UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 70-i

HOUSE OF COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

CHILDREN, SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES COMMITTEE

 

THE WORK OF OFSTED

10 DECEMBER 2008

CHRISTINE GILBERT, MICHAEL HART, VANESSA HOWLISON and MIRIAM ROSEN

 

Evidence heard in Public

Questions 212 - 314

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2.	Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.
3.	Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.
4.	Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.

 

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Children, Schools and Families Committee

on Wednesday 10 December 2008

Members present:

Mr. Barry Sheerman (Chairman)

Annette Brooke

Mr. Douglas Cars76well

Mr. David Chaytor

Mr. John Heppell

Paul Holmes

Fiona Mactaggart

Mr. Andrew Pelling

Mr. Graham Stuart

Mr. Edward Timpson

 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Christine Gilbert CBE, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Education, Children's Services and Skills, Michael Hart, Director - Children, and Miriam Rosen, Director - Education, Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, gave evidence. Vanessa Howlison, Director - Finance, Ofsted, was in attendance.

 

 

Q212 Chairman: May I welcome the chief inspector and her team this morning? This is one of the two occasions when we regularly see you, but this sitting is about your annual report. We usually give you a chance to say something to get us started before questions, so over to you.

Christine Gilbert: Good morning, Chairman. I welcome the opportunity to appear again before the Committee. This is an important time for inspection because significant changes are planned, and I want to say something about those plans and changes. As an inspectorate covering a wide range of educational and children's provision, Ofsted is in a stronger position than ever to report and promote good practice, not just within specific services, but across them. Children do not grow up in silos, and by covering a range of remits, we can get a fuller picture of how, for example, children in disadvantaged circumstances are supported by different services-I highlighted that in my annual report. That joining-up is the broad context for inspection reform.

When we last met, I gave an indication of our likely direction of travel, and today I confirm that we are well advanced in making those changes for 2009. There are five important aspects of the reforms, and I will deal with them briefly. First, we want to hear more from service users and those on the front line, and to make it easier for front-line staff to tell us when things go wrong. In addition to the measures announced by the Secretary of State following the tragic events in Haringey, we are considering the introduction of a confidential whistleblowers hotline in 2009 for social workers and other front-line professionals to alert us to any serious concerns about practice that fails to ensure the safety and welfare of those we serve.

Secondly, there is a growing debate about the extent to which inspections use data and front-line observations. Since becoming chief inspector, I have been particularly concerned that we get that balance right so that we can judge the impact of services on those who use them. I have no time for a tick-box approach, and statistics are no substitute for inspections. As inspectors, we are far more interested in outcomes and how they are achieved than in whether people are crossing t's and dotting i's on their self-evaluation forms. We want our inspectors to see more of what is happening on the ground, whether through more lesson observation, talking to social workers and so on, but data also matter, and given recent concerns, I have asked council chief executives to assure me of the accuracy of any data provided by their authorities.

Thirdly, we want to ensure that inspections, particularly with regard to schools and FE colleges, are proportionate to risk, so there will be more frequent inspections of those that are weak and satisfactory, and fewer of those that are rated good or outstanding, thus focusing our resources on the areas in which we can make the greatest difference.

Fourthly, we are introducing more efficient and speedier reporting with changes in the reporting process for the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service and initial teacher training. There will also be a single inspection of all teacher training programmes when we visit a teacher training college or facility.

Fifthly, as I mentioned to the Committee last time we met, we will make more use of no-notice inspections for both schools and children's safeguarding. Time and again, for example, parents tell us that that is what they want, and they also tell us how much independent inspection is valued.

Inspection offers a much fuller picture of quality on the ground than test scores or other data, although the latter are clearly important. As I said in my annual report, much is going well for many children, but much is still patently inadequate, and there are too many settings in which the rate of improvement is unacceptably slow. I am confident that the changes that we are making will support improvement, particularly where it is most needed. My colleagues and I look forward to your questions.

 

Q213 Chairman: Thank you, chief inspector. We will obviously cover what we can learn from the Haringey experience in a positive way, but I shall start with the feeling that two things are happening with Ofsted. The organisation has grown as your remit has gone down into early years and pre-school, up into FE and a bit of HE, and across into social care and children's welfare. There is a feeling among some of your critics-and I have been one of them-that you might have grown too quickly and that assimilating all those responsibilities is a bit too much for one organisation.

Christine Gilbert: Well, since the new organisation was launched last April, we have delivered every single programme of inspections for each of those areas as they would have been delivered by four inspectorates. We have delivered them to time and so on. More than that, as the year went on, we began to join up different forms of inspection. The different places that we inspect do not now have two sets of inspectors visiting them. Gradually, as the year has gone on, we have streamlined and co-ordinated our processes.

More importantly, the change has allowed us to look right across all areas of our remit. This year's annual report picks out three themes that we would not have been able to cover when I was sitting in front of you this time last year, when we did not have that breadth of remit. We looked at outstanding social care and education to try to pick out its features. We also looked at safeguarding children and at skills for working lives. That gave us breadth, because all our work and our discussions with our users and providers-users in particular-show that users do not experience services not joined up. If you talk to somebody on a council estate or a parent trying to access services, you find that they want the whole range. They do not just go in at tangents. We want to have such focus.

 

Q214 Chairman: But whistleblowers from your organisation have contacted us. They fear that the lighter touch and the expansion of your range of activity mean that there are actually not such high-quality inspections or such a real understanding of what is going on at the sharp end. We do not run a whistleblowers line, but people write to us when they know that you are coming in front of the Committee. Some of your staff are concerned about the thinness, especially at a time when you are cutting staff. That might not be your responsibility, because the Government want you to be more effective and the Gershon reforms are pushing you in that direction, but is the picture as good as you are painting it?

Christine Gilbert: We have been very careful in the past year to assess the impact of our work with users themselves, which is new, and with providers, as the four different organisations did previously. Part of that involved asking for forms to be returned and so on, but we found, for instance, that schools that had done better were more inclined to fill in their satisfaction survey. We therefore went out to the National Foundation for Educational Research, Ipsos MORI and so on. We found very high percentages-more than 80% or 90% in all but one area, I think-saying that we are getting it right, identifying the right issues and helping improvement. That said, I do not want to be complacent, and what worries me most about what you have said-if this comes from whistleblowers in the organisation-is that people have not felt that they could make such points in the organisation and be heard.

In the past year, we have focused very much on merging four organisations to create one that was stronger than the sum of its parts. We have tried hard to do that with people coming in to critique us. As I said the last time I appeared before the Committee, we were keen to have an Investors in People assessment at the end of our first year. That assessment has taken place and it commented on our remarkable progress and how the morale of staff has improved. However, the organisation has been merged and we have a long way to go.

 

Q215 Chairman: I know that the Committee wants to ask questions about what we learn from the Haringey experience. It has not done the reputation of Ofsted a great deal of good, has it? Critical comments have been made, and in press interviews, you held up your hand and said honestly, "Yes, we made mistakes." Can you take us through why you think that those mistakes were made?

Christine Gilbert: Do you mean the judgment of the annual performance assessment for Haringey in 2007?

 

Q216 Chairman: Yes. I am asking you to take us through the chronology. The 2006 inspection was not very good, but in 2007 Haringey received a rather good one. Take us through the chronology of why you think that happened.

Christine Gilbert: I am pleased to do that. In 2006, there was a joint area review, which is essentially an inspection. It is on-the-ground investigative work that looks at a range of things, such as the social care duty room and files. Talks with key players, children and young people, and social workers take place. It was not a bad JAR, but one of the two lowest grades was for safeguarding-nevertheless, it was adequate. A number of things were identified and picked out for improvement, such as the assessment and referral of initial and core cases of child protection, and the number and stability of social work placements. There had been real advances from the situation in Haringey in 2001.

