Children’s services showing areas of improvement, say Ofsted - Improvement Update - 4 June 2021

4 Jun 2021,

Ofsted have published the outcome of their latest monitoring visit to Bradford’s children’s services.

The visit, which took place on 28 April 2021, was the fifth since their main inspection of children’s services in 2018.

The letter recognises the difficulty of delivering services throughout the pandemic and the creative efforts to which social workers have gone to keep services going. The letter also highlights a number of areas where improvements are being made to services, but it also states that improvement in social work practice has been too slow for children and families.

Ofsted acknowledge that since the main inspection in 2018, a new permanent senior leadership team is in place and is driving improvement. This team is supported and challenged by an improvement board chaired by the Department for Education (DfE) commissioner. The new management team has improved the basic infrastructure of the service. This has led to an improved front door service, a revamped training programme, improved quality assurance and performance management, and significant financial investment to increase social work and managerial capacity. This has resulted in the number of caseloads for most social workers steadily reducing.

You can read more details here