Oral evidence: Children in care, HC 809
Oral evidence, 12 January 2015.
Witnesses
Tom Jeffery, former Director General for Children’s Services, Department for Education, Debbie Jones, Director of Social Care, Ofsted, Paul Kissack, Director General for Children’s Services, Department for Education, Sir Michael Wilshaw, HM Chief Inspector, Ofsted, and Chris Wormald, Permanent Secretary, Department for Education, gave evidence.
Chair
This is a big team. Thank you all very much for coming. Thank you for coming back from retirement to revisit your past, Tom. I thank both of you from Ofsted, too. I will start with the role. Chris Wormald, page 13 says that your objectives are “to improve the quality of care and stability of placements for children in foster and residential care, so all children have a good start in life.” That is what was articulated by our friend from the Care Leavers Association. Do you accept that?
Chris Wormald
We accept that that is the objective of the system.
Chair
Your functions, as set out in paragraph 1.3, are: to set out the statutory duties: to set out the expectations for service performance and targets for adoption; to analyse and collect data to help authorities improve; to take an overview on the way that services are provided and how the market functions; and to intervene where authorities fail. Do you accept that?
Chris Wormald
That is not how we describe it. As I am sure you know, we did not agree the National Audit Office’s Report.
Chair
You are going to have to speak clearly.
Chris Wormald
We didn’t agree the National Audit Office Report, as I’m sure you know.
Chair
I am not asking whether you agree but whether you accept.
Chris Wormald
I will give you our description, which is not a million miles from the description in the Report.
Mr Bacon
Mr Wormald, you say that it’s not your description, but footnote 5 says “Department for Education” and then, in italics, presumably the title of the report: “Accountability System Statement for Education and Children’s Services”. Are you saying that the five bullet points that the Chair just read out are not taken from the DFE document?
Chris Wormald
No, I am not saying that.
Mr Bacon
You are not saying that?
Chris Wormald
No, sorry.
Mr Bacon
Okay, so are they taken from the DFE document?
Chris Wormald
They’re not taken verbatim. They are the National Audit Office’s description of what we put in our much longer Accountability Statement.
Mr Bacon
But is it inconsistent with the DFE document?
Chris Wormald
Not particularly, no. It is just not very—
Mr Bacon
Not particularly inconsistent?
Chris Wormald
It is not the way that we describe our—
Mr Bacon
You said “not particularly” inconsistent. In which ways is it inconsistent?
Chris Wormald
Let me set out how we describe it.
Mr Bacon
I am just asking you in which way it is inconsistent.
Chris Wormald
Let us be very clear that these are not DFE words, but we don’t—
Mr Bacon
You said that it is “not particularly” inconsistent. I am asking you in which ways it is inconsistent.
Chris Wormald
I’m sorry.
Mr Bacon
You said that it is “not particularly” inconsistent—I am quoting your words—and I just want to know in which ways you think it is inconsistent.
Chris Wormald
It is not our description.
Mr Bacon
I didn’t ask you whether it is your description. I did earlier, but I am now asking you a different question: in what ways is it inconsistent? You said that it was “not particularly” inconsistent, which suggests that you think it might be a little bit inconsistent. I am asking you which bits are inconsistent.
Chris Wormald
We don’t describe what we do around targets in that way. We don’t describe—
Mr Bacon
Which bits are inconsistent?
Chris Wormald
The Report says “including setting targets in the case of adoption”, but we don’t describe our targets in the case of adoption in that way.
Chair
Do you have a target for adoptions, Chris?
Chris Wormald
We have a series of targets around the processes of adoption.
Chair
You have targets on adoption, don’t you?
Tom Jeffery
Not for the number of adoptions.
Chair
Not a number, but you have a target for how long it takes.
Mr Bacon
Which of these bullet points is inconsistent?
Chris Wormald
As I said, we wouldn’t describe those things like that. I am not saying that we particularly disagree, but I am saying that this is not our description.
Mr Bacon
You said that it is “not particularly” inconsistent. You don’t think that it is inconsistent at all?
Chris Wormald
As I said, that description of targets for adoption is not how we describe it. Is it exactly consistent with what I would say? No, it isn’t.
Chair
It is a target; it is just not a target on numbers—nobody ever thought it was a target on numbers. Let me bring in Ashley, because in my briefing I was told that these are words in your Accountability Statement.
Mr Burrowes
I understand that what has been agreed is the accuracy of the data in this Report. There has to be a level of agreement, otherwise we will completely fall out. What you have not agreed is that the key conclusions and recommendations are supported by the evidence. That is not to say that you will end up—we have only been through paragraph 1. My understanding is that there is a level of agreement about the data and the rest of the Report but not the key recommendations and conclusions. Otherwise, we are going to have a long session.
Mr Bacon
This is quite important, Mr Wormald, because it is a basic description. I will read out the preamble to the bullet point: “There are some functions that only the Department can carry out, or is best placed to do”. There are then five bullet points. If we cannot agree what it is that only you and the Department can do, we’re not off to a very good start.
Chris Wormald
No, as I say that we did not agree this Report and this wording was not our words. If you take that preamble—
Mr Burrowes
As I understand it from summary point 24, you do not accept that “the report’s key conclusions and recommendations are supported by the evidence.” If we are going to go paragraph by paragraph in terms of what you agree and do not agree, we will not get anywhere. I understand that there is a level of write-around agreement with all these Reports. Quite exceptionally in this case, as has been made clear, there is not an acceptance by the Department of the key conclusions and recommendations. It is another thing to then go through the Report and say, “Well, we actually don’t agree with the Report. We don’t agree with this or that.” It is not acceptable, and we need to get some level of agreement before we go much further.
Ashley McDougall
If I can confirm—the words in the bullet points were drawn from the Department’s papers and accountability statements. We have taken it from their targets. Not all of the words will be the same. We are happy, and we want the Department to be happy, that the sense of all of those was retained. We passed it to the Department. I was not aware that the Department wanted any changes to any of those words, as Mr Burrowes suggests.
Chair
Okay. Without the Committee interrupting—Chris, do you agree that only you can set out “the statutory duties of local authorities for children’s services”?