The JAR happens once every three years-it is a three-year programme. We have now come to the end of all the joint area reviews, and this is also the last year of the annual performance assessment. Both have now finished. The last round will happen during this month and the next couple of months.

 

Q217 Chairman: What will it be replaced by?

Christine Gilbert: The comprehensive area assessment.

 

Q218 Chairman: Which will happen only every three years?

Christine Gilbert: It will, but it has two rolling programmes within it: one on safeguarding, and one on looked-after children. They are every three years, but in the proposals that we sent out for consultation in September, we said that we would have to do brief on-site inspection visits to look at the sort of things that were examined during the recent Haringey JAR. I shall come to that in a second.

Initially, the JAR grade became the grade for that year, but it looked at a number of things. It focused on the safeguarding and actually looked at all five Every Child Matters outcomes to give a general picture of children's services in the area. The annual performance assessment is an annual look at performance data. It looks at briefings from a number of organisations. For example, we had a full briefing from the Government office, which works closely with the local authority and feeds back on it, and the local partnership, which feeds back on a number of things. We had briefings from a number of organisations, such as the health inspectorate, which would make comments, as perhaps would the Youth Justice Board. There would thus be a range of briefings and a range of data. Two Ofsted inspectors, one with a social care background and one with a background in education, would have made an initial assessment of all that before it went through a number of panels. That was based on data for the 2006-07 financial year, going up to April 2007, so those data are 18 months old.

 

Q219 Chairman: That is the 2007 report, as opposed to the 2006 one.

Christine Gilbert: Yes.

 

Q220 Chairman: The 2006 report was adequate and the 2007 one was quite good.

Christine Gilbert: The JAR overall was good, was it not? The safeguarding element of the annual performance assessment was adequate.

Although the data used were for the financial year I mentioned, the assessment would have taken place in the autumn. We are just now finishing the APAs for this year. The judgment moved from adequate to good. The assessment and referral of initial and core assessments that I mentioned were judged to be good and the cases allocated to social workers were better. A number of positive things were said.

More recently, the Secretary of State asked us to look at Haringey a few weeks ago. For the broad outline, we used the JAR methodology-our inspection methodology. However, there was a difference because it was shorter and focused just on safeguarding. We found some things outlined in the report about issues such as management, paperwork and practice. However, we also found that some of the data that we used for the APA the previous year were inaccurate. For instance, when you looked at the case files, it was clear that assessments had not been completed, whereas the figures coming in had reported that assessments had been completed in a particular time.

 

Q221 Chairman: So, is this the matter about which I saw you on television saying that Ofsted had been misled?

Christine Gilbert: Yes.

 

Q222 Chairman: Who was responsible for that misleading? At what level did that happen?

Christine Gilbert: Well, it would have been the reporting of the data from the local authority. Another example was the allocation of social care cases to social workers. In a number of instances, it appeared from the files that families had been allocated to social workers rather than the separate children in those families. Therefore, some social workers would have had a far harder and heavier case load than was reported.

A further key thing was that files were not closed promptly, as they should have been. That information came in incorrectly and was fed back into the data profile on performance and so on.

 

Q223 Chairman: So, chief inspector, with the inspection that rated Haringey as good, did a senior person from Ofsted speak to the director of children's services about the overall quality of that inspection?

Christine Gilbert: Of the JAR or the APA?

Chairman: The one in 2007.

Christine Gilbert: The assessment. The point is that that was not an inspection.

Chairman: That was the paper-based one.

Christine Gilbert: It was paper-based, with data and reviews from different organisations-briefings, as we call them.

 

Q224 Chairman: So no one from Ofsted went there and looked at people and talked to people.

Christine Gilbert: There would have been an on-site meeting, but not an investigation meeting. That would have been a meeting to discuss what was emerging from the APA.

 

Q225 Chairman: Who would have met with whom for an on-site meeting?

Christine Gilbert: It differs. Sometimes it would be the director of children's services. More rarely, the chief executive would be there.

 

Q226 Chairman: But in this specific case, you must have a record of who met with whom.

Christine Gilbert: I do not have that to hand, but it would have been senior people from the local authority with the two inspectors from Ofsted.

 

Q227 Chairman: So you do not know whether the director of children's services was met at that time.

Christine Gilbert: I do not know.

 

Q228 Chairman: One criticism is that that particular person was strong on the educational side, but did not have much background in social services. I will bring the rest of the team in, but I want to press you on this. What shocked me, when I looked at the review that the Secretary of State asked for, was that such a high percentage of the social work staff were agency staff: it was not far below 50%. When you come across that sort of figure-even if it is paper-based-do alarm bells not start ringing? Or is that normal?

Christine Gilbert: I have to say, that sort of figure is fairly usual across London. Sometimes, it is not as bad as it looks, because they are agency staff but they might well have worked there for several years. When we looked at Haringey recently, a number of them had been in post for at least six months. They just chose to work for an agency, rather than a council. But that pattern is fairly typical across London.

 

Q229 Chairman: Would you not be rather alarmed if a school was half run by temporary staff?

Christine Gilbert: Yes, this is an issue. The question of the stability of social workers is really key; it is the human connection between a social worker and the child or young person that allows you to see what is really going on. It is concerning. Absolutely.

 

Q230 Chairman: But it was not flagged up in the two reports that we have been talking about.

Christine Gilbert: That is because it is fairly typical, and it is a well-known issue.

 

Q231 Chairman: Right, but it does not come out in the report, so if it was known then, it is a shock to me, as the Chairman of this Committee. The other thing that struck me about that was the number of case conferences. One thing that one knows about human organisations is that, in the IT age, colleagues who are in the same office, or just across the corridor, now do not look at each other and speak; they e-mail each other. I do not know whether that was going on in this case, but the report that the Secretary of State asked for reveals that many of the participants in case conferences did not show up. Was that picked up when Ofsted's inspections-of any kind-took place? The crucial thing about this world is that it is the facilities responsible for health and education, as well as the school, the social worker-the whole team-that know about the child. This goes back to long before computers-people sit around and talk about the child and the family that they know. Yet the evidence that came out, when we looked at this tragedy, is that some of those people turned up, but some of them did not. Was that picked up by the report?

Christine Gilbert: That would not have been picked up in the APA, unless we had been specifically told that through one of the briefings, which are destroyed. So it is not clear to us whether that would have been picked up. I would doubt it very much; in all the APAs that I have read, I cannot remember that sort of detail ever emerging. It would, or it might, emerge in a joint area review. The issue that inspectors found in Haringey recently was that, although there was commitment to communicate and collaborate across different agencies, they were almost all working in parallel with the particular children. We looked at the whole safeguarding arrangements; we only looked at the case of Baby P in terms of the serious case review-we were not sent in to look at that.

 

Q232 Chairman: The most important point in this whole Baby P case, although there are other cases like it, is to learn a lesson and to try to do a better job. What reforms will there be in the inspection process, which will make sure that we know how many temporary social workers there are and whether people are turning up at case conferences? That is surely the level of detail that Ofsted needs.

Christine Gilbert: What has happened has reinforced the need for inspection-even in between the three years. It has reinforced the proposals that we sent out in September. This tragic case has made us go back to those proposals, and in the end, they will be different because of what has happened. We were proposing annual visits, during which we will look at case files, speak to people on the ground and perhaps look at most of the things that you have just mentioned. I am not sure whether we would have picked up the sort of detail that you have just talked about with regard to case conferences without a full inspection, but we would certainly try to get underneath some of the data, and we have decided that we will do that. We now think that a day is probably insufficient time for that.

 

Q233 Chairman: A day?

