News

Serious concerns have been raised about Southwark Council's children's and families service in a report published by the Social Services Inspectorate.

The report, based on a three-week inspection of the London Borough carried out in January this year, found that thresholds for accessing family support services were very high and the quality of child protection cases variable.

"We had concerns that in some cases children were not properly safeguarded," inspectors concluded. "There was evidence that some child protection cases were defined as children in need of family support. There was also concern in some chronic neglect cases that effective intervention had been delayed."

The service was also failing to review child protection and looked-after children's cases within statutory timescales, the report adds.

Problems were partly attributed to the difficulties the council had experienced in recruiting social workers and the numbers of relatively inexperienced social workers new to their posts.

"This, along with having a large number of looked-after children caused cases to become stuck in both referral and assessment teams and the family support teams, reducing effectiveness," the report states.

Services provided by the district teams were also "under considerable pressure", and inspectors found "little evidence of family support work in the district teams outside of cases where there were obvious child protection concerns".

However, the council was praised for its joint planning arrangements, its good relations with other agencies, its commitment to providing inclusive services, and its "wide range of innovative services designed to support children looked after" developed in partnership with education and health agencies, using Quality Protects and mental health grant funding.

While the inspectors felt children were not coming into the looked-after system inappropriately, they still saw that there was a need to review the balance of resources between services to ensure that preventive services could be more effective. However, they warned this would "not be easily or quickly achieved".

The inspectors said change would not be easy "given the financial constraints facing the service".

An action plan finalised by the committee last week to address the report's 26 recommendations included the appointment this month of an independent specialist child protection adviser, the establishment of a timetable of internal professional auditing for all activity including child protection work, extra training, and stricter management controls with respect to visits and reviews.

The area child protection committee structure and function have also been reviewed, and updated procedures and protocols are due to be launched in the autumn. A workforce planning strategy is due to be launched by the council in October.

Chris Bull, Southwark's director of social services, welcomed the report. "Throughout the report there is recognition that there is 'management grip' on each area of weakness and the efforts which are being made to deal with them have been noted."