Children’s services in Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Hammersmith and Fulham merged to save money and protect services, but the move has been a spur to improvement

When asked how safeguarding services and provision for children in care in the tri-borough (Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Hammersmith and Fulham) achieved a rating of “outstanding” in our recent Ofsted inspection, the first point I would make is that we built on good foundations. All three councils were judged as good, four years ago.

“Requiring improvement” has become the new normal Ofsted rating. So why were we judged outstanding?

In 2011, the three boroughs’ services were brought together to create one children’s service. Originally conceived as an arrangement to save money (which it did — £11m a year, half of the target for the first three years of the austerity programme) and to protect frontline services, it has also provided a platform for innovation and service improvement.

We have come to see the importance of giving social workers support in applying new skills after training programmes

The backbone of this improvement has been our Focus on Practice programme, funded in part as a Department for Education Innovation Fund scheme, with additional short-term investment by all three councils. The main components of this programme involved the whole workforce, from social workers at the front line through to the senior management team. Systemic therapists were deployed to coach and co-work with social workers.

We have come to understand the importance of providing support in the application of new skills after social workers have attended a training programme. The evidence is that skills and knowledge acquired in training programmes very quickly degrade once the staff member returns to the workplace, such that the impact is barely discernible within a short period of time unless the training is supplemented subsequently by some form of coaching.

We maintain that social-work practice will only improve if social workers have manageable caseloads. This enables us to have high expectations of our staff. Over a number of years we have established a pipeline of high-quality recruits through the Step Up to Social Work training programme, now complemented by the first cohorts of the Frontline training programme entering the service. We are intent on making the three boroughs a destination of choice for social workers, and supporting them with able team managers. As a result we have few agency workers, and are increasingly offering children and families continuity of workers.

Our staff are supported by a stable, strong senior leadership group, who work as a team. One development we believe has been particularly influential is the introduction of “practice weeks”. Twice a year, the senior leadership team spends a week out and about: observing practice and discussing cases with social workers. We ask the social worker to take the senior manager through a case, explaining the objectives and describing how the intervention is designed to help the child or family achieve what is desired. These “practice weeks” give the leadership team a good understanding of the strengths and capabilities of the organisation. Changes to policies and practice are made as a result of the observations.

We also need to make sure that there is a pipeline of able candidates for middle and senior management positions. We hope that as participants in the DfE Partners in Practice programme, we can make a contribution.

The strong governance of our children’s service should not be underestimated. Our senior leadership is held firmly to account by each borough’s lead member and cabinet, who know their services well and are well-known to staff.

We recognise that delivering children’s services well is difficult and risky. We constantly seek to improve and innovate. We see great potential in our Action for Change scheme, which undertakes targeted work with parents who are at risk of repeat removals of their children in care proceedings. Such innovations are made possible by virtue of the scale that we operate at. But we must also continue to keep doggedly attending to the basics.