Christine Gilbert: We would be going in for a day, or two days at most. The consultation on those proposals closed at the end of last week, so we are just going through the comments that we have got back. For instance, one of the things that we will be proposing that was not set out in our proposals in September is that we will send a questionnaire to social workers in the authority before going in for the day visits. Those are the sort of things that we are proposing, so we are really trying to get underneath some of the evidence.

 

Q234 Chairman: Before I open up the questioning to other Members, I have just one last question. Some of the criticisms about your inspections have focused on the general idea that you can move to a lighter touch, because an authority is doing all right. From the 2007 inspection report, would not Haringey have got the lighter touch, because you would have said that, as it got a good inspection result, you do not have to bother about it for perhaps three years? Is not that the danger of the lighter touch? If you do the lighter touch, you only go back to the cases that you think are causing problems, whereas the real emerging problem might be in an authority that you thought was perfectly all right a year or two ago, and you are leaving those because the lighter touch means that you will say, "Well, we want to concentrate on the ones we know might be problematic."

Christine Gilbert: That is exactly why we think that it is really important to use inspection. Even in the school sector, if we look at what was described as a reduced tariff, where we essentially went in for a day, we see that those schools have been very positive about that. We targeted that at the top 30%, rated according to performance, where all of the indicators suggested that that will be good or better, but when we have gone in we have found that over 6% of that 30% are satisfactory or worse, so we absolutely know that you cannot rely only on data but have to get underneath some of what it is telling you.

The issue for us is whether the proportionality is in terms of time, so with schools, we had said initially that we would be going back to "good" or "outstanding", unless the data indicated otherwise, every six years. We are making a slightly different proposal on that now, but that is what we were saying. We had known, when we reviewed the proposals for what comes after joint area reviews and APAs, that we had built into the safeguarding element and the looked-after children element an element of inspection that would give a snapshot to tell us whether we need to move the inspection to this year, next year or to year three. We shall be doing an intensive safeguarding inspection into looked-after children every three years in every authority in the country, so that is not proportionate in that way, but we had thought that the short inspection visits would help us to decide essentially the priority order of those.

Chairman: Chief inspector, thank you.

 

Q235 Mr. Carswell: Chief inspector, Baby P had not been removed from his home, where he was subject to continual abuse from his mother, her boyfriend and their lodger, despite 60 separate meetings with social workers. You rated those social workers as "good" in 2007 in your performance assessment. Are not you failing as an inspector?

Christine Gilbert: We think that the APA has some validity in looking at outcomes, and I think that most authorities in the country, if not all of them, are full of people with integrity and commitment, and I do not think that the data produced by the majority of authorities would have been faulty. We do not know that, so I wrote to chief executives on Monday to ask for an assurance that the data submitted for this current year is fine and that it has been checked and so on. I do not believe that people up and down the country are submitting inadequate data.

 

Q236 Mr. Carswell: I have a letter from Professor Ian Sinclair of York University on the question of whether it was you or dodgy data. He starts by saying: "First the tragedy of baby P did not arise because he was not assessed or assessed quickly enough." He then goes on to say: "Christine Gilbert is not complaining that assessments were not done at all but rather that they were done badly". He goes on: "The statistics themselves only record whether assessments were in some sense completed within the time limits and a technical note warns of 'extreme variability in some of the figures' which may reflect 'local differences and interpretation'."

Professor Sinclair continues: "Such ill-defined data can hardly be regarded as either false or true." Is it therefore not a little disingenuous of you to pass the buck by blaming dodgy data when the data does not actually allow you to do so?

Christine Gilbert: I place more importance on the data than that suggests. A lot is being written about data being bureaucratic and so on. The data is really important. It is not just recorded on file. The idea is that someone looks at it and does something with it, and picks up the connections across and so on, so that different agencies work together and focus on the child. It is not correct to say that the assessments were coherent and sufficiently brought together, because things got missed in the assessment of this child.

We did not go into Haringey to look in detail at the Baby P case. We looked at safeguarding arrangements, and at the serious case review. We could see from that, and from the files on Baby P, that if those files had been looked at, connections could have been made that were not made, and that questions could have been asked. Issues about practice were not picked up. For instance-I will not refer to the Baby P case here although it is an example of this-the ideal is that you try to see the child alone or at least have some personal connection with the child during a session with a social worker. That is not always possible, in which case you record that. In some instances, the fact that the child was not-or could not be-seen was recorded four or five times on file. That should have been picked up in discussion between that social worker and the manager in what is described as supervision. Supervision was happening, but it was not focused on the practice and the individual child. The data is only there to support the child; it is the cornerstone of the support.

 

Q237 Mr. Carswell: With respect chief inspector, does that response not suggest that we have now created an inspection system in which social workers are so busy perfecting the files, the records and the assessment reporting that they are not ensuring that vulnerable children are okay. We have created a Kafkaesque inspection system that does not ensure that the really important stuff is happening.

Christine Gilbert: Can I be really clear: inspection has not created these demands. The practice that I am talking about came out of the Laming inquiry recommendations. The sort of things that I am talking about were listed there. It is about what good practice is in safeguarding, and being really explicit about that. The second point is that you have to manage that. I agree that it cannot just happen by writing it down on a piece of paper; that will not help anyone. What you do with that information and how you use it to support and help the child is absolutely fundamental.

 

Q238 Mr. Carswell: I have two further questions. Does this whole episode not show that with your £250 million a year budget, your army of inspections and your gigabytes-worth of computerised record keeping, Ofsted is doing too much? Your remit has grown and you need to focus more specifically.

Christine Gilbert: I will be repeating the points that I made at the beginning. We have done all the things that each of the separate organisations would previously have done, but also got added benefit from bringing the four organisations together. In doing that, as I said to the Committee last time I sat here, we are reviewing our whole approach to inspection and regulation to make sure that we and children, young people and adult learners are gaining the benefits of merger. That is beginning to emerge. For instance, the work that we have done on serious case reviews was applying a system and a rigour that had not been there previously to highlight the issues involved, making sure that people were aware of them and would be more likely to do something about them.

 

Q239 Mr. Carswell: On the serious case review, you know that it remains unpublished. Can we have confidence in children's services while it remains unpublished? Do you think it should be published?

Christine Gilbert: This question was raised with me last week by two leading politicians. I went back and talked to inspectors about that very question, and talked to directors of children's services. All of them, to a person, told me that the reviews would not be done as openly and honestly if they were going to be published, and that it is really important for people to be as honest as they can in reviewing what has gone on. The summary-the overview-is published, and I believe that our evaluation could well be published. Even if parts of the letter needed to be redacted, I think you would still get the general sense. Our overall evaluation could be published, but I have to say that I am persuaded of the dangers to other children in the family-other members of the family-involved with publishing the whole review.

 

Q240 Mr. Carswell: So, you can have openness and honesty only if what you are saying is kept secret?

Christine Gilbert: I think that the reviews are very honest about other members of the family in some instances. I went back, because the politicians that I spoke to said that they considered only about a page needed to be redacted in the Baby P case, and I think that that is probably true, because so much is in the public domain. However, I looked at a number of other cases, and you would have had to redact page after page without it personally impacting on another child in the family-another member of the family-in a way that would be very difficult for that child to bear.

 

Q241 Annette Brooke: Just two questions really. First, briefly, do you think that there should be sanctions on local authorities or whoever for actually giving false information? Would that strengthen your data collection?

Christine Gilbert: I certainly think that people should not knowingly submit false data. If they knowingly submit false data, that is a disciplinary issue to be dealt with in the council as such-or in any other organisation that had submitted data.

 

Q242 Annette Brooke: You do not think, from your inspection, that there is any role for sanctions coming out?

