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Star ratings are here to make it easy for the public to gain an understanding of the quality of a social services department, but, for many department heads, they can obscure the truth about services. Lauren Revans reports.

A new map of England was drawn up last month depicting councils not according to their political persuasion, their budget, or their number of tiers, but according to the number of stars their social services departments were awarded in the first round of the new star-rating performance system.

Exactly four weeks on, the media circus that surrounded those announcements has passed and social services directors have begun asking what their stars actually mean to them, their staff, and services users - and how they can get more next year.

Bigger questions are being asked about the benefit of league tables for services over which people have no choice, and the practical use of star-ratings to people who want to know about the quality of a particular local service.

Owen Davies, national officer for social services at public sector union Unison, questions the need to compare performance between departments and produce "crude, headline-grabbing star-ratings", calling instead for a greater emphasis on involving service users and the public through mechanisms such as citizens juries and community panels.

"It's not like schools," Davies argues. "People don't have a choice. If you live in Bexley, you get services from Bexley. League tables have a different impact when there's no choice. If the impact is to focus attention on failures and to shame staff in those departments, then that's not going to do anything to help service users."

Most social services directors, however, appear to have resigned themselves to the arrival of easy-to-understand social services league tables.

Association of Directors of Social Services junior vice-president elect Tony Hunter says: "There's an inevitability these days for open and accountable bodies to have this sort of system. Rather than saying we don't want such a system, our task is delivering it in the best way."

Director of zero-star Haringey social services department Anne Bristow says: "The idea of having a system that's easy for the public to understand is good. Clearly the Performance Assessment Framework and all the government returns we do are impossible for the public to understand. But there are dangers. In accessible information, we lose some of the detail."

Having been on special measures since December 2000, Bristow was expecting to have that position confirmed with a zero-star rating. However, she feels the underlying judgements - which cite prospects for the council's adults' services as uncertain and prospects for its children's services as poor - are "very tough".

She says: "I'm not sure the evidence entirely backs the judgements on our prospects. 'Uncertain prospects' is not a reflection of the work that has been put in. We think, on the evidence, we ought to get a more positive outcome."

The Local Government Association is continuing to lobby hard for complete transparency on how the Social Services Inspectorate make its judgements so it can be certain the approach is consistent.

Unison also fears judgements could be subject to "significant interference", with those following the preferred policy lines of ministers - for example, by externalising all residential care services - more likely to be judged as having good prospects than those following local needs. Davies warns: "We are concerned judgements could be used in a way that is not in the interests of the service user, and we are concerned about the impact on staff."

East Sussex social services department was also expecting its zero-star rating following criticism of its adult services by the joint review team last year. However, director David Archibald shares Bristow's feelings that the SSI's judgements do not necessarily reflect the evidence.

"We are basically tackling all the things that are wrong," Archibald argues. "So their judgement was overly harsh because we are working on getting these things sorted."

The reasons cited by different social services departments for their successes and failures are manifold and complicated. But some themes are recurrent.

Top of the list are resources, political and managerial leadership, internal infrastructures, and previous experience in performance management.

The director of the London Borough of Bexley's three-star social services department, Nick Johnson, attributes his department's success to its history of monitoring and measuring, and to consistent cross-party support for policies. He says: "We are very conscientious about measuring performance. The government has brought in this sort of thinking recently. Where some councils have had difficulties getting up to speed with it, we have had a head start."

He says a scrutiny role for members existed at the council long before the cabinet system was introduced, including all-party forums and member working groups. He had no reason to fear for his services and policies when Labour won the local election last month after years of Conservative rule, thanks to a history of strong political consensus at the council.

"They have been party to the ideas," he says. "There will be changes in emphasis, but the direction will still be the same."

Another of the eight social services departments with three-stars is Leicestershire where emphasis has also been placed on developing a quality and performance culture over the last few years.

Director Tony Harrop says: "We made sure that we knew what was happening in the department, what we were delivering, and at what standard." He adds: "We have had clear objectives for years which emphasise community-based services, such as developing home care and preventive services. That has coincided with the indicators that the government feels are the good ones."

Political leadership at Leicestershire has also become stronger in the last couple of years under joint Conservative/Liberal Democrat control and now straight Conservative control. Before that, it had been a hung council for 18 years, meaning a different chairperson for every social services committee meeting.

In Swindon, meanwhile, it was a lack of political consensus and leadership that contributed to its social services department's zero-star status, says housing and social services director Marie Seaton.

At the local election in May 2000, Swindon became a hung council with the arrival of 23 newly elected members. This was followed in September 2001 by a period of no administration when the Conservative councillors moved a motion of no confidence in the Labour members and called for their resignations. Seaton also believes social services lost out financially when Swindon became a unitary authority in 1997.

In the London Borough of Lambeth, performance management and information-gathering systems were a problem, when executive director of social services and health improvement Lisa Christensen arrived in 1999. "I nearly kissed the piece of paper when I got my first graph," she says.

Celebrating her department's one-star and consequential removal from special measures, Christensen credits the SSI with having helped the department get on top of collating the information required to understand its activity levels.

"In terms of provision of information and having to meet targets, that was one of the things that helped us to turn things round," Christensen says of being on special measures. "I didn't find the extra information a burden. It was very useful to us to have information about how we were performing and to be able to take decisions on the basis of that information."

Christensen adds: "My impression is that the infrastructure in local authorities that have more stars than us is more robust. They have better systems and a longer history of better management."

At Birmingham's social services department, a critical joint review in July 2000 said there had been 10 years of poor performance. It reported a failure to modernise, no integrated IT system, no devolved budgets, failing children's services, and concerns about the organisational infrastructure, including major issues about the management of information.

Since then, social services director Sandra Taylor has introduced devolved budgets and an integrated IT system, and restructured children's services. Birmingham, which has been subject to "enhanced regional monitoring" for the last 18 months, is one of four zero-star departments to be selected for external help from DoH-funded performance action teams. Taylor says the specification for Birmingham's PAT is likely to focus on training front-line staff, on performance management skills for middle managers, and on "tidying up areas that the department has difficulty getting on top of".

"This is tremendous," Taylor says. "If I had the resources, I would have bought this kind of resource in just as we are. But we are having to manage very, very pressured budgets, and taking money out for this kind of consultancy is always considered to be at the expense of front-line services."

While few believe more money alone can improve performance, most believe it would help, and point to the higher SSA levels of several of the three-star social services departments as proof. But whether a new formula and redistributed grant would have any real impact on star-ratings remains to be seen. Certainly Harrop has his doubts: "In Leicestershire, we have the lowest SSA per head of the population in the country. But we still believe we provide good services. It's about how you use the money. When you do not have a lot, you use it quite sparingly."

One thing on which everyone seems to agree, however, is that star-ratings have already had a big impact on staff morale, sapping it in some areas, and boosting it in others. The impact of the star-ratings on recruitment, however, is not so clear.

As interim director at Bromley's zero-star social services department Bob Ward explains: "I would be surprised if my three-star colleagues weren't using it as a recruitment tool. But it is entirely possible to recruit good people to us too - people who want to work in a challenging environment."