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Children’s Services Improvement update

Author: Nick Griffin

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Following its latest monitoring visit to Barnet, Ofsted has published its findings.

The visit, which took place at the end of July and beginning of August, was the fourth to be carried out by Ofsted since Barnet’s Children’s Services were judged to be inadequate in July last year.

During the visit, inspectors reviewed the progress made for children looked after across the Children in care and Intervention and planning teams.

In their conclusions published this week, Ofsted found that the local authority has maintained a consistent and strong focus on improving services and the quality of social work practice.

They found that an appropriate and steady pace of change in the last year has begun to establish improved social work practice for looked after children. The findings also highlighted that the council had acknowledged improvements were still inconsistent and require further consolidation across all teams before practice is of a good standard.

Councillor David Longstaff, Chairman of the Children, Education and Safeguarding Committee, said: “The safety and welfare of our children remains our top priority and I am pleased to see that Ofsted has recognised that we have begun to establish improvements in social work practice.

“We also acknowledge there is still a great deal of hard work ahead, and we will continue to focus our efforts on making the improvements we need to make.”

The full findings are available via the Ofsted website