Christine Gilbert: It would make the assessment invalid if we knew that. We would not have a role in doing that; it would be up to the local council or organisation to deal with it. It would not be our role.

 

Q243 Annette Brooke: Just taking a slightly broader perspective-I appreciate that a lot of this has only just come into your remit-and following on from the Children Act 2004, there has been a major shake-up. There has been lots of questioning whether it was right to get rid of the old format of the child protection index. There have been issues about who should be chairing the local safeguarding board and whether the social workers are able to find the needle in the haystack with all the information.

Has any of Ofsted's work, right across all authorities, looked at the implications of the changes that have been brought in? Have you picked up whether local authorities-social workers-see the moves as for better or for worse? Surely there are general trends here that could have been picked up earlier. It seems to me really bad to have to have-I am sure we have to have it-this follow-on Laming report to pick up all these issues, when surely an ongoing inspection ought to have picked some of the issues up.

Christine Gilbert: The report that we led on with the other inspectorates in July picked up a number of issues. It was the third safeguarding report and the first time that Ofsted led on that report. It pointed to a number of improvements since the previous report, three years before, in the general arrangements for safeguarding, but also highlighted a number of things that we were deeply concerned about.

On the day that the report was launched, I was sufficiently concerned to write to chairs of local safeguarding children boards and invite them to a conference immediately after the launch-the report had been launched in the morning. I was there for the entire day. I spoke to them and we talked about what was in the report. The afternoon session was entirely on serious case reviews and there was a presentation on our findings. We were trying to highlight those issues and areas. We did not feel that the publicity related to that report had been sufficiently strong in this area, so in our annual report-published just a fortnight ago, as you will have seen-we included a chapter that picked up a lot of the information.

At the same time, we decided that we would publish our first-year evaluation, looking back over 50 serious case reviews and considering not just how they had been done-the processes-but the practice related to them and the issues coming out of them. To be honest, we were to publish that just when we were asked to do the investigation of Baby P. We did not think that we could do so while we were doing that review, so we published them at the same time.

That report highlights a number of difficulties and problems, and essentially suggests what people need to be doing. We have tried to pick up key themes and issues. For instance, another issue that is touched on here, although we have another report coming out after Christmas, is private fostering. We have tried to pick out issues that we are really concerned about-not just to do our basic inspection of the different services, but to try to pull the lessons together and produce a report that really makes the key points, with some emphasis.

 

Q244 Annette Brooke: It seems a little alarming that the Baby P case will trigger the change, whereas your reports do not seem to have had any impact. Should we be learning any lessons from that?

Christine Gilbert: I do not know whether they would have had no impact. We put the safeguarding chapter in the report because the annual report always generates a lot of interest. Usually the focus is entirely on schools, and we hoped that by putting that chapter in, as I said at the beginning of my introductory remarks, it would generate a lot of attention. I am launching the report that we will publish after Christmas at a particular conference. We think that that approach-we have always had survey reports in other areas of Ofsted's work and they always generate some interest-would have generated interest in these areas, even without the tragic case of Baby P.

 

Q245 Chairman: Some people out there who have been interested in and horrified by what happened to Baby P might say that if there was a tougher report and a more accurate and insightful inspection system Baby P would have been saved-rescued-and the misery of that small life would have been ameliorated.

Christine Gilbert: As I said, Chairman, we have not been complacent about this at all. We have really tried to look at what is happening and look at what our review found-nobody seems to be arguing with what we found a fortnight ago. We are looking at the process and the practice to make sure that the changes that we had already said we were introducing are sufficiently comprehensive. If there are pieces of evidence that we should be looking at that we are not looking at, we will really try to find them.

 

Q246 Chairman: But the crucial investigation is the 2006 one, is it not? The report said adequate, and 2006 would have been early enough to have influenced the life of Baby P.

Christine Gilbert: I would stand by the 2006 report. That report highlighted some difficulties. Inspection gives you a picture of what is happening at the time. Things do not stand still; they get worse or better.

 

Q247 Chairman: Are you saying that there was a cataclysmic decline between 2006 and 2008?

Christine Gilbert: Sorry?

Chairman: Are you saying that in 2006 you found that children's services and safeguarding in Haringey were okay-indeed, that they were adequate and in some respects good-but that by 2008 there had been an absolutely cataclysmic failure, which you did not detect in 2006, not even a hint of it?

Christine Gilbert: In fact, there were hints of it then. The issues about child protection and initial and core assessments, and the points I made about case files and so on, were all there. We thought that they had been worked on and improved. That was not the case. I would also say that things do not stand still. We can see that in schools. An inspector who had been into a primary school spoke to me on Monday. The school had evaluated itself as good and the data was suggesting that the school was satisfactory, but when he went on the site visit and made the inspection he put the school into special measures. So, that school has moved in the three years since the last inspection.

 

Q248Chairman: You are moving to a three-year cycle of inspections for vulnerable children's services.

Christine Gilbert: With annual checks, with annual on-site inspection visits. That is the key difference.

 

Q249Mr. Chaytor: Is there anything, chief inspector, that you would change with the benefit of hindsight? Is there any judgment you would change in the 2006 report?

Christine Gilbert: In the 2006 report? I could not possibly say. It is based on inspectors' judgments at the time.

Mr. Chaytor: You have just said that you stand by the 2006 report.

Christine Gilbert: The 2006 report was an inspection.

Mr. Chaytor: But I am saying that, excepting that general defence of the 2006 report, is there any specific judgment in there that, with the benefit of hindsight, you think was inaccurate?

Christine Gilbert: Not that I could immediately consider. There would not be anything that I would highlight from that report.

 

Q250Mr. Chaytor: In the 2007 report, I think you referred to three sets of data provided by the local authority that were inaccurate. Leaving those on one side, were they the entire reason that the 2007 judgment was good? Had the data in those three categories been accurate, would a different judgment have been delivered in the 2007 report?

Christine Gilbert: It might have allowed us to ask more questions about the briefings because we also have a number of briefings from different organisations and the briefings were very positive about what was going on in Haringey. So it is a combination of briefings from other organisations and the data-those two things.

 

Q251Mr. Chaytor: Had the data been accurate, it could still have resulted in a judgment of good in the 2007 annual performance assessment?

Christine Gilbert: Yes, it could.

 

Q252Mr. Chaytor: Could I ask you to clarify? Did you say that the briefings have now been destroyed, so that it was not possible to verify?

Christine Gilbert: The inspection information is held only for a certain time. I am not sure how long it is held for.

Miriam Rosen: Three months after the publication of the report or the final transactions if there is any complaint about the report. All the evidence is then destroyed.

 

Q253Mr. Chaytor: Again, with the benefit of hindsight, is that three-month period long enough? I understand that there will be a huge amount of material for all the inspections that Ofsted carries out, but given the possibility of challenge and the public interest in inspections generally, would it be better if the briefing material were retained for longer?

Christine Gilbert: I think we should look at that, but even more importantly, we need to be sure before we make our overall judgment that we have checked out the information. We will take that point away and look at it, but that should not stop us doing the more important thing.

 

Q254Mr. Chaytor: In the special JAR that you carried out in November, you recommended, among many other things, that Haringey should appoint an independent chairperson to the local safeguarding children board and ensure that all elected members have CRB checks and undertake safeguarding training. Do you not think that those recommendations should apply to all local authorities? Why just Haringey?

Christine Gilbert: The issue is that they are not statutory requirements, but we felt when looking at Haringey-this is my personal opinion, too-that they should be applied to all elected members because if they are carrying out their corporate parenting role they will be looking at some very personal information. The role is related not just to practice with children, but to looking at information. That is why we said it. We feel that if the organisation is to carry out its corporate parenting role effectively, it needs to look at some very confidential information that might put children at risk if looked at by the wrong people.

