand well the children and families they support and engage with; that there is ‘outstanding practice’ in support of children in care and care leavers; and that the political and senior officer leadership is committed, well-informed and prepared to invest in the service. One of the most heartening findings was that staff are ‘rightly proud of the work they do’ and ‘love working for Kent’. 

There are a,ways challenges, and always areas in which we can improve further, and the report sets these out. But this is, taken in the round, a fantastic tribute to the staff who, day in and day out, dedicate themselves to the children and young people of the county.

You can find our media release, with a link to the Ofsted report, here

Kent's Children's Services Rated Good by Ofsted

Yesterday saw the publication of Ofsted's inspection report on Kent County Council's Children's Services. The outcome was very encouraging, rating the Council's services as 'Good'. This puts Kent in the top third or better of authorities in the country.

The result is all the better, given that Kent's services were rated 'Inadequate' in 2010, an outcome described by KCC Leader Paul Carter as the darkest day of his leadership of the County. An extensive improvement programme has been in place since then, yielding an 'Adequate' rating in 2013 and now the move up to 'Good'. And this for a big and complex county, in which the Council  not only has responsibility for around 1,400 local children in care, but has also had to deal with significant inflows of Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children (UASC), especially during a big surge in numbers in 2015. There are also roughly as many looked after children placed in the County by other local authorities.

The report gave high praise to services supporting adoption, fostering, children in care and those leaving care, asylum seeking children, those on 'the edge of care' and others, including the Virtual School Kent; it also praised the commitment and high quality practice of Kent's social workers. Some areas still have room for improvement, notably those for 'children who need help and protection'; in some cases, referrals were closed down prematurely and practice was not consistently good. Overall, the report provides some ten recommendations for improvement.

This strong outcome is a tribute to the dedication of front-line staff; to a senior management team that has given clear and committed leadership; and to political leaders, above all my predecessors in this job, Jenny Whittle and Peter Oakford, who backed the process of improvement unswervingly and were willing to put the necessary resources behind it. As the new portfolio holder for Children's Services, I can (and do) claim no credit for this result; however, I now have a job to do in overseeing the Council's practice development plan, which will seek both to implement the report's recommendations and to drive still further overall improvement.

You can find the full report here.