Chris Wormald
Yes.
Chair
Do you agree that it is your role—that you are best placed or that only you can carry it out—to set out “expectations for service performance for local authorities”?
Chris Wormald
Not in the words here, no. The majority of expectations, as Alan Wood described earlier, are set locally and are locally held to account. I would not agree that only the Department could do that. But does the Department have a role? Yes, it does.
Chair
We always end up with these ridiculous philosophical debates which have absolutely no relation to reality. Your role—if there is any, or we might as well close DFE—is to do what you can nationally to “improve the quality of care and stability of placements for children in foster and residential care”. I read that out at the beginning.
Chris Wormald
Yes.
Chair
Part of that must be looking at expectations, which come out of the statutory duties for service performance, including setting targets. You are being really pernickety when you say, “We didn’t set a target for numbers.” Of course; no one sets a target for numbers, but you set targets for how to deal with adoptions.
Chris Wormald
I am answering the question very specifically, which is what I was asked to do. The question was: is the Department the only body that can do that? No.
Stephen Phillips
That is not what paragraph 1.3 says. It says that the Department is the only body that can do it or is “best placed” to do it.
Mr Bacon
What it says is, “setting out expectations for service performance for local authorities”. I presume you do not think that local authorities set their own expectations for their own performances. They have to be held to account by the Department to a standard, so someone—the Department—sets out what the service performance expectations are for local authorities.
Chris Wormald
No. We are stewards of the national legislation in this area, but it is a locally managed and locally accountable service. In terms of who sets individual expectations of services, that is done locally.
Mr Bacon
The word individual is not in there. Someone has to say to local authorities, “Here’s what we expect you to do.” Who is that?
Chris Wormald
What we expect local authorities to—
Mr Bacon
Who is that?
Chris Wormald
No—
Mr Bacon
Not no—you can answer my question.
Chris Wormald
Am I allowed to finish the point?
Mr Bacon
Mr Wormald, there is no need to say no. What I really want you to do is answer my question. Who sets out what local authorities are expected to do?
Chris Wormald
There is no one person. The expectations are set first by the relevant Acts of Parliament, which are extensive, secondly by statutory guidance that the Department issues and, thirdly, by the framework of inspection set by Ofsted. There is no one—
Chair
The inspector sets the standards or you set the standards? You direct the inspector as to what to inspect under the standards you set.
Chris Wormald
No. The responsibility for setting the framework—
Chair
No, setting standards.
Chris Wormald
In terms of standards, they are not set particularly by the Department—
Chair
Setting standards, against which you have then— [Interruption.] Sorry, we shouldn’t all interrupt. Give him a chance to answer. Setting standards against which Ofsted then inspects.
Paul Kissack
It depends which sector. We set in foster care national minimum standards and we set in residential care national minimum standards—
Chair
And then Ofsted is instructed by you to inspect.
Paul Kissack
—but in other areas of the framework, particularly when you are getting into issues which Alan Wood and others were talking about as being the essence of good care, which is about the quality of frontline practice, the description of good practice is set out by the Chief Inspector within the framework.
Chair
So you decide the standard, do you?
Sir Michael Wilshaw
We decide, on the basis of the frameworks that we publish, what standards we expect local authorities to subscribe to.
Dame Anne McGuire
Do you just pluck them out of thin air or is there any engagement with the Department about what those standards should be?
Sir Michael Wilshaw
Well, their standards are built up over time. We obviously consult with the Department on those standards, and also with local authorities as to what those standards are and should be.
Dame Anne McGuire
But Ofsted is the unilateral arbiter of what the standards should be?
Sir Michael Wilshaw
Well, I mean, this is a debateable issue, because when local authorities fail their inspections or require improvement, we expect the Department for Education to intervene. Ofsted does not intervene; the Department for Education does.
Chris Heaton-Harris
Not to be pernickety, but what does local accountability mean to the Department?
Chris Wormald
Well, much as Alan Wood described it earlier. Local authorities are responsible for their performance to their own councillors, their own electorates and to their own local accountability measures, particularly through the local children’s board.
Chair
How many are you actually intervening in at present?
Chris Wormald
21.
Chair
They are so accountable you are intervening in how many?
Chris Wormald
21. Shall I get on to—
Chair
No, I want to get through the list. It just seems to me we are again playing around with words. If you think it is right for the Department to intervene in 21 instances on the basis of inspections carried out by Ofsted, that strikes me there is something at the centre about how you are setting the standards against which you then judge the performance of individual local authorities. It is nothing to do with blah-blah about local accountability: this is you at the centre, determining—
Chris Wormald
No, I’m sorry, Chair—
Chair
No, otherwise you wouldn’t intervene, Chris. You are intervening in 21 instances on the basis of your agency telling you.
Chris Wormald
Yes, we intervene in cases. Fair enough. That was not was I was objecting to. I don’t think you can write off local accountability as blah-blah. The relevant Acts of Parliament—
Chair
You’re trying to hide behind it for saying, “We have no responsibility.”
Chris Wormald
No, I’m not saying that.
Chair
You do, and you exercise it.
Chris Wormald
No, I am very sorry, Chair. I am not saying that. I am saying that the Department has a series of roles that flow out of the Acts of Parliament passed by this House and we carry out those things, which sets this, as Alan Wood described it earlier, as a locally managed, locally accountable system that is done within a national framework of law and inspection.
Chair
I’m afraid that is blah-blah. Let me go to the next one.
Chris Wormald
Well, I’m sorry you think it’s blah-blah, but unfortunately it is how the system is set up.
Chair
Let me just go to the next one. Is only the Department best placed to collect and analyse performance data to help local authorities?
Chris Wormald
Again, we are not the only, but we certainly have a role in that area.
Chair
You agree with that?
Chris Wormald
We are not the only organisation that does it, because local authorities do this for themselves—
Mr Bacon
Are you best placed, though?
Chris Wormald
We are best placed to do the national side and, as you discussed with the witnesses earlier, we do collect and publish a lot of data in this area.
Chair
Are you the only or the best placed to take an overview of the way services are provided and how the market for residential and foster care is working?