Q255Mr. Chaytor: So your feeling is that the recommendations ought to be a statutory requirement?

Christine Gilbert: It is.

Mr. Chaytor: All three recommendations?

Christine Gilbert: Sorry, I was talking about the CRB checks.

Mr. Chaytor: The CRB checks, elected members undergoing safeguarding training and the independence of the chairman of the board.

Christine Gilbert: I certainly think that the safeguarding training is important. Many councils take their corporate parenting role very seriously and do it, and some do it for some elected members who they think will come in contact with children or see data about them. Those two recommendations are really important.

The independence recommendation is important but needs exploring. It is not quite as simple as it might look, because you also want somebody chairing the local safeguarding children board who has the authority and clout to get things done. I definitely think that the person who chairs the panel that deals with serious case reviews needs to be completely independent.

Chairman: I think that Paul wants to come in on that point.

 

Q256 Paul Holmes: Yes. In the emergency review that you did just last month, you said specifically that "the local safeguarding children board...fails to provide sufficient challenge to its member agencies" and that that is further compounded by the lack of an independent chairperson. I understand that of 150 boards across the country, only 50 have independent chairpersons-the other 100 are in-house. I believe that often the director of children's services acts as chairman. Surely there is a lesson there that should be applied across the whole country.

Christine Gilbert: We did identify that as a real issue in the July report. We said that more of the chairmen were independent than when the boards were set up, but that that was a real issue that local boards needed to consider. As I said, that is why I invited in the chairmen of the local safeguarding children boards to hear some of the recommendations from the July report.

 

Q257 Paul Holmes: If you were to have 150 independent chairmen rather than the 50 that we apparently have at present, who would they be? Would they be mini-children's commissioners? How would you describe their role?

Christine Gilbert: One of the things that we feel really needs a wider debate is what independence means. Some people might think that the chief executive of a local authority was sufficiently independent for the detailed process of chairing the board. Some boards have people who live locally, some have made arrangements with neighbouring authorities and so on. There are different ways of doing it.

 

Q258 Paul Holmes: You highlighted the fact that the boards were not challenging member agencies, but it seems that there is a complete lack of challenge throughout the system, and certainly in Haringey. If the leader of the social work team were not in the weekly supervision picking up on the fact that children were not being seen repeatedly, that would be a failure at middle management level. Then right at the top you have senior managers who are deliberately misleading you when they fill in the forms, yet you say that you do not know off hand who the people were whom your team met last year. Surely all those people should be prosecuted, reprimanded or sacked because they deliberately misled you when they filled in the forms that gave such a misleading impression last year.

Christine Gilbert: I do not know whether the issue is about being misleading. What we pointed out in July and again in the annual report is that it is very hard for people who are completely involved in a case to sit back, critique themselves and be objective. Yes, they need to be involved in the individual management reviews, but you also need people in the review teams who have not been involved in the case looking at it.

Generally, when we look at the serious case reviews, I do not think that people have deliberately been misleading. It is very difficult to critique the behaviour of a colleague with whom they work closely, so somebody needs to be challenging, scrutinising and questioning at every level-at the individual management review level and then at the broader level-which is why I am stressing that the person who chairs the review panel overall really does need to be independent. As I said, some authorities have good arrangements with neighbouring authorities and so on.

 

Q259 Paul Holmes: Back to the other point about annual performance assessment. You said in interviews on the weekend that you were misled-that people were claiming they had done things that had not been done-yet you cannot say, "These are the people we met last year, these are the people who should now be held to account." Surely it should be a major factor if somebody in a local authority is deliberately misleading the inspectorate and saying that they are doing something when they are not. There has to be some penalty system.

In America, some of the people who sold toxic loans and sub-prime products have been prosecuted for criminal fraud. Unfortunately, we are not doing that here, but surely if you are systematically and deliberately misleading people there has to be some penalty.

Christine Gilbert: Absolutely there should, but that means that you are not doing your job. I do not know who produced the wrong data, who filled in the forms, who signed them or any of that sort of thing. There would need to be an investigation by the council, and the council would then need to apply its disciplinary procedures.

 

Q260Paul Holmes: You say that you do not know, but you are the head of Ofsted. You inspected them and gave them a good review last year and a disastrous review this year, so surely you should know. You should be saying, "I, the chief inspector, was totally misled and made to look a fool on this; we want heads to roll and we want to know what is going on."

Christine Gilbert: But that is not my job. We inspect and we report; we do not employ the people at Haringey. I would suggest, if that sort of thing happens, that there would need to be an investigation within the council and that the disciplinary procedures should be applied, with the outcome of those procedures being a range of things leading either to sacking or even, as has been said, to a criminal case.

 

Q261Chairman: Let us clear this up in terms of data, chief inspector. When you answered my original question, you were a little unclear and fuzzy about who had carried out the inspection and who they had met. Then, when you answered David Chaytor's question, it became clear that you do not keep those records after three months. I think that Miriam said that you keep records of inspections for only three months. That seems bizarre to me. How do you know that all the allegations that you have been making about being misled are based on the truth if you do not even have the records for the inspection on which you were misled? You cannot tell us who your inspectors met and when, or what they said. You cannot tell us anything about it.

Christine Gilbert: I am basing what I am saying about misleading information on the information in the report and letter that we have, and in the data that was submitted. The responsibility for submitting the data-

 

Q262Chairman: Could you be clear about which data you kept, because you are saying that records of inspections are not kept for more than three months?

Christine Gilbert: The only data and evidence that I assume that we have are those set out in the report or in the APA letter. May I just confirm that with Miriam?

Miriam Rosen: Yes, we have only the APA letter.

Christine Gilbert: That is a detailed letter with facts, figures and so on.

 

Q263Chairman: So how do we know what happened if you have only that letter? You do not have any record of what your inspectors did, who they met or what the answers to their questions were. That is a great shock to me, because I assumed that much of what you had said was from your detailed knowledge of what happened in 2006 and 2007, and on your reflections on that in 2008, but you are now telling the Committee that none of that material is kept. Do you even know who carried out the inspections and which of your people were there?

Christine Gilbert: Yes. The evidence base is in the joint area review report, which is a big report, and in the annual performance assessment letter. We do have records about inspections and so on. That is practised right across the piece in different inspections, although it may be something that you want to come back to at another meeting.

 

Q264Chairman: We really would, chief inspector, because in the report that I read-I had to be locked in a room in the Department to have access to it-it was pointed out that many of the health records were totally illegible and unsigned. Did your team pick up on that kind of flagrant misuse of record keeping? I presume that you do not know because you have destroyed the evidence.

Christine Gilbert: Yes, because that sort of detail, if they had looked at it and it was significant, would be in the reports. My point about inaccurate data can be substantiated by looking at our reports and at the case files in Haringey. At the moment, we still have the evidence trail for Haringey, but the reports stand as a substantive piece of evidence.

 

Q265 Chairman: But let us get this clear. What do you mean by the evidence trail? I do not know about the rest of the Committee, but it is not clear to me what the evidence trail is if you admit that you destroyed the records after three months.

Christine Gilbert: The evidence would be in the report, which refers to case files looked at, the points made on those case files and so on.

 

Q266 Chairman: But that is like an academic writing an article and destroying all their research material. That is horrific, is it not? Should you not keep the material, especially on safeguarding children? I understand that there is a large body on inspection of schools, but with the sensitivity of this matter-

Christine Gilbert: I am just talking about the rules that we have currently for the different forms of inspection. In inspections at the moment, that evidence is destroyed in a certain time.

