Joint inspection of services to protect children and young
people in the Dumfries and Galloway Council area.
27 May 2010
The inspection of services to protect children1 in the
Dumfries and Galloway Council area was carried out in February
and March 2010. We looked at the services provided by health,
the police, the council and the Children’s Reporter. We also
looked at the services provided by voluntary and independent
organisations. Our report describes how good they are at
protecting children and keeping them safe. To find this out we
read a sample of children’s files which were held by these
services. We talked to a number of children and their parents
and carers to listen to their views about the services they had
received. We also spoke to staff in these services who worked
with children, parents and carers and to senior managers who
were responsible for these staff and the services they provided.
What we found and tell you about in this report is based on a
sample of children and families. We cannot promise that this will
be the same for every child in the area who might need help.
A team of inspectors gathered all the information and helped to
write this report. These inspectors have experience of working
across the range of services involved in protecting children.
Inspection teams include professional staff who work in council
areas elsewhere in Scotland.
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When we refer to children in this report we mean children and young people
under the age of 18 years.
Contents
1. The area
2. Particular strengths that make a difference to children and families
3. Examples of good practice
4. How well are the needs of children and families met?
5. How good is the management and delivery of services?
6. How good is leadership and direction?
7. How are services improving?
8. What happens next?
1. The area
Dumfries and Galloway is a mainly rural area situated in the south
west of Scotland. It covers an area of 6,426 square kilometres.
Dumfries and Galloway has a population of 148,580 with 19.5% under
the age of 18 years compared to the Scottish average of 20.2%.
The number of children referred to the council for child protection
enquiries increased between 2006 and 2009. The level of referrals is
higher than that for Scotland as a whole. The proportion of children on
the Child Protection Register (CPR) is 3.1 per 1000, which is broadly
in line with the national average 2.9.
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2. Particular strengths that made a difference to children and
families
•
Improvements in sharing information between services at an early
stage when concerns are raised.
•
Trusting relationships with their key workers.
•
Developing procedures and processes to review work and in
planning to improve outcomes for children.
3. Examples of good practice
•
Family Group Conferencing effectively involves children and their
wider family when planning and making decisions about their future
care.
•
Parents as First Teachers home support programme successfully
promotes parenting skills in families from pre-birth to when children
are 3 years old.
4. How well are the needs of children and families met?
School aged children benefit from helpful advice on how to keep
themselves safe in a wide range of situations through Operation
Safety. They also receive valuable guidance on how to stay safe
when using the internet, social networking sites and mobile phones.
Some children get individual support from a variety of staff to help
keep themselves safe. Children and families benefit from a range of
services providing practical assistance and emotional support. These
services help families care for their own children and keep them safe.
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When vulnerable pregnant women and their babies are identified, staff
provide early and effective help. Families gain confidence from
support provided which improves their parenting skills and helps them
deal with the effects of domestic abuse and substance misuse.
However, some children and families are not getting this help early
enough and it is not always available for everyone who needs it.
Staff are alert to children who may be at risk of abuse or neglect.
Police and social workers respond promptly to protect children and
keep them safe. Very useful planning meetings are held regularly
where staff agree what they should do next and how they will do it.
The views of health staff or staff who know the child and family well
are not always taken account of early enough at these meetings.
Managers are taking steps to ensure all relevant staff are involved in
these meetings at an early stage.
Children and families are kept informed about the actions police and
social workers are taking. They are supported through investigations
and helped to understand what will happen next. Checks are usually
made to ensure that placements with relatives are suitable when it is
not safe for children to stay at home.
When children are known to be in need of protection staff work well
together to help improve their circumstances. Involving the wider
family in planning the care arrangements for some children is very
effectively helping to meet their needs and keep them safe. The
Young People’s Support Service helps children excluded from school
return to school. Children and families affected by substance misuse
receive very effective support from the Integrated Substance Service.
Staff provide very good support to relatives to help them care for
children who can no longer stay at home with their parents. Most
children whose names are on the CPR and those who are looked after
away from home have their health needs met well. Although many
children receive the help they need, some children wait too long to get
help and for others services stop too quickly. Steps need to be taken
to ensure all children get the help they need to prevent difficulties
increasing. Some children who need specialist help to recover from
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abuse and to improve their mental health do not receive help quickly
enough.
Staff pay close attention to the needs of children who are educated at
home. There are effective systems in place to trace children who go
missing from education. Police have procedures in place to trace
children who run away from home. The Child Protection Committee
(CPC) is improving ways of ensuring that children who run away from
home are kept safe and well. They are aware of the risks for children
who may have been bought into or moved around the country illegally
and plan to introduce procedures to help staff identify and assist these
children. Staff are aware of the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual or
transgender young people and there is a range of local services
available to offer them support and advice.
Most children and families benefit from regular contact with staff who
built trusting relationships with them. They have confidence to talk to
staff openly about their personal issues. Most staff seek the views of
children well and ensure these are recorded and properly represented
at child protection meetings. Families are usually prepared well and
supported to attend meetings. However, a few families do not have
the opportunity to read reports in good time before meetings. Young
people are not routinely invited or encouraged to attend key child
protection meetings. Although some staff help and support children to
express their views independent support services are limited for
children on the CPR who could benefit from such support.
5. How good is the management and delivery of services?
Services are committed to continue improving the quality of their work
to protect children. Senior managers encourage staff to review their
practice to improve outcomes for children. Within and across services
managers and staff have identified strengths and priorities for
improvement and action plans have been produced. Although staff
are increasingly involved more needs to be done to include children
and their families in these processes.