Chris Wormald
Again, I don’t think we are the only people who are able to do that. We certainly have a role to play in that area, but I thought the debate that you had with the witnesses earlier in fact brought the issues around the balance of national and local commissioning very clearly to the fore, and I don’t think you can get to the position in that area where there is a one and only organisation that can do it.
Chair
And the last one.
Chris Wormald
Yes.
Chair
Okay, can I just go back to the market, because we ought to start on that.
Dame Anne McGuire
Can I just have clarification there? The Department has agreed two out of the five. Is that my interpretation?
Chris Wormald
Only on the basis of the phrase that is in the preamble there around the “only”. We describe our role in detail in the accountability statement, which is a lot more detailed than what is here, and we categorise it into three categories. One is the national stewardship of the legislative system; the second is around—
Chair
I have no idea what that means. What does national stewardship mean? It is just another word, Chris. That is why it is so irritating. What does it mean?
Chris Wormald
In terms of what we do around that, it is mainly around the statutory guidance that we issue in line with the—
Chair
No, but it is about guidance, it is about setting expectations, it is about collecting and analysing performance data, it is about taking an interest in how the market is working and it is about intervening, isn’t it? Isn’t that another way of talking about stewardship?
Chris Wormald
No, we had only got to the first of my categories. My second category is that we have a range of responsibilities around helping the system to self-improve, which will include most of the things that you have just described. Our third area of activity is around intervention in failure, which is very tightly defined in the legislation as failure to carry out a statutory duty. So we characterise what we do in those three broad categories.
Dame Anne McGuire
So, just to clarify, you only accept two of the five functions identified in the NAO Report?
Chris Wormald
As the only person, yes. Do we have a role—
Dame Anne McGuire
No, it does not actually say—
Chris Wormald
Yes, it does say “only”, actually.
Dame Anne McGuire
We are bumping around here with semantics, but it actually does not say “the only”; it says “the best placed”. Can I ask again: are you saying that the Department is best placed in only two out of the five bullet points that have been identified?
Chris Wormald
I think that that is where we got to, though, as I have set out, we have a role in the other three, but with the other three that is a shared role.
Dame Anne McGuire
But you do not accept that you are best placed?
Chris Wormald
Well, in some cases the local authority itself is best placed. In some cases, as Sir Michael has just described, Ofsted is best placed.
Dame Anne McGuire
So this is not a semantic issue. You are not just complaining about the words.
Chris Wormald
It is and it is not. Is it very important to be clear about the accountabilities? Yes, of course it is. Actually, I think that the law in this area sets it out extremely clearly, both in the Children Act 1989 and in the Children Act 2004. All those functions need to be carried out, and the way in which the care system works, as I thought came out very clearly from the way in which your three witnesses described it, requires a lot of shared responsibilities between different agencies.
Chair
How many people have you got working in this area in the Department?
Paul Kissack
Within the children’s social care area, there are 140 staff at the moment. But for some of the issues covered here, which would include things like pupil premium, there is a greater number for that across the Department as a whole.
Chair
140 people. How many people are actually working on the implementation of the Children Act and looked-after children?
Paul Kissack
I would say about half of those are looking specifically at—
Chair
Seventy.
Dame Anne McGuire
Can I ask the NAO, given that Mr Wormald has said that he only really accepts two of these, how we got—
Chris Wormald
That is not quite right.
Dame Anne McGuire
So we are bandying around semantics here, then?
Chris Wormald
I was asked to be very specific in this area. There are a number of these issues—this comes out throughout the discussion that you have just had, in the Report and indeed in everything around this—where progress can only be made if a number of statutory organisations share responsibility. We have already had discussions around how the health service and social care need to work together to deal with some of the issues Mr Jackson raised. That is true across the piece, so it is not one of those areas where it is very easy to say, “There is a single body that is responsible for this.”
Dame Anne McGuire
I think we all understand the integration of services for children. The phraseology, I assume, that the NAO has put into this paragraph has been very precise in that you did not say that the Department had total responsibility; you said that they were best placed because they are the lead Department on children’s issues. Is that a correct interpretation?
Ashley McDougall
That is correct. There has got to be a balance, and that is why some are “only” or “best placed”, because we know that the Department will have some responsibilities and local authorities have responsibilities. It is going to be both parties participating in this, and I am not actually sure that we are that far apart. We did not realise that this was contentious, and we had no comments from the Department.
Chris Wormald
This was not one of the things I was expecting to disagree with.
Chair
Let us move on.
Sir Amyas Morse
I want to make quite an important point. I understand that the Department objects to the overall conclusions, but we have not had any note of a disagreement with this description before this hearing. I am just putting that on the record, because we have now spent half an hour or so talking about something which was a form of words to try to abbreviate the whole of the Department’s statement of accountability. If we are going to go through like this—this is disappointing, to be frank. It is not fair to cover that because we had a careful discussion about the points of disagreement. This is not something that we have not talked about; we have talked about it a great deal.
Chris Wormald
No, and I was not expecting to disagree. I go back to my first comments about that, which is that we do not particularly disagree with these things; they are not the words that the Department has published, but we did not have a particular problem with them, so I was not expecting to spend half an hour assessing it either.
Chair
Okay, let’s move on because, as you can see, it is rather irritating to many members of the Committee. The meat of the Report says that over the past five years outcomes—or however you are currently measuring how well the state provides for the very vulnerable group of children who are taken into care—have, on the whole, not improved and in some instances got worse. I will just pick out the ones that are obviously important. The gap in educational outcomes between children in care and their peers has worsened—page 28, figure 6—since 2008-09. For stability of placement, none of that has improved since 2009, although that was one of your major departmental stated objectives of the work that those 70-odd people do. Why?
Chris Wormald
Sorry, I do not fully understand your first statement. If you look at figure 6—we did agree the numbers here—the large attainment gap between children in care and their peers has begun to narrow slightly. It is not getting worse since 2010.
Chair
I think I took children with—
Chris Wormald
I’m referring to the exact figure to which you referred.
Chair
I took it from page 28. Look at 2008. The attainment gap between children in care and their peers began to narrow slightly from 2011-12 to 2012-13. If you take it back to 2008-09—in lots of ways the NAO Report was generous to you—the gap between children in care and their peers was 38.1%, and today it is 42.7%. It went up, and it is beginning to come down but it is considerably worse than it was five years ago.
