Ofsted criticises city’s care of vulnerable

Bristol City Council has been criticised in a watchdog report into the way it looks after vulnerable children in the city.

An investigation by Ofsted found that the council was “not yet delivering good protection, help and care for children, young people and families”.

While the report, published last Friday, praised the council identifying and addressing failures in its provision, it said services for children who need help required improvement.

Meanwhile, services for young people needing help to leave care and find work and further education opportunities was described as “inadequate”.

Assistant mayor Brenda Massey said there were “no surprises” in the report and that work to address the problems was “well underway”.

Ofsted inspected Bristol’s services for children in need of help and protection, children looked after and care leavers between September 30 and October 22 this year – the first time since 2010 the authority’s services had been inspected when they were found to be “good”.

Some 90,500 children and young people under the age of 18 years live in Bristol, with 3,500 needing the help of one of the council’s specialist children’s services and nearly 700 looked after by the local authority.

Among the key points made in the report were:

• Outcomes for care leavers are poor: Fifty per cent of care leavers are not in education, employment or training.

• Educational outcomes for looked after children require improvement: Too many looked-after children do not achieve well in school. Persistent absence is high and the quality of personal education plans requires improvement.

• The quality of social work practice is not consistently good: Insufficient priority is given to children in need.

There was praise though for the council’s early help services for children and families and its Troubled Families project to support families needing help and support. Meanwhile, Ofsted said that “when child protection concerns are identified, children are quickly safeguarded”.

Responding to the report, John Readman, Bristol City Council’s strategic director for people, said:  “While there are also considerable strengths we are not yet delivering good services consistently and we welcome the constructive feedback provided in this report.

“In particular we recognise that we are not doing well enough for our care leavers and we are determined to improve their prospects as they move into work and adulthood.”

Councillor Brenda Massey, assistant mayor for people, said: “Encouragingly there are no surprises for us in this report. We know ourselves well and had already started tackling the vast majority of issues identified by Ofsted, even before the inspection. Improvement does take time for the results to show across the board, but work is well underway.”

You can read the Ofsted report in full here.