Joint inspection of services to protect children and young
people in the Highland Council area
4 May 2010
The inspection of services to protect children1 in the Highland
Council area was carried out in January and February 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
The Highland Council is Scotland’s largest local authority area in size.
It covers an area of 25,659 square kilometres. Around a quarter of
the population live in Inverness. More than 63% of the population
lives in remote areas. The Council area has a population of 219,400
with 17.8% under the age of 18 years compared to the Scottish
average of 20.5%.
The number of children referred to the council for child protection
enquiries decreased between 2006 and 2009. The level of referrals is
significantly lower than that for Scotland as a whole. The proportion of
children on the Child Protection Register (CPR) in Highland is 1.8 per
1000 which is lower than the national average of 2.9 per 1000.
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2. Particular strengths that made a difference to children and
families
•
Effective communication and the development of trust with staff.
•
The wide range of support services provided to them at an early
stage.
•
Action taken to protect children when identified as at risk of
immediate harm.
•
Joint approaches by managers and staff to reviewing their work to
improve services.
•
Senior managers encouraging and supporting staff to work
together well to improve outcomes for children.
3. Examples of good practice
•
Using police child concern forms to share information which helps
meet children’s needs at an early stage.
•
The work done by children’s services workers to support families.
•
The involvement of staff across services in revising child protection
guidance and reviewing the effectiveness of services.
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4. How well are the needs of children and families met?
Staff are helping children to be aware of personal safety through
carefully planned individual work and imaginative programmes in
schools and nurseries. As a result, children understand their right to
keep safe and know how to keep safe when using the internet and
mobile phones. Families, including vulnerable pregnant women and
their partners, benefit from a wide range of services to prevent
difficulties arising or getting worse. These include support from early
years workers and children’s services workers. Support services are
available for as long as families need them. Increasing numbers of
families are benefitting from programmes to help parents develop skills
and confidence in caring for their children. Many families are confident
that their lives are improving as a result of staff working well together
to help them.
In almost all cases, staff take prompt and effective action when
immediate child protection concerns are raised. They ensure children
and families know what is going to happen when concerns are being
investigated by carefully explaining their actions and keeping them
informed of decisions made.
When it is unsafe for children to remain at home, staff find an
alternative safe place for them to stay with family, friends, foster carers
or residential staff. Police and social workers use the law effectively to
keep children safe. In a few cases, education and social work staff do
not share information quickly enough when there are concerns about
children.
Children across the council area are benefitting from a wide range of
support which is helping to meet their physical, emotional and social
needs. Increasingly, staff are working together well to ensure
children’s needs, including health needs, are identified and met. Staff
anticipate and plan effectively to meet the long-term needs of most
children. However, in some cases, the desired longer-term outcomes
for children are unclear. Staff do not always give enough thought to
how to meet children’s needs if plans are unsuccessful or if parents
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are unable to improve care of their children. Children who need
particular help to recover from the effects of abuse and neglect are
supported well by a range of services, including children’s mental
health services and voluntary organisations. Staff review children’s
needs carefully to ensure those in greatest need get help quickly from
the most appropriate service. Some specialist services to help older
children who have experienced trauma or neglect are not available in
all areas.
Staff are aware of the risks to children who go missing. Robust
systems are in place to track children who are missing from education
and staff use these very well. Staff know what action to take if children
run away from home, residential or foster care. They work together
effectively to assess risks, trace children and support them to return.
The Child Protection Committee (CPC) provides clear guidance to help
staff identify and support children who may be at risk because they
have been brought into or moved about the country illegally. It has
provided information to the public to help them report concerns about
children they suspect may be at risk. Awareness is growing of the
particular needs of gay and lesbian young people and training is
available to help staff provide appropriate support.
Staff work hard to develop trusting relationships with children and
families. Staff communicate effectively, taking time to explain their
actions and what is expected of parents to keep their children safe.
Children and parents feel confident to discuss difficult issues with
them. Staff are sensitive to the needs of babies, younger children and
those with communication difficulties. Where English is an additional
language, children and parents are helped to express their views
through interpreters. Across services, attention is paid to seeking
children and families’ views, recording them and taking account of
them when important decisions are being made. Some children and
parents benefit from having independent supporters to help them give
their views. This is not yet available for all children and families who
could benefit.