Chris Wormald
No.
Mr Bacon
What do you mean, no? It was 38.1 and now it is 42.7. Are we going to have to argue about every single point? Are you saying that 42.7 is not worse than 38?
Chris Wormald
You said five years ago, in 2010.
Mr Bacon
2008-09. One, two, three, four, five; there are five bars, one for each calendar year.
Chris Wormald
Over that period, quite clearly. It got worse in the late 2000s and then it began to improve.
Mr Bacon
Do you agree that it is worse now than it was five years ago?
Chris Wormald
On that number, yes.
Chair
Why?
Chris Wormald
For some of the reasons that Alan described earlier. The measurement of educational attainment of children in care is extremely complicated and we do not understand all the movements. It is only fair to say that.
Chair
So what do these 70 people do? I will come to Sir Michael because he might be able to help us on this. Either Tom Jeffery or Paul Kissack—why? Going back to what we think these people are doing in the Department; if they really have a purpose, it is to try to understand how you can improve the quality. Looking at the long-range stats over a five-year period, why has there been no change?
Paul Kissack
One thing that we do is—as Alan Wood suggested—to try to take a more sophisticated look at what the data are showing and try to form some of the better comparator groups that Alan was suggesting. One way that we do that is to strip out special educational needs status, which is obviously hugely different within the looked-after children population. For figure 6, for example, if we were to look at the attainment of children who are looked after and do not have SEN status, the gap would have narrowed from 35 to 30 over the same period[1].
Chair
Yes, but I bet if you looked at SEN in 2008-09 and then in 2012-13, you would not see a different relationship in that period.
Tom Jeffery
There are differences across a range of educational indicators. If you look at key stage 2, for example, the gap in maths has narrowed very significantly indeed. In most areas, the absolute attainment of children in care has improved very significantly. It is sometimes the case that the overall attainment rate has improved more quickly and the gap has widened, and it is something—
Chair
But the overall achievement of children in the population on the whole has improved.
Tom Jeffery
That is my point: it has improved more quickly than for those in care, but both have improved.
Chair
Yes, but we want equality. Maybe Sir Michael can help us.
Sir Michael Wilshaw
I think attainment is shockingly poor, and the gap is shockingly wide. As a result, a lot of these youngsters leave school and care and become members of the NEET population. That is the responsibility of the local authority, but it is also the responsibility of schools, which receive large amounts of public funding through the pupil premium. When we inspect schools as well as local authorities, we expect them to focus on looked-after children and make sure that there is a co-ordinator in the school who oversees their progress, but also that the people in the school link well with the local authority’s virtual schools co-ordinator. There is somebody in each local authority now who is funded to ensure that children in care in the local authority receive a good education. I just wonder how they report to the DFE.
Paul Kissack
We are in regular contact with a lot of virtual school heads. They actually have a national conference this week, which of course the Department will be attending. This is a relatively recent change to the statute; we now require all local authorities to have virtual school heads. As with many aspects of service provision in this area, one of our principal sources of information is the Ofsted framework. Most of the Ofsted reports that I have seen under the single inspection framework will pass comment on the quality of support coming from virtual school heads.
Stephen Phillips
I am trying to get a handle on where this is going. Sir Michael, you described there being a shockingly bad attainment gap between looked-after children and the general cohort. Is it getting better or not? That is all the Committee really wants to know.
Sir Michael Wilshaw
I think that at key stage 2, it is getting slightly better, but only slightly better; it is still shockingly wide.
Chair
Why?
Sir Michael Wilshaw
I think it is shockingly wide because of poor accountability. If we are paying through public funds for the appointment of a virtual schools co-ordinator or virtual school head teacher—somebody employed by the local authority to oversee the progress of looked-after children—that is their job: to report to the Department for Education on how well those children are doing. It is the responsibility of schools, which get double the amount of pupil premium funding for looked-after children. When I was a head, I made sure I appointed somebody senior in the school to track the performance of looked-after children. It is a moral responsibility.
Chris Heaton-Harris
Sir Michael, you have gone through a number of these. My education authority area is Northamptonshire, one of the authorities that you have seen and that has not done particularly well out of the inspection. I am hoping that you have seen some areas that you have not failed—21 is quite a big number and certainly covers a wide geographic swathe of the country—and that there is some half-decent practice out there. Is that the case?
Sir Michael Wilshaw
Yes. There is good practice out there, and we know where that good practice resides. So does the Department.
Mr Burrowes
We don’t know where good practice lies in relation to fostering.
Debbie Jones
In relation to fostering, the single inspection framework will look at the achievement of all looked-after children, wherever they are placed. The majority of children, 75%, are placed in foster care, so we absolutely do look at those young people and comment on them in our inspection reports.
Mr Burrowes
I can understand the focus in relation to adoption. The release of information to enable proper benchmarking has not been done to the same extent in relation to fostering.
Debbie Jones
As far as our inspection report is concerned—
Mr Burrowes
No, beyond the inspection report. This involves the Department.
Paul Kissack
Which information did you have in mind?
Mr Jackson
I think Mr Burrowes is referring to paragraph 2.39 of the Report, which makes a distinction between the clarity and transparency of the information for adoption and fostering, and that for the wider category of looked-after children. I think I am right in saying that it basically says that information is effectively hidden from the lay person. That is what it says here. It says that the Department does not publish scorecards for local authority children’s services on the same basis as it does for adoption.
Paul Kissack
We publish an annual performance table on a set of measures, which includes all looked-after children, alongside adoption. In fact, I think we published the latest one in December. For individual local authorities, we have the local authority interactive tool, which has an even greater number of measures covering the full looked-after children population, and which allows local authorities to benchmark their performance against other local authorities.
Mr Jackson
You are going slightly off the point. I am not talking about local authorities benchmarking against each other, but about clarity and transparency for the people who live in the local authority area. I will read the paragraph. “It is difficult for local people to hold their council to account for its performance on foster and residential care. The Department annually publishes supplementary tables to its 2 major Statistical First Releases that set out local authorities’ performance. These Microsoft Excel tables are long, detailed and published as annexes in the statistical section of the pan-government website, GOV.UK. By contrast, the Department publishes adoption scorecards that have graphs illustrating trends in headline figures for each local authority.” Are you going to review that so there is some kind of openness and accountability for these data?
