West Sussex County Council's much-improved children's services to be reviewed by Department of Education

The service was rated ‘inadequate’ in 2019, leading to threats of being placed under the control of an independent trust.

But the efforts of Lucy Butler, director of children’s services, and her team brought such strong improvements that the threat was removed last year, with Ofsted lifting its rating to ‘requires improvement’ in May.

During a scrutiny meeting on Wednesday (September 13), Jacquie Russell, cabinet member for children & young people, learning & skills, said the six-month review was expected at end of October, with Ofsted due to return for a focussed visit in the Spring of 2024.

On top of that, an external review of the council’s social care practice model for family safeguarding is being carried out by the University of Bedfordshire.

Mrs Russell said the council was ‘working relentlessly’ to take the Ofsted rating to ‘good’ and then ‘outstanding’.

Ofsted’s report highlighted seven areas which needed more improvement, including child protection investigations, placement choices for children coming into care, how the council responded to 16 and 17-year-olds who presented as homeless, and initial health assessments.

The scrutiny committee discussed a report which detailed the actions being taken to bring about those improvements and keep the rest of the service up to scratch.

While the committee was happy with the work being carried out, they did make a few recommendations.

The first centred around children in need of protection.

The report said that 67 per cent of those youngsters were visited by children’s services within five days of that need being made known.

The committee asked for an update on what was being done to support those who were not visited within that five-day deadline.

Members also felt it was important to receive feedback from children and families to monitor how well the service was performing.

And they stressed the need for improvements to continue across the entire service, not just the area’s identified by Ofsted.

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