Ann Coffey

|

Inspection of Children’s Homes

I want to welcome the new Children and Young Person’s Bill, which aims to reform the statutory framework for the care system and to ensure that children and young people receive high quality care and support.

The Bill also aims to improve the outcomes between children in care and their peers and to improve placement stability.

I want to focus today on a crucial tool for helping to raise outcomes for children in care – the quality of inspections of children’s homes.

The importance of robust inspection is an issue I have felt passionate about for many years, ever since I was a social worker in the 1980s.

There are about 6,500 children in children’s homes and hostels in England. That is eleven per cent of the total number of all children.
The latest data shows that these children tend to be older – 14 per cent are aged 10 to 15 years and 23 per cent are 16 and over.

Many of these children have very complex needs and display challenging behaviour. It is all the more important, if we are to improve outcomes for them, that we have high quality care.

We need rigorous inspections of children’s homes so that poorly run homes can be made to improve or to close.

It is only with a good care environment that young people will achieve better educational outcomes. Without the support of their corporate parents this will not be possible. And that means not only the social worker but the care home.

I welcome the measures in the Children and Young Person’s Bill to enable registration authorities to issue compliance notices to children’s home providers who are failing to meet required standards and to impose a notice preventing new admissions to establishments where this is deemed inappropriate. I think this will make it easier to enforce minimum standards.

But in order to get to this stage of taking action against homes, we need to see the introduction of more rigorous inspection regimes. We have to ensure that children’s homes provide the standards of care necessary to improve outcomes for the children they look after.

All children’s homes are required to be registered under The Care Standards Act 2000. Ofsted are now responsible for the inspection of children’s homes and took over this role from the CCSI in April 2007.

Children’s homes are subjected to detailed statutory regulations and national minimum standards. However, the framework for inspection reports is the five outcomes in Every Child Matters, which formed the basis of the Children’s Act 2004. The five outcomes, under which children’s homes are inspected, are: Being Healthy; Staying Safe; Enjoying and Achieving; Making a Contribution and Achieving Economic Wellbeing.

I believe that - particularly in relation to children’s welfare and running away - some of the minimum care standards and how they translate to the five “Every Child Matters” outcomes are too general. This can lead to inspection reports that do not show the forensic detail that is needed.

I became interested in inspections after I was recently alerted by my local Community Safety Team in Stockport about concerns they had about what they saw as the inadequacies of Ofsted Inspection reports into some children’s homes in my constituency.
 
The team had catalogued numerous instances of problems involving children at the homes and yet felt the inspection reports did not reflect the true picture of what was actually going on in the homes. They provided me with evidence of very high levels of children running away and going missing; repeat offending and committing assaults and criminal damage, which were not being reflected in the reports under any of the above general inspection headings.

This anti-social behaviour was causing problems for local residents who live near the homes.  The team were worried that if these incidents were not being highlighted then other agencies could not provide the interventions needed to help these young people correct their behaviour.

Stockport has a very high number of children and young people placed in our children’s homes from other local authority areas. Indeed fifty three per cent of all looked after children in Stockport are from out of the borough compared to a national average of 35 per cent throughout the country.
Many of the young people who were causing problems and had attracted the attention of the Community Safety Team had been “exported” into Stockport from out of the borough.  I am pleased that the new Children and Young Person’s Bill addresses this and aims to limit out-of-authority placements. 

I decided to apply for reports of ten children’s homes in Stockport, from Ofsted, to check for myself.
 
The first problem I encountered was actually getting hold of a copy of the reports. They were not available on the Ofsted website.
I applied for them and I received a letter saying my request was being dealt with under the Freedom of Information Act. I objected and, of course, because I was an MP, I was immediately supplied with the reports. But my point is that they are not easily accessible.

Looking at the reports -  as I said, I had detailed statistics about the many incidents of children going missing, assaults and criminal damage in and around the homes committed by the residents and yet these statistics were not reflected in the reports. Even without this important information four of the homes were officially classed as “inadequate”; three were “satisfactory  “ and only three classed as “good”.
 
My point is that the reports contained no context or overview about how often children were getting into trouble or going missing. Without this we cannot truly assess whether the care provided by the homes helps to manage or stabilise the behaviour of young people and whether the homes are meeting standards for safeguarding children under the Every Child Matters criteria.

It cannot be right, for example, that one inspection report into one Stockport home failed to mention that one young person had run away 89 times. Another one did not mention that there had been 69 missing cases, six assaults and 31 incidents of criminal damage nearby. 

Under the regulations, the home should promote and make proper provision for the welfare of children and for the care, education and supervision and, where appropriate, for the treatment of children accommodated there. The National Minimum Standards call for written records of all incidents of absconding and reasons given by the child for running away. However, there is no requirement for these incidents to be included in the inspection reports and so they are not being reflected under the “Staying Safe” heading. I think they should be.