Chris Wormald
As Alan Wood described earlier, we are in discussion with ADCS and others about the data we publish and about making them as useful as possible. We took a different, new approach to adoption scorecards recently—their introduction was not without controversy with local authorities and others. It is an innovation that we are looking at extremely closely. However—this gets to the measurement difficulties question—in adoption, it is reasonably obvious to see what your headline numbers and the things you should track are, given that the actual professional decision making is hermetically sealed in a court decision. You measure the time that the various processes take. It is generally seen to be a universal good that those processes are done as quickly as possible. Bluntly, it is quite obvious what you should put on a scorecard. The debate that you had with your witnesses showed that very clearly. What your headline metrics for foster care and children in care are is a highly controversial and difficult area, and a lot of the most important judgments are qualitative, not quantitative.
Chair
Honestly, there are well-worn metrics, such as how often a child gets into a new placement, what the child’s educational outcomes are and what the health of the child is like. It is not that difficult, Chris.
Chris Wormald
The second half of my answer will answer you. We, therefore, think that the published Ofsted reports are the best things to hold local authorities to account, because they look at both the quantitative data and have a qualitative judgment.
Sir Michael Wilshaw
It comes back down to the issue of accountability and intervention. One of the things that schools do pretty well now is to keep data on the progress of their children, including those with special educational needs and those who are looked after. That progress is tracked on a weekly and monthly basis. When we inspect schools, we want to see those data. All schools know how their looked-after children are doing. They should inform this virtual school’s head teacher about what progress looks like for children in their school. It is absolutely essential that the Department for Education regularly collects those data and intervenes quickly with local authorities that are not doing well.
Mr Burrowes
Is that agreed, with respect to that level of intervention?
Chris Wormald
As I said earlier, our powers for intervention are closely circumscribed by statute to where a local authority is failing in its statutory duty. Our usual test of whether it is failing in a statutory duty is the Ofsted inspection. Where we have a local authority about which we have concerns about its performance, the first thing we do is ask Debbie and—
Chair
Can you just say, do you agree or don’t you agree with what Sir Michael said? Just do it very quickly. Do you agree or don’t you?
Chris Wormald
Basically, yes, but I am just explaining the process by which we do so, which is based upon inspection.
Mr Jackson
I will just give you a helpful example in that it is not necessarily a question of finding the excuses or rationale for intervening and discharging your statutory powers, but the Report tells us that 34% of children are moved within a year. It might be very instructive to find out why that is. If there is a regional basis, if there is a particular issue of more child sexual abuse in an area, then the more transparency and daylight on these figures the better for assisting professionals to deliver the goods.
Chris Wormald
Yes, and all the numbers that are included in here are published by the Department. What I was saying is that we do not intervene, except in very exceptional circumstances, simply on the basis of the data. The data causes us to ask questions, like the one you have just asked, about performance. Where there are questions about performance, we would ask Ofsted to go and do a proper inspection of that authority and if they were found inadequate on that inspection, that is when the Department intervenes. So in almost all cases—
Chair
I have to say to you that the Report says you don’t use the data and you only intervene on the back of Ofsted inspections.
Chris Wormald
That is true.
Chair
What has been suggested to you by Stewart—and I have a queue of people—is that it might be more sensible, with your 70 people working there at the cost of the taxpayer, to have some regard to the data in terms of what you then do.
Chris Wormald
We do have regard to the data.
Tom Jeffery
In the Department we have been collecting further data—
Chair
There is no point collecting it and sitting on it waiting for something else to happen.
Tom Jeffery
—on placement moves and the reasons for placement moves precisely so that we can ask those questions.
Sir Amyas Morse
That is very encouraging. I think what Sir Michael was saying is that the Department should be collecting data. Can I just check whether you are also planning on collecting data on the success—or not success—of virtual heads? You have put this innovation—it sounds very exciting and Sir Michael is referring to it, but how are you going to know whether they are making a positive difference or not? You are not collecting that data at the moment, and I know it is very early days, but what are you going to do about that to know whether it is working or not?
Paul Kissack
Well, our hope, of course, is that virtual school heads, as Sir Michael has set out, will help to drive up—
Chair
I am sorry, Paul, you are going to have to speak up. The acoustics are awful.
Paul Kissack
The intention behind virtual school heads, as Sir Michael rightly alluded to, is to set high ambitions and to challenge schools. The metrics, in that sense, will be around educational attainment, which are exactly the metrics we have been talking about. The actual role of virtual school heads—what constitutes good practice and what is making a difference—is a much more qualitative judgment and is best decided by Ofsted inspectors looking at what virtual school heads are doing, which is exactly what is happening under the single inspection framework.
Dame Anne McGuire
Sir Michael, your eyes narrowed there. Was there a particular reason why they narrowed?
Sir Michael Wilshaw
It is important that their roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and somebody checks up on whether they are doing their jobs properly or not. It is really important, since they are publically funded, that they report not just to the DCS in a local authority, but to the Department.
Paul Kissack
And to provide some reassurance, their roles are very clearly defined in new statutory guidance that we have set out following the introduction of the new statutory requirement to have virtual school heads.
Sir Amyas Morse
So, in that case, you will be assessing how well they perform, based on information?
Chris Wormald
They are local authority employees and they are performance managed via the local authority.
Chair
So you will not be assessing the value of these people nationally?
Chris Wormald
We look at the overall quality of a local authority in providing its services and we do it largely by—
Chair
Will you be looking at whether this new role, which Sir Michael thinks is very important, is working?
Chris Wormald
We look at whether the system as a whole is working.
Chair
Will you be looking at whether this new role is working and having the effect that you hoped?
Chris Wormald
As a part of our overall process of inspecting local authorities, yes, via the way we do things. Are we doing something specific outside? No.