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5. How good is the management and delivery of services?
Across services, staff clearly recognise children who may be at risk.
Staff who work with adults are confident about reporting concerns and
work effectively with children’s services staff to ensure children are
kept safe.
In almost all cases, when concerns about children’s immediate safety
are reported to social work services, staff take very prompt action to
assess and reduce risks. Where risks are less immediate, social
workers sometimes make decisions about what action to take without
speaking directly to the person raising the concern. Managers should
ensure that staff gather full information in all cases and that the person
raising the concern is kept informed of what is happening.
Police officers and social workers work very well together to plan child
protection investigations. Staff have clear guidance to seek the views
of a doctor when considering whether a medical examination is
needed but this guidance is not always followed. Where children may
have experienced physical injury or neglect, advice is now readily
available from a specialist children’s doctor. However, some children
who have recently reported sexual abuse have to wait too long to be
examined because suitably trained doctors are not available outside
office hours.
Staff are working hard to improve the quality of assessments and
children’s plans. There is growing attention to ensuring clear targets
against which progress can be measured. Helpfully, plans are
focusing increasingly on the specific needs of children rather than the
needs of parents.
Chief Officers and senior managers are strongly committed to
improving outcomes for children. They consistently encourage staff to
review the effectiveness of their work. Priorities and plans for
improvement have been directed by learning from a large number of
reviews carried out by individual services and by staff in services
together. Staff seek a wide range of views when considering their own
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work, including the views of children and families who use services.
6. How good is leadership and direction?
Child protection in Highland is strongly led by the Chief Officers’
Group, the Lead Officers’ Group and the CPC. Chief Officers and
senior managers across services, including the voluntary sector, work
together very effectively to help staff provide high quality services for
children and families. A shared vision promotes high ambitions for all
children, regardless of disability, race or background. Staff clearly
understand the vision and their responsibilities to keep children safe.
Managers are working together very well to plan, develop and deliver
services. They follow national policies and carefully adapt services to
meet local needs and circumstances. Services helpfully share
resources to meet agreed goals. Chief Officers and managers have
successfully led the implementation of new assessment and planning
processes across the Highland area. Effective leadership is helping
ensure all vulnerable children have a single plan and that staff from
different services work closely together to ensure children get the right
help at the right time to improve their lives. Staff across services are
strongly committed to closer working and continuous improvement.
Chief Officers and managers now need to work together to achieve the
necessary improvements in arrangements for medical examinations
for children who report sexual abuse.
7. How are services improving?
The Integrated Children’s Services Plan For Highland’s Children sets
out a clear shared vision and appropriate aims for children’s services,
including child protection. Taking into account lessons learned from a
review of the previous plan, a very effective system has been set up to
monitor how the plan is working. The CPC’s work plan helpfully
identifies priorities and keeps track of progress through regular
monitoring. Managers and staff have achieved success in two
important areas. These are reducing the number of meetings which
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children and families have to attend and increasing the time social
workers can spend directly helping children and parents. Families are
increasingly satisfied with how well they are involved in decisions
about their children. Systems for gathering management information
are effective overall and developing rapidly. Social workers now
provide reports for the Children’s Reporter more quickly and delays in
planning have reduced significantly as a result. The work of the quality
assurance and reviewing officers who chair key decision-making
meetings is helping achieve greater consistency in assessment of risks
and needs and improving the quality of children’s plans. Managers
have a sound understanding of services’ strengths and areas which
require further improvement. Staff and managers are working together
very well to continue to improve outcomes for children and families.
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 improvements.
We have agreed the following areas for improvement with services in
the Highland Council area.
•
Further develop joint initial assessments to support effective early
help to children and families.
•
Further improving arrangements for medical examinations for
children who report sexual abuse.
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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 Highland 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
very good
very good
very good
good
We also evaluated the following aspects of the work within the local
authority area.
Self-evaluation
Improvements in performance
very good
very good
Managing Inspector: Helen Happer
April 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
Inspectorate of Education