I am particularly concerned that three of the homes in Stockport - all managed by the same organisation – were given notice to improve last year and were classed as “inadequate”. Since then two of these three homes have been inspected again and have now been classed as “satisfactory”. However it is not entirely clear to me what level of improvements have been made to warrant moving from “inadequate” to “satisfactory”.  Again, the problem is that the inspection categories are too general.

Another children’s home in Stockport, which has a different owner, and charges up to £4,250 a week per child, has sent out advertising flyers trying to attract placements for prolific and priority offenders from areas outside Stockport. The flyers say:

 “Our aim is to drastically reduce offending behaviour and achieve positive outcomes for the most challenging young people”.

But the Community Safety team have given me detailed times and dates of incidents involving two clients - whom we shall call X and Y - which reveal that the home is failing dramatically in this stated aim.

In the case of Client X, who was already electronically tagged, there were more than 35 incidents over nine months, ranging from assault, burglary, missing from home, criminal damage, punching and biting care workers, throwing a knife at another resident and stealing a vehicle. Client Y had fifteen similar incidents.

The relevant Ofsted inspection report did not reflect any of the above.

After reading the reports on the ten children’s homes in Stockport,
I wrote to Ofsted to express my concerns about the lack of thoroughness of the inspection reports and have since had a helpful meeting with Michael Hart, the Children’s Director of  Ofsted and Andrew Mercer, an assistant divisional manager in the Children’s Directorate. They assured me they had taken on board my concerns and would feed them into the on-going review of National Minimum Standards for Children’s Homes.

I am also grateful to the minister for allowing me the opportunity to raise some of these concerns at a recent meeting. I hope through this debate to put my concerns on the record together with his - I hope - positive response.

I believe there are a number of steps that can be taken to improve inspections.

The first point I raised was the importance of the reports being made more freely available. I would like to see them published as a matter of course, on the Ofsted website, which I understand Ofsted are now consulting on. At the moment the inspection reports only go, as a matter of course, to the owner of the home,  whether local authority or private. I believe they should go as a matter of course, to the placing authority and the authority in which the home operates and also to the school and agencies responsible for tackling crime and disorder. If a home is deemed to be inadequate, the placing authority should put their reasons for continuing the placements on the child’s record.

I would also like to see statistics published showing the number of homes with their inspection categories so that we can see the impact of inspections in improving standards – just like the school “league tables”.

If local agencies have a responsibility for dealing with the behaviour and education of all looked after children in their area then those agencies should also be aware of the quality of care being provided.

I want to see the reports being better informed by inspectors seeking views of local agencies such as Crime Reduction Partnerships and Community Safety teams and schools in advance of their visits. I accept the usefulness of random visits but I also feel that if the police and schools were consulted on their views about the homes and the activities of the residents, before the visits, then the reports would be better informed and consequently more useful.

Also it would encourage those homes to work more co –operatively with local agencies if they knew that those agencies would be asked for their views in inspection reports.

Does the minister agree that as part of the inspection process, it would be a good idea to invite comments from local Crime  Reduction Partnerships, Community Safety Teams and other agencies about anti-social behaviour, offending and running away by young people in these homes to help inform the inspection reports?

Does he also agree that it would be useful if schools were consulted about the levels of support being provided by the care homes to pupils and amount of communication between teachers and care home staff and the performance of the pupils in care?

My suggestions for the updating of the National Minimum Care standards are that inspection reports should contain a summary and proper evaluation of all incidents of running away, assaults and criminal damage. This would enable placing authorities to better evaluate the control mechanisms that are in place in the home to manage behaviour and to assess if the home was properly meeting the “Staying Safe” criteria.

Can I pay tribute to my honourable friend for Warrington South (Helen Southworth) for all her hard work on the All Party Parliamentary Group on Runaway and Missing Children.  As secretary of that group, I know that many of the 100,000 children who go missing every year come to some harm. One in 6 are forced to sleep rough or with strangers and one in 12 are hurt or harmed.

An analysis by Greater Manchester Police showed that on average children missing from home during a particular six month period committed just under 5 offences each. 47% were victims of crime on more than one occasion during that period. These included physical and sexual assaults. There is also evidence of substance misuse when missing and prostitution. So a failure to manage those children in a care situation, not only has a high resource cost but also more importantly exposes those young people and the wider community to risk.

So I would argue that “missing” incidents from children’s homes should be recorded under the “Staying Safe” criteria of the inspection reports.

I know that some children go missing just because they are staying out late at a friend’s house. But for others, it is often more serious and we must find a way of assessing the seriousness of missing incidents and why they happened.

I am concerned that because of the way the inspection reports are structured they are not providing the effective tools for either achieving minimum standards or improving them.
 
If we are to improve outcomes for looked-after children we need not only to enforce minimum standards but to use inspection reports to drive up standards. I believe that Ofsted inspections have been a vital tool in doing that in our schools. But to be effective in improving standards in our children’s homes Care Standards need to be more prescriptive in what is taken into account in the inspection, need to include other agencies observations and be widely published and available.