 

Q267 Paul Holmes: You said that the evidence would be in the report, but the report that we are talking about is last year's, which said that Haringey was doing a good job. Clearly, there was no evidence in that report that medical records were illegible, that there were no signatures or that children were not being seen and nobody was picking up on it. That is not in the report.

Christine Gilbert: It is in the report, because it says that core assessments and initial assessments have got better. It makes specific reference to that. It also makes specific reference to the case load of social workers, their appointments and so on. The evidence is in there that led us to reach-

Paul Holmes: Except that it turns out that most of that was untrue, and that you were lied to.

Christine Gilbert: It was wrong, yes.

 

Q268 Paul Holmes: This still strikes me: over the years, Ofsted has dealt with schools in a very aggressive way, such as naming and shaming-although I know that that is on the Government's part rather than Ofsted's-or saying, "This school's rubbish; unless you get your act together, we'll close you down next year; bring in special measures," yet here, when a child has died and people have lied to you about the process and misled you completely, you seem very relaxed and laid back about saying, "Well, I don't know who we met, and I don't know who should be penalised."

Christine Gilbert: Sorry, I do not in any way want to give the impression that I am relaxed about this. It is a really serious thing to have occurred. What I am saying is that Ofsted does not employ the people who did those things, and it is up to the people who employ them to take this further. We have absolutely no role in which to do that.

In terms of naming and shaming, we are highlighting key issues that we think are crucial to the safety and welfare of children, such as the serious case reviews. We have done the annual evaluation, as I said, and now, quarterly, we are publishing on the website the names of the local safeguarding children boards, the area that they come in and their grade. We are doing a number of things to highlight areas of bad practice and poor practice.

 

Q269 Mr. Timpson: Bearing in mind the deficiencies exposed in the annual performance assessment process in Haringey in 2007, and widening this out from Haringey, how confident can we and you be in the rigour and accuracy of other APAs in local authorities around the country?

Christine Gilbert: I think that we need to be clearer about the APA being an assessment of outcomes. As I said earlier, it is a series of outcomes and briefings that should give us a picture about an area. I have to say that my impression is that most councils up and down the country will have completed their returns with integrity and with-

 

Q270 Mr. Timpson: Where do you gain that impression from, based on what has happened over the last three weeks?

Christine Gilbert: From the work that we have done. That was why I wrote on Monday to every local authority in the country asking their chief executives to vouch for the accuracy of the information that has come in to us.

 

Q271 Mr. Timpson: Can we conclude from that that you do not have confidence in APAs in other local authorities?

Christine Gilbert: No. I generally have confidence in them. I have far more confidence in inspection and on-site investigation of key issues. On the second day in Haringey, I was being told of the level of inadequacy. Miriam will tell me that that was because all the inspectors were working 15 hours on those two days. Nevertheless, the extent of what was going wrong in Haringey was being reported to me at the end of the second day. That was from inspection and on-the-ground investigation. That is why we were changing the process anyway-to get a greater feel of what things were like on the ground. The data are important, but they are not the whole picture; you have to get underneath the data, which is what we are trying to do. I will feel confident about publishing in the middle of next week, if I get assurances from local authorities beforehand.

 

Q272 Mr. Timpson: Did the APA fail so spectacularly in this case partly because it involved nothing more than a paper exercise? In all your inspections involving children in care and children's services-not just your intensive triennial safeguarding inspections-do you not need to see social workers doing their job on the ground in the same way that a schools inspector sits in a classroom and watches a teacher perform their role teaching children? That would make your life more difficult, given that social workers spend only about 5% of their working day face to face with children, but do you not need to ensure that you have the right quantity and quality of people to do the job?

Christine Gilbert: I absolutely support the need for the really close inspection of practice, but that is not gained as easily by observing one or two social workers as by observing teachers in schools. We need to get underneath the practice of social work, which involves not only looking at what social workers do, but detailed discussions with users about what they think. We already talk to children, although not through the APA process. We talk to children in care who have experienced the system and so on, so I absolutely support the need for inspections in coming to a judgment.

 

Q273 Mr. Timpson: Do your Ofsted inspectors dealing with social care and children's services, especially those coming from an educational background, of which there are many, have the expertise to identify risks and failings and to judge whether social workers and others in children's services are doing their job to the necessary standard to protect children?

Christine Gilbert: I do. In the main, the people looking at social care have come over from the Commission for Social Care Inspection and are social care inspectors. However, moving to different areas of our remit, over time there will be scope for inspectors trained and equipped to look more generally at, for example, boarding schools, rather than having two sets of inspectors going in at the same time, which happens now. Over time, we might well breed a different sort of inspector with the breadth to do that. However, the people looking at social care certainly have a social care background, and those doing the APA were one education HMI and one social care inspector. We have not lost expertise in social care and we value it very much. In fact, we will be extending it to look at what we need to do with the new comprehensive area assessment.

Chairman: Andrew wants to come in on this point.

 

Q274 Mr. Pelling: I might have misheard, but I thought that our witness said that most local authorities provided true information. How widespread then is the misinformation being provided to Ofsted?

Christine Gilbert: We do not know, which is why I wrote on Monday to all chief executives asking them to give me assurances that the information submitted for this year's APA was accurate.

 

Q275 Mr. Pelling: By definition, chief executives are straightforward, direct and honest, but can any measures be employed to judge whether Ofsted is being widely misinformed?

Christine Gilbert: The only way to get underneath that is through sampling and checking, which needs to be built into our proposals. Any chief executive or director of children's services knowingly supplying wrongful information could be sacked-questions were asked about that earlier. That is the ultimate end of any disciplinary process. That is in terms of the council; whether it goes beyond that is something else.

 

Q276 Mr. Heppell: The JAR would not have happened if it had not been for the Baby P case-we are agreed on that-and it is only because of the JAR that the failure of the data has been identified. I find it a little worrying that you say that chief executives will be asked to say that the data is okay. You said that the only way in which you could ensure that the data for all the authorities was accurate would be to do some sampling. Have you done any sampling?

Christine Gilbert: It would not be our job to do the sampling because very little of the data comes back directly to us. The data comes to us from the Department of Health, and a lot of it comes from the DCSF and from Government offices and so on, so it comes at us from different ends and contribute to the assessment. The sampling would not be our job, but I am raising this with other inspectorates. Although I am talking this morning about the social care data, the Department of Health was finding similar things in its approach.

 

Q277 Mr. Heppell: So are you recommending that people do sampling?

Christine Gilbert: As inspectorates, we need to look right across the piece, because there is an increasing reliance on self-assessment and you need checks on how people are assessing themselves.

Mr. Heppell: So you are recommending that they do sampling, but as far as you know, no sampling is going on at present.

Christine Gilbert: Some data are checked by the Audit Commission and so on, but we need to be clearer about who is doing what in the checking of data, and whether we ask the Audit Commission to do it, as part of its consideration of a local authority's work, or the district auditor for that particularly authority. When I was in a local authority, the district auditor, which happened to be the Audit Commission, regularly checked a whole range of data.

 

Q278 Fiona Mactaggart: Chief inspector, I am looking at four people. You are the one who has been doing all the work, but as I found out from your biographies, we have before us three teachers and one accountant. By saying that, I am trying to highlight my concern that at the most senior leadership level of Ofsted, the social care experience that might have helped to avoid this situation is not there.

Christine Gilbert: I was for five or six years-I cannot remember now-a chief executive of a local authority, and social care was high on my list of priorities. For instance, I always attended the corporate parenting panel and all those sorts of things, so I have close experience of social care and I considered it an important priority, as did the members of that local authority.

 

Q279 Fiona Mactaggart: Who is the most senior member of your staff whose initial history was in social care and social work?