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Strong working relationships between staff has helped to improve
information sharing. Information is shared effectively at child
protection meetings and in day-to-day working. However, some
review child protection meetings do not benefit from up-to-date
information from all services. Staff work well together to share
information about sex offenders who may be a risk to children.
When considering immediate risks to children, police and social
workers need to ensure they gather information from staff in all
relevant services more consistently before deciding a course of action.
Staff consider children’s needs well, but greater attention needs to be
given to continually assessing the changing risks to children. Training
and guidance is helping improve staff’s understanding of risk and how
best to respond to it. A new approach is being introduced which is
beginning to help staff consider risks to children more effectively.
Appropriately trained staff conduct medical examinations in a child
friendly environment. Examinations for sexual abuse take place out
with the area. Appropriate follow up treatment and support is provided
for those children who need it.
Guidance has recently been issued to improve planning to meet
children’s needs at case conferences. However, more needs to be
done to ensure all staff follow new guidance and procedures fully.
Ways of meaningfully involving more young people in child protection
meetings have still to be developed more fully. A helpful new format
for a child’s plan has been introduced but the quality of individual plans
varies. Plans are increasingly meeting children’s short term needs,
but more should to be done to improve longer term planning.
6. How good is leadership and direction?
Chief Officers have set out a joint vision for children’s services and
staff across services are aware of it. Senior managers are taking
steps to ensure that strategic plans for children’s services are aligned
to each other and the Single Outcome Agreement . These plans do
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not always help direct staff in their work. The leadership and direction
provided by the CPC is becoming more focused. Chief Officers have
set a joint budget to take forward improvements in services to protect
children. All the subgroups of the CPC need clearer direction to help
them take forward their work. Agreed priorities for actions need to be
more clearly stated and then implemented. Stronger monitoring of
actions requires to be put in place so that senior managers know if
these are progressing well. There are many recent joint initiatives to
protect children being tried out in a number of areas. These now need
to be put in place more consistently across the council area and their
impact evaluated. Senior managers across services are working more
effectively together at a strategic level. The involvement of the
voluntary sector in the CPC has strengthened partnership working.
Senior managers have recently restructured planning processes to
improve links between the way services are planned and provided at a
local level. It is too early to assess the impact of this change.
7. How are services improving?
The Integrated Children’s Service Plan identifies clear priorities, which
include protecting children. Progress is slow in taking forward many
planned actions. Improvements made following previous inspections
or self-evaluation are often limited. Changes planned as a result of
service reviews should be implemented more quickly. Chief Officers
are becoming more aware of trends on child protection activity, and
are beginning to receive regular reports from the CPC. More key
information on how effective processes are in protecting children could
be gathered routinely across services to help them plan improvements.
Some improvements in processes, such as staff sharing information
better and planning to meet children’s needs are evident but these are
inconsistent across the area. Although improvements in processes
have been made their impact on better outcomes for children and
families is not yet clear.
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8. What happens next?
We are confident that the services will be able to make the
necessary improvements in light of the inspection findings. As a
result, we will make no more visits in connection with this
inspection. Our link inspector will maintain contact with services to
support and monitor improvements.
We have agreed the following areas for improvement with services in
the Dumfries and Galloway Council area.
•
Ensure children and families get help and support early enough to
prevent difficulties arising or increasing.
•
Improve outcomes for children and their families by ensuring staff
provide a good quality service more consistently across the area.
•
Ensure planned improvements result in better outcomes for
children and families.
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Quality indicators help services and inspectors to judge what is good
and what needs to be improved in the work to protect children and
meet their needs. You can find these quality indicators in the HMIE
publication How well do we protect children and meet their needs?
Following the inspection of each local authority area, the Scottish
Government gathers evaluations of four important quality indicators to
keep track of how well services across Scotland are doing to protect
children and meet their needs.
Here are the evaluations of these for the Dumfries and Galloway
Council area.
Children are listened to and respected
Children are helped to keep safe
Response to immediate concerns
Meeting needs and reducing long term harm
good
satisfactory
good
satisfactory
We also evaluated the following aspects of the work within the local
authority area.
Self-evaluation
Improvements in performance
good
weak
Managing Inspector: Fiona McManus
May 2010
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To find out more about inspections or get an electronic copy of this
report go to www.hmie.gov.uk. Please contact the Business
Management and Communications Team (BMCT) if you wish to
enquire about our arrangements for translated or other appropriate
versions.
If you wish to comment about any of our inspections, contact us
at HMIEenquiries@hmie.gsi.gov.uk or alternatively you should write in
the first instance to BMCT, HM Inspectorate of Education, Denholm
House, Almondvale Business Park, Almondvale Way,
Livingston EH54 6GA.
Our complaints procedure is available from our website
www.hmie.gov.uk or alternatively you can write to our Complaints
Manager, at the address above or by telephoning 01506 600259.
If you are not satisfied with the action we have taken at the end of our
complaints procedure, you can raise your complaint with the Scottish
Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO). The SPSO is fully independent
and has powers to investigate complaints about Government
departments and agencies. You should write to SPSO, Freepost
EH641, Edinburgh EH3 0BR. You can also telephone 0800 377 7330,
fax 0800 377 7331 or e-mail: ask@spso.org.uk. More information
about the Ombudsman’s office can be obtained from the website
at www.spso.org.uk.
This report uses the following word scale to make clear
judgements made by inspectors.
excellent
very good
good
satisfactory
weak
unsatisfactory
outstanding, sector leading
major strengths
important strengths with some areas for
improvement
strengths just outweigh weaknesses
important weaknesses
major weaknesses
Crown Copyright 2010
HM Inspectorate of Education