West Sussex children's services to face full Ofsted inspection next year

The sector was rated ‘inadequate’ in 2019 and came close to being taken out of the county council’s hands and placed in the control of a Trust.

But three years later, across-the-board improvements achieved despite the challenges of the pandemic, have led to some promising monitoring reports from inspectors.

During a scrutiny committee meeting on Wednesday (November 16) John Coughlan, independent chairman of the improvement board, said that, in his opinion, children’s services was now at the ‘middle to high end of requires improvement’.

Mr Coughlan, who was appointed by the government in 2019 to act as commissioner to oversee the improvements, added: “I’m afraid you’re not ‘good’ yet. A large authority always struggles enormously to get over the ‘good’ line.”

Ofsted is expected to return for a full inspection any time between now and March 2023 and is expected to ‘look relentlessly’ at cases handled by social workers.

Mr Coughlan said the proportion of cases which were at least of an acceptable standard was more than 80 per cent – well above any notional line that Ofsted might set for how well the service is doing.

But he added that a ‘dogged small minority’ of cases needed to be conducted better and managed more tightly.

An ongoing area of concern is recruitment.

While this is a national issue, Mr Coughlan pointed out the extra challenge faced by West Sussex as potential staff were less likely to want to be part of a ‘failing’ authority.

A report to the meeting said 36 high calibre candidates had been recruited from South Africa and would be inducted into the social work teams in early 2023.

When asked why recruitment had taken place in that country, transformation director Vince Clark said there were not enough social workers nationally ‘to fill all the gaps’.

While looking abroad for staff has been going on for the last decade or so, Mr Clark explained that both Brexit and Covid had put paid to some recruitment sources.

South Africa was chosen because its training and recruitment methods are very similar to those of the UK.