Christine Gilbert: Michael would have elements of social care in the work that he has done, as would the divisional managers-the members of the senior civil service. In September, we issued the plans for the reorganisation of Ofsted. The Committee will remember me saying last time that I did not want to change the structure that was established when I was appointed until we had been through one year, or until we had run business as usual and got a sense of what we needed to do in the new merged organisation. We have a different structure planned for next September, which has a director of social care and a director of education in care.

 

Q280 Fiona Mactaggart: Do you think that that might help with some of the issues that we have been highlighting?

Christine Gilbert: I have given this work top priority, so I do not think that we have neglected social care, but it would be useful to have an additional resource in social care at senior levels of the organisation.

 

Q281 Fiona Mactaggart: One of the things that you said in answer to one of my colleagues was that you accepted the advice that serious case reviews should not be published and that you are putting emphasis on serious case reviews. However, your report shows that 90% of those serious case reviews are completed out of time and that 30% take between three and four years to complete. If the reason for not publishing them is to improve learning, I accept that: people will offer a kind of frankness in a setting where something will not be published-pilots and others do it, and I understand that-but if it will take four years to produce the report, where is the learning? Those responsible for the case cannot learn if the report is produced in four years. When a pilot has a near miss, I do not believe that he takes four years to produce a report about it. I want to know what you are doing about that.

Christine Gilbert: I completely agree, and I would endorse your worries about that. That is exactly why we have prioritised the focus on serious case reviews. When we took over responsibility for this area, we started to grade them. That grading had not happened before and it has had an impact. At the conference that we ran in July, safeguarding officers from some local authorities told us that the importance of serious case reviews had increased because of that happening, and that leaders or directors of children's services were taking more interest in such cases than they had done previously. It was a key feature of the July report.

The afternoon session of the conference presented the shocking findings that you referred to, which are in the report that we published a few weeks ago. Those issues are really serious but our job now is to inspect and report. Support for local authorities and so on comes not from us, but from Government offices, which work with local authorities to support and challenge them. For example, if a local authority wants an extension, the Government offices give that permission. Our job is one of inspection and reporting on the outcomes. Part of that makes things very uncomfortable by shining a light on the key issues.

 

Q282 Fiona Mactaggart: You finally spoke about your job as an inspection mechanism. I do not know what my colleagues think, but I am beginning to believe that these desk-based, short inspections in between things are in some ways dangerous. If, as you suggest, the data that people produce are accurate, arguably that should be sufficient between inspections. However, if you have inspected an institution and suggested that it is safe and that the quality of education is satisfactory or whatever, people are likely to believe that and will operate in the confidence that their processes are appropriate. As a result of that, a certain confidence or happiness in inappropriate processes could become imbedded in an institution, and as a result of such a superficial investigation, it could become more dangerous. If you think that there is any truth in that, what could you do about it?

Christine Gilbert: The changes made would ensure that there would always be some sort of inspection or on-the-ground investigation before we produced an assessment about a local area. We must be very clear about the detail and nature of that short inspection, but we will grade an authority on its safeguarding only every three years. In September, we proposed not to grade short visits, although they would help us to prioritise bigger inspections. Finding problems on the ground would lead us to bring the inspection forward and we would then carry out a very full inspection. There is a danger in giving an assurance with Ofsted's brand stamped on the back of a set of data.

 

Q283 Chairman: How many local authorities are there?

Christine Gilbert: One hundred and fifty.

 

Q284 Chairman: It is 150. I have been looking at your figures: you have 2,700 staff and you employ a further 1,100 inspectors who work on inspections. You have a very large budget and there is a worry, which we probably will not get to today, that although you said that you were going to trim the administrative costs, they are actually increasing. Given the level of interest in child protection in the country at the moment, I do not feel confident that your suggestions will keep the taxpayer and our constituents happy. It is only 150 local authorities. Why not-even if you only experiment with this-insert an inspector in every local authority who is charged with being on the ground all the time monitoring the quality of the service? You have admitted yourself that that would involve only 150 people. The disquiet in the country at the moment is such that that sort of move might put people's minds at rest. Given that you have 2,700 staff, some 1,100 extra inspectors, a very big budget and a lot of administrators, why not do that?

Christine Gilbert: We have a wide-ranging remit, so those figures include child care and so on.

Chairman: But children die if this goes wrong.

Christine Gilbert: Absolutely, but I need to say that there is just the person whom you describe attached to each of the 150 authorities and based in Government offices. In every Government office, there is a children's safety person.

 

Q285 Chairman: They are not your people, are they?

Christine Gilbert: No, but that is their role.

 

Q286Chairman: I am not interested in them, chief inspector. I am interested in the inspectorate knowing what is going on the ground without needing a gimmick or a whistleblower. There is nothing wrong with a whistleblower, but this sounds gimmicky to me, when 150 well-trained people inserted in local authorities could put our constituents' minds at rest over whether there was the vigilance that we think is required at the moment.

Christine Gilbert: You would need to change the legislation. As the legislation stands, that role is given to the Government offices. They have a role to challenge and support local authorities.

 

Q287 Chairman: No, chief inspector, I am not going to be palmed off like that. I do not believe that. I am sorry, but I do not believe that legislation has to be changed for you to appoint an Ofsted inspector in each local authority to look at social care. Explain to me why you think that that needs legislation.

Christine Gilbert: Because I think that inspection is an external look at what is going on, and the role of challenging, supporting, monitoring and so on is there with the children's services advisers in the Government offices. If you think that the proposals that we are putting together for safeguarding are not sufficient, I think that we would look at them again, but I cannot see that one person in every local authority would give the assurance that you want. Ofsted's rigour is based on its inspection frameworks, so those frameworks need to be as open and transparent as possible and we need to apply them properly

 

Q288 Chairman: Chief inspector, with all the will in the world, while you can persuade this Committee on school inspections, you are not persuading me and a lot of my colleagues that enough is being done on this. I do not believe any politician who says that this sort of thing will never happen again-of course such tragedies will happen again-but our job is to ensure that as few as possible happen again. The experience of Baby P and others that we have heard about recently gives us the opportunity to do something that makes a real difference. If you are telling me that a person is inserted in each local authority, it would be rather good if the money that we are spending on something that obviously does not work was spent on your having an inspector placed in each local authority. Why are you so resistant to that?

Christine Gilbert: Because that would be a radical change to the way in which inspection has developed. Whatever we are saying about inspection now is rooted in each council-each local partnership-taking responsibility for its own development and improvement.

 

Q289 Chairman: It does not work, chief inspector, and we know that it does not work as well as we want it to. It works partly, but not well enough.

Christine Gilbert: I do not think that it does work well enough, but there have been significant improvements that we have pointed to. We need to do more-we all need to do more-but I would rather that the Committee engaged in debate about the things that we are proposing for introduction in April to see if we can strengthen them. At the moment, I cannot see what just placing an inspector in every local authority, as you are suggesting, would do. We need to have a team of people looking from the outside at what is going on. We intend to allocate a linked inspector to each local authority to talk about the performance across the area, but that is not really inspection; it is linked to pick up issues and to feed back issues.

Chairman: Well, it is a different view of the inspection.

 

Q290 Mr. Carswell: On the issue of data that you used before you decided that Haringey social workers were doing a good job, the data, Professor Sinclair tells us, relate to the completeness of assessments: it is quantitative information, not qualitative. When you said that Haringey was doing a good job in 2007, you were gauging Haringey to be good at completing assessments. You measured nothing about how good the assessments were, or any follow-up. Perhaps the good professor is wrong, but assuming that he is right, and I think he is, is not such an assessment methodology fundamentally flawed? You cannot blame the data if the data could not give you a picture of what was really happening anyway.