Dame Anne McGuire
I think I might now understand why Sir Michael’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly there. We are getting mixed messages here. We have the head of Ofsted saying that this is an important role, it’s an innovation and he expects that there is some accountability to the Department. We then have the permanent secretary in the Department saying, “Well, actually, it might be the local authority’s responsibility. It’s not really ours—we’ll collect the data.” Where is the accountability?
Chris Wormald
They are local authority employees, and they are managed by the local authority system.
Dame Anne McGuire
I understand that bit.
Chris Wormald
They operate within a system of national inspection. If Ofsted has concerns about how one is operating in a particular area, I am sure they will report on that, and we would intervene as necessary. We would not deal with virtual school heads in any different way from how we would deal with any other part of the system.
Chair
It would be really helpful, and I think the temperature would go down in the room, if you just answered the question. Anne will ask the question once more. Just give an answer directly to the question.
Dame Anne McGuire
We have conflicting opinions over where accountability goes in terms of virtual heads. Sir Michael, I think, has an expectation—albeit that these people are local government employees, and we accept all that—that there is accountability to the Department, because we are talking about this fantastic initiative, which is linked to what the Department has said about strategic objectives for looked-after children. Where is the accountability?
Chris Wormald
The primary accountability rests with local authorities, but within the national framework that I have described.
Dame Anne McGuire
Right. Sir Michael, is that satisfactory?
Sir Michael Wilshaw
We inspect once every three years. It is really important that the Department collects that data on a regular basis so that they can intervene much more quickly when things start to go wrong. After all, if the analogy is with schools, we have league tables. You know how schools are doing on a regular basis. The Department intervenes with schools, shuts them down, turns them into academies or whatever. This is no different.
Dame Anne McGuire
So are you saying that, for some of the most damaged children, coming from really quite challenging backgrounds, the three-year cycle of inspection that Ofsted currently undertakes is not suitable to meet their needs?
Sir Michael Wilshaw
We have those routine inspections. We are quite happy to inspect on a more regular basis, on the instructions of the Department, if they have the data to identify when things are going badly wrong.
Stephen Hammond
Can we continue on data, but move to part 3 and data on costs? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that the data provided on the costs of care in part 3 is accurate and comparable?
Chris Wormald
In the first instance, it is the local authorities in their section 251 returns, which are audited by their own auditors and then sent to the Department.
Stephen Hammond
Given that the Report says that a number of 251 returns are inaccurate, what are you doing at departmental level to ensure the quality of the data is being improved?
Paul Kissack
Every year, after the 251, we run a consultation with local authorities to try and understand how to improve the quality of that return so that it continually improves over time. We do recognise there are problems with the quality of the data. Those problems tend to rest at the lower levels; the aggregated figures tend to be of a higher quality. The Local Government Association has always been a bit sceptical about the section 251 returns, and they recently commissioned CIPFA to undertake an investigation. On the back of that, they have agreed that there is value in the 251 returns, but they are working through some recommendations on how to improve them further.
Stephen Hammond
What is your benchmarking tool, which you made a lot of, going to do to actually improve the quality of the data you are going to receive?
Paul Kissack
The likelihood of the data quality improving is partly a factor of how useful local authorities find it—it is a chicken-and-egg situation. The more we can use this data to set the benchmarking tool—we have worked with the LGA on that—the more local authorities will demand improved financial data on which to do their benchmarking, and that should lead us back into more of a virtuous circle on the 251.
Stephen Hammond
Isn’t even the data you have causing some concern? Obviously, averages hide a whole load of things, but if you look at paragraph 3.13, you see the sheer range of the costs. Now, you can say that that is because of a lot of poor financial data, which we have just been talking about, but the real worry—you can talk about value for money for councils—is that the figures must mean that there is a huge difference in the quality of provision for the children in care. The Report says this is not to do with house prices, so we can take that out. If that is not the problem, there must be other factors. It must be the provision of care. Doesn’t that ring any alarm bells?
Chris Wormald
We have had a look at this issue within the Department. It is one of the things that we discuss a lot with ADCS and others. There is no correlation that we can find between local levels of spend and what Ofsted then find when they inspect that provision. There is no clear and obvious relationship between the level of spending by a local authority and the quality of its output. Is that range worrying? It is certainly surprising.
Stephen Hammond
As guardians of the public purse, if there is no obvious trend in quality, should we not be saying that everybody should be spending £15,000 and not £57,000?
Chris Wormald
These are extremely good questions. Our work on this area showed that the cost drivers of the system—I think is one thing on which we and the National Audit Office did agree, actually—are not well understood and a lot more work needs to be done. We do not, as a Department, given that it is not our money, take a specific view on what the cost of care should be, but it is certainly something that local authorities should look at.
Debbie Jones
What we have found clearly in our inspections, when we look at the demographic differences, is that you can have a very good authority providing excellent care and planning properly for the children for whom they are responsible, and then you get another authority with the same kind of problems, and you get a completely different picture. Obviously, we do not look at value for money, but we do look at the way in which local authorities plan for the individual needs of the children that they have in public care. We are very clear about that, and we look at that and comment on that in our reports.
Stephen Hammond
If you are not responsible for the cost, you have a statutory duty on the quality of care that is being provided—is that right?
Chris Wormald
No. We have a duty to intervene where statutory functions are not being carried out.
Stephen Hammond
If the variation is so large—notwithstanding what Debbie just said, because I accept there will be some differences—where in that scale, when you see that financial data, does it trigger an intervention on the basis that there must be concerns about the quality of what is being provided?
Chris Wormald
For the reasons that Debbie just set out, that is not one of the things that we do. We intervene on the basis of the quality of the care provided, regardless of whether people have spent a small amount or a lot on it. Our trigger for intervention is whether the care is good enough, not the level of budget.
Stephen Hammond
How can you be sure what the quality of care is if the cost variation is so wide?
Chris Wormald
Whether the care is of good quality is measured by the Ofsted inspection framework and their inspections of the quality—as in the outputs of the system, as opposed to the cash inputs.
Chair
What do you use the data you collect for? Chris tells me you don’t use it for anything. What do you use it for?
Paul Kissack
Principally, we use it as a means of supporting sector-led improvements.
Chair
What does that mean?
