New performance indicators for children’s safeguarding services
should assess the composition of social work teams as well as staff
vacancy and turnover rates, the British Association of Social
Workers (BASW) has said.
BASW’s policy officer on children’s issues, Nushra Mansuri, said
proposed indicators published last week were not ambitious
enough and were open to manipulation by local authorities.
The consultation from the National Safeguarding Delivery Unit
put forward seven new indicators, including those on staff
vacancies and turnover, and dropped or changed four.
The proposals follow Lord Laming’s comments, in his post-Baby P
report in March, that indicators have been too focused on processes
and timescales, and not enough on outcomes and multi-agency
working.
As a result, the government wants to replace an indicator that
measures the number of child protection cases reviewed within
required timescales, with one that measures the percentage of care
and supervision applications where the core assessment is missing
or incomplete.
Although Mansuri welcomed the inclusion of workforce indicators,
she said they “need to go deeper and look at the make-up of a team,
how many are newly qualified, and how many are agency staff”.
“We need to be looking at the make-up of frontline managers, the
quality of supervision and sickness rates,” she added.
In an attempt to drive better and quicker multi-agency working,
one of the new indicators will measure the speed that child
protection conferences are put in place. The indicators will be
used by six inspectorates.
However, Colin Green, chair of the Association for Directors of
Children's Services (ADCS) families, communities and young people
policy committee said they were disappointed there were still so
few indicators that measured results rather than processes.
He said they appreciated the difficulty in identifying robust
outcome indicators and welcomed the committment to develop them
over time.
"The definition of the indicator is however only a first step;
it is also vital to identify the purpose of these indicators – are
they to drive improvement or simply to measure current activity and
expose weaknesses in a particular authority?”
The consultation asks which of the indicators should become
statutory from 2011-12, and which from 2014-15.
Other suggestions include indicators around average caseload and
numbers of unallocated cases, as well as workload by experience
level of social worker.
Proposed new or changed indicators
- Percentage of initial assessments for children's social care
carried out within 10 working days of referral
- Percentage of initial child protection conferences which were
held within 15 working days of the start of a s47 enquiry
- Percentage of children who report they feel safe
- Children and young people-unintentional/deliberate injuries and
preventable deaths
- Percentage of care and supervision applications where the core
assessment is missing or incomplete
- Children's social worker vacancy rate
- Children's social worker turnover rate
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