Paul Kissack
We will take the data, which the NAO Report says in some instances feels a bit inaccessible, and we will make it more accessible by putting out data packs for local authorities. So for example, in December, we put out—
Mr Bacon
Sorry—data what?
Paul Kissack
Data packs. We will put out probably about 50 slides of charts and maps and graphical illustrations of the data. We put out more information on the residential care market in this country than at any time in the history of the Department, as far as I can see, through these data packs.
Chair
You just put it out there.
Mr Bacon
This speaks directly to what Mr Wood said earlier about information. He said that the problem is not the lack of collecting information. It also speaks to what Mr Graham was saying. He said “I go to conferences up and down the country and I hear about lots of good practice” but—I paraphrase what he said—“There is no local government place, or even a place at the DFE where people say ‘There is enough evidence to say that this works and you have to do it.’” Why not?
Paul Kissack
I don’t think that’s true.
Mr Bacon
You don’t think that’s true—it’s wrong.
Paul Kissack
Let’s take virtual school heads, as we were talking about that earlier. We initially piloted virtual school heads. We did an evaluation. Ministers took the decision that there was enough evidence to support it, and we have implemented it, with Parliament’s permission, into new statutory duties. That is exactly what we do.
Mr Bacon
I am not saying that I am encouraged that Mr Graham is wrong, but it is encouraging if there is somewhere that people can go and say, “There is enough evidence. This works. We have to do it.” Can you give me some other examples?
Paul Kissack
There is staying put, which was an example that Alan Wood gave. The evidence base on that is somewhat disputed, in fact. There were debates in Parliament during the passage of the Children and Families Act 2014 on whether the evidence was sufficient to support staying put. In the end, it was the view of Ministers and of Parliament that there was, and it is now a statutory duty on all local authorities.
Chair
What is the statutory duty on local authorities?
Paul Kissack
The statutory duty is the ability for those in foster care aged 18 to stay in care until they are 21.
Chair
Oh, this is after 18.
Mr Bacon
Are you bursting with another example, Mr Wormald?
Chris Wormald
No, I was going to say that—
Mr Bacon
That you do not particularly disagree.
Chris Wormald
I was going to say that there were areas where I would agree with what Mr Graham said. If you compared the two sides of my Department—schools and children’s services—we have a lot more outstanding practice to draw from on the schools side. If you look at Ofsted inspections of children’s services, there is quite a lot of good practice and considerably less outstanding practice, so we are undoubtedly short of that compared with where we are on the schools side.
Chair
So what are you doing about that, Mr Wormald, as the permanent secretary?
Chris Wormald
That gets into the things that were described earlier on the innovation fund, which is trying to develop excellent practice, and what is probably the biggest single objective of the Department, which is to improve the quality of social work. When you look at all the issues we have discussed, almost all of them come back to the quality and sufficiency of the local work force and the local leadership. The biggest thing we are doing in this area, following on from the work by—
Chair
What are you doing to improve the quality of social work at the DFE?
Paul Kissack
Principally, we are focused on the issue that Alan Wood was talking about, which is the quality of new entrants to the social work profession. We commissioned the Martin Narey review a couple of years ago to look at the quality and that found it to be patchy. There is some good quality and overall the messages we are getting back from the directors of children’s services are that quality is getting better. We are not content, however, with the rate at which that is happening. We have introduced what are sometimes called elite entry schemes for highly talented graduates. “Step Up to Social Work” has been running and is in its fourth cohort. We had 10,000 expressions of interest for the fourth cohort. Frontline, which was launched by the previous Secretary of State, is in its first year with a cohort of 100. It is often described as a Teach First for social work and was heavily oversubscribed. Within the next few months we will be launching some new teaching partnerships—exactly the sort of partnerships that your earlier witnesses were talking about—bringing together employers with higher education institutions. We also continue to fund the social work bursary. The Government have, I think, put £500 million into that to support social workers through undergraduate programmes. It is regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council, and we work with them to assess continually the standards that are in place. We discuss with them how to ensure that the standards are at the right level. We fund the College of Social Work, which runs an endorsement scheme on individual courses. It is a new institution within the profession, which was established to try to drive up professional practice. We also have principal social workers in every local authority and a chief social worker to drive practice among the existing work force.
Chris Wormald
We discussed what we can do to make the situation better across a range of the things that you have been talking about. The Department’s clear view on what will drive long-term improvements in the sector are those improvements to social work. That is a long-term game, but the Department’s position is that it is what will really drive a step change in performance, not just in this area, but in children’s services more generally.
Ashley McDougall
As a point of clarification on the section 251 reports, as the accounting officer said, they are all signed off by the local auditors—the local officials—but they are all different, so the actual sign-off is not worth that much. They are agreeing different practices in different places. The comparability is just not there, and I think that that is widely agreed.
Chris Wormald
Yes, that is true across the whole of local government finance.
Chair
That is why you have all those things you do at the beginning that you said you did not.
Meg Hillier
Stephen Hammond raised the issue of variability and the differences that averages mask in terms of finance. I want go back to educational attainment. To set the context, in 2013, 25% of looked-after children in my borough, Hackney, achieved five GCSEs, including English and maths, and 37% achieved the same without necessarily including English and maths. That compares with an average of 17% in our statistical neighbour authorities—the three around east London—and an average for England of 12%. That means that one London borough—I am sure that there are other examples, but this is the one that I know best—did twice as well as the English average. With the virtual headships, it seems that we are waiting for Ofsted to come in every three years, as though that is equivalent to looking at schools when there are lots of other people who would flag up problems in schools. The Department just sits on the data that are coming in—[Interruption.] For the record, Mr Kissack is shaking his head. We have heard, Mr Wormald, that no particular intervention takes place. You say that they are local authority employees as though it has nothing to do with the Department. My worry—
Chris Wormald
No, I haven’t said that at all.
Meg Hillier
Can I finish my question? You say that they are local authority employees, but surely with that sort of difference—that is just one example I have given—there must be some good practice-sharing that goes on. If you have one borough achieving at 12% and another at 25%—not that 25% is any good at all, compared with the rest of Hackney, but it is much better—surely somebody elsewhere in England could learn from Hackney. What are you doing to facilitate that? Ofsted cannot do that alone with three-year inspections, and the boroughs cannot.
Chris Wormald
No, and Paul will describe what we do in the good practice area in a moment. The one thing that I would say is a point that has been made earlier about all these numbers: the correlation between what is done by the services of care and what is done by the school is not very well understood. Hackney also happens to have a range of very successful schools in other ways.
Chair
You are moving away from the question. What are you doing to share good practice? It does not matter whether the figures might be a bit iffy here and there; there is good practice in some places—how can we share it?
Chris Wormald
I did not say that the numbers were iffy. I said that whether what you are looking at in an individual case is a very successful school—
Chair
What are you doing to share good practice, Mr Wormald?
Chris Wormald
Paul, do you want to describe what we do?
Paul Kissack
The reason why I was shaking my head is the idea that the Department sits on the data. The data you have quoted are on a public website and we put them out in December.
Chair
But how are you using it?
Meg Hillier
Putting them out doesn’t do anything at all. I was dealing with this as a councillor 20 years ago. As the chief inspector says, the problem is that it is an appalling gap, and it still is. It is a shame on all of us. Any of us who have ever had any involvement in this feel the shame that kids in care still come out badly. The Government collect the data and they go on a website—fat lot of use that is. What are you actually doing about it?
Paul Kissack
We would want to do with them exactly as you have described. We would want local authorities looking at the data and thinking, “What is Hackney doing? Is there something that we can learn from that?”
Meg Hillier
So you are relying on them to do that.
Paul Kissack
We have created our own website called the local authority interactive tool, which is specifically designed for local authorities to go in and benchmark their performance against—
Meg Hillier
So, Mr Kissack, let’s say I was a councillor or interested party where they were achieving 12%—would you be content with that? Let’s say that I was the cabinet member responsible—would you be on my back, saying, “You are doing really badly. You have to visit Hackney”? Or would you just hope that I happen to see it on the website and do my job properly?
Paul Kissack
One of the things that we want to do is be very careful about how we use the data. The data you are quoting are extremely volatile, because the numbers of children undertaking key stage 4 in any given year in any given council is very small, so imagine Hackney—
Meg Hillier
We have a total of 354 in Hackney, of which 101 are 16 and over.
Paul Kissack
So the numbers are very small. There is a lot of volatility, which is why we—
Meg Hillier
But you can see a trend over time, can’t you?
Mr Burrowes
Sadly, the numbers are not that small.
Paul Kissack
But it would be strange to intervene in a local authority on the basis of one data point in a given year on small numbers such as that.
Meg Hillier
You are taking me very literally. Hackney is doing pretty well compared with other parts of England, right?
Paul Kissack
Yes.
Meg Hillier
And there is a trend—you can see that. So if there is a trend of poor achievement, don’t you do something?
Paul Kissack
The people who will be looking at that information and considering whether it is sufficient principally will be the people at the local level: the councillors who are responsible for running the services.
Meg Hillier
This is lovely. I was a councillor and I preface my next comments by stating that I do think that councillors do an excellent job. Nevertheless, many councillors might, for example, have day jobs as well. They might not all be of the top quality, dare I say it. They might not be able to read the data. They might have varying qualities of council officers. What I’m saying is that you might happen to have a rotten borough, or a borough where someone is just not watching this issue because politically—I am afraid to say this—children in care don’t win votes, to be brutal, but parking might and other things might. Even if a very good council is pushing hard at this, with the cuts going through and the challenges, it might not be concentrating on this issue as much as the chief inspector—I will borrow the word that was used—“morally” ought to. So what is the Department doing to ensure that they don’t get lost, because overall it is a small number, but it is a very critical number? For a child in care, when a problem arises, it has a knock-on impact, not just for them but for their community, and for generations to come.
Paul Kissack
We do the three things that the permanent secretary set out at the beginning. We set the statutory framework, which is continually being raised and uplifted in the sense of introducing new requirements, such as virtual school heads; we put out data and we share best practice when we see it; and we intervene in cases of failure. That is the framework within which we—
Meg Hillier
What is the point of failure where you have to intervene? Do you intervene pre-failure?
Chair
It might help if we go to either Debbie Jones or Sir Michael Wilshaw, just to ask them, “What do you think the Department could do to put you in a position to identify failure, or pre-failure, so that you can intervene early?”
Sir Michael Wilshaw
First of all, regularly collect the data; that is critically important. If you look at schools, they are improving because the data that we hold on school performance are now excellent. Ofsted produces something called RAISEonline—reporting and analysis for improvement through school self-evaluation online—and the data dashboard, which show how schools are doing in relation to national standards and benchmark standards—the standards of schools with similar intakes. That information goes out on a regular basis every year and on the basis of that we inspect much more regularly if things are going badly wrong. That is the first thing: collect the data on a regular basis. Don’t wait for Ofsted’s three-year judgment—collect the data. The second thing is that once you get that data and they show that looked-after children are performing extraordinarily badly in that local authority, haul in the director of children’s services and the chief executive and tell them their fortune.
Chair
Do you want to add to that, Debbie?
Debbie Jones
I wanted to add to it because in addition to being national director for social care, I am regional director of London and I am very familiar with the figures that Meg has just quoted. As part of our work—in terms of interrogating the data, actually holding to account and sharing good practice—the performance of children in care in London is a priority for us, and our element of challenge would be to ensure that where there is good practice, we encourage, support and challenge local authorities to work collaboratively to identify and share it.
Chair
When I prepared for today, I looked at Hackney and at Barking, and Hackney is doing much, much better than Barking, sadly. I just thought—this was the first time I had seen the data—“Why on earth isn’t somebody getting on with things?” We are spending a lot of money in Barking and Dagenham on it, to support an improvement in quality, and it is really depressing that it hasn’t shifted in the last five years.
Chris Wormald
We don’t agree that nothing has improved in the last five years. Indeed, a lot of—
Chair
Oh my God, don’t go back to that—“Some key stage 2”—
Chris Wormald
No, I was thinking much more widely than education. If you look at things like truancy—
Chair
No, we are talking about children in care. We are talking about the most important—