Christine Gilbert: I think it would lead you to ask more questions and different questions if the data had come in differently, but the thing that gets underneath the data is the inspection. It is inspectors looking at the files, talking to the people connected with the files and making connections across. You are right that it is really only inspection that gets underneath those figures, but if the figures had looked different, we would have been unlikely to give the same grade. It is really two different processes operating.

 

Q291 Mr. Carswell: Finally, do you think that we should democratise the process for appointing the chief inspector of Ofsted, so that there is proper accountability and so that those we elect can have a say in who runs the show?

Christine Gilbert: I am accountable to the Ofsted board and I report to you twice a year.

Chairman: You report to Parliament through this Committee.

Christine Gilbert: Yes, so there is an accountability framework and the Ofsted board holds me to account for my performance and for the strategic direction of the organisation.

 

Q292 Mr. Carswell: You think that is good enough?

Christine Gilbert: It feels pretty rigorous to me. Certainly the board did not ask all your questions but it asked many of your questions on Monday.

Chairman: Graham has been very patient, but Fiona had one last question on which I cut across her, so we will hear from Fiona first and then Graham, who is going to get a gold star.

 

Q293 Fiona Mactaggart: I think that in our previous questions to you I have been the only person who has raised child protection. Everybody else has always raised issues relating to education, learning and achievement. You may recall that my concerns the last time I interviewed you related to child protection issues at a private boarding school. This discussion highlights a concern that I was trying to press then and that I would like to press again, which is that the transfer from the Commission for Social Care Inspection to Ofsted of some of these issues has-I am worried about this and I think, from their questions, that my colleagues on the Committee now share that worry-led to a weakening of the effectiveness of these procedures. I wanted to know whether there was a concordat or an agreement between Ofsted and CSCI about taking that over in order to ensure the quality of inspection of child protection in residential child care settings and other places, and what that was; is it a public agreement?

Christine Gilbert: There were different forms of protocols and agreements about the transfer. I will check when I get back, but I do not think there is anything that fulfils the sort of thing that you said. I am sorry if the Committee feels that we are not dealing with social care as well as previously. Serious case reviews have been around for a while, and the discussion about them is really happening only now. I think it would have happened with the report that we produced, because it is fairly astonishing when you look at the length of time that some authorities, some safeguarding boards now, have taken to do those serious case reviews. Over three years is far longer than Ofsted has been in charge of this area. We do take social care issues very seriously, and we are using the force of Ofsted's name to try to get a higher profile for some of those very important issues.

 

Q294 Fiona Mactaggart: If there is such an agreement, can you send a copy to the Committee?

Christine Gilbert: There would not be. I think that I might go back and find different agreements about different parts, which I will send to you if I can.

Fiona Mactaggart: Thank you.

 

Q295 Chairman: Fiona makes a very strong point, does she not? We are not trawling over matters, nor are we trying to embarrass you about the Haringey episode, particularly; we want to learn the lesson positively, and coming out of the session is the Committee's concern that, in a way, one inspection system that is appropriate for schools and education is probably not appropriate, and needs to be rather different, for social care. This is a learning curve for us, too, but you seem to be a bit resistant, because, as Fiona pointed out, not one of you has a social care background. That has been a criticism of Haringey, and of some children's services where, predominantly, there is an education person in charge, rather than a social worker. I hope that you will take this in a positive way-that we have these strong concerns about the appropriateness of the inspection system that is okay for education, but probably is not right for this issue.

Christine Gilbert: We are not using the same systems for social care as those that we use for education. The use of proportionality, for instance, is much stronger in schools and colleges than it is in social care. We have, despite what you said earlier, reduced our administrative budget and so on, and reduced front-line services in some areas-but absolutely not in social care. By bringing the four organisations together, we have tried to learn from the best of every framework-the grading of the serious case reviews and doing survey reports, for instance. We are trying to use all of that and to do things a lot quicker, so, under the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, for instance, it would have been months and months before you got one of its reports, but we are now changing the process so that it is much quicker. We think-well, we know-that we have looked this past year at every framework, and we have come up with something better in all areas, including in respect of the former Ofsted in April 2007. That is not to say that we cannot learn more.

 

Q296 Mr. Stuart: Chief inspector, why is there confusion about Ofsted's figures relating to suspicious child deaths?

Christine Gilbert: Is this about the figure of 282?

Mr. Stuart: Yes, the figure of 282 children. The report is rather unclear on such an important matter; it suggests that in all 282 cases there is suspicion of abuse. Will you clarify why you allowed that to happen and, perhaps, straighten us out?

Christine Gilbert: Those figures are correct. We wrote to The Observer and asked for the article to be corrected, but it did not publish the letter. The figures that were used in the report are correct. They are from April 2007 to the end of August 2008, which fitted in with the annual report. I do not know the difference that was quoted in The Observer-we are still not really sure-but I am clear about our figures. When authorities notify us, they notify us if neglect or abuse is suspected in a case, and you sometimes do not know whether it was a feature until you have finished the investigation. Of those 282 cases, 72 did not die from abuse, but we did not know that. If the child is looked after and dies, authorities have to report that to us, and the child may have died not through neglect or abuse, although there might have been an element of abuse somewhere, but through a road accident-those sorts of things. Those figures will change at the margins until we know the results of the investigation.

 

Q297 Mr. Stuart: Your report covers the period between 1 April 2007 and 31 August 2008. That is where the 282 children are mentioned. So that I can be absolutely clear, you are saying that 72 of the 282 children were not killed as a result of neglect?

Christine Gilbert: That is right.

 

Q298 Mr. Stuart: So in other words, 210 were during that period. Is that your evidence?

Christine Gilbert: Yes.

 

Q299 Mr. Stuart: That is a little over a year, and that number is higher than those suggested by the Government.

Christine Gilbert: It is, but we double-checked when we were being accused of presenting inaccurate figures. Our figures were as right as they could be when they went to press. Michael has the details of the 72, if you want them.

Michael Hart: We have been through every case to make sure that we understood the discrepancy between the 282 and the 210. As the chief inspector explained, they include all children who were looked after and who died during that period. Some of them had special educational needs and were looked after, but it turned out that there was no abuse involved in their deaths. However, for others, such as those who were killed by stabbing, shooting, road accidents, sudden infant death and so on, there was initially some concern that there might have been abuse, but subsequently it was established that that was not a factor.

 

Q300 Mr. Stuart: Thank you for that clarification. If 210 children were killed during those 15 or 16 months, that means that more than three children in this country are killed by abuse every week. That is an horrific statistic. Can you explain the discrepancy between that and the Government's assertion that the figures are more like one a week? Whether it is three a week or one a week, those children are not statistics; they are human beings who have been killed.

Michael Hart: Those are the figures that we established. The calculations show that there were around 12 a month over 17 months. Those are certainly the figures that we have established since we have had responsibility for them.

 

Q301 Mr. Stuart: Thank you.

Are social workers hindered in their jobs by the excessive bureaucracy and paperwork involved, and could a reduction in that bureaucracy and paperwork help to ensure a more effective system that is less interested in ticking boxes-you referred to that, chief inspector-and better able to identify and support children such as Baby P?

Christine Gilbert: We have not investigated that issue as such, but we have identified it for possible survey work in the year to come. As I said, people are dismissing the paperwork without looking at the detail of what it tells you. It is like going to the doctor and the doctor not having your notes and giving you the wrong treatment. The paperwork is really important, and the issue for me is that if it is managed properly, and looked at and discussed as it should be, you would pick up the bits of information that someone might have missed during a busy day and so on. There are two issues. We have not focused just on social workers, so I do not have the evidence to answer your question, but I would not dismiss the importance of paperwork.

 

Q302 Mr. Stuart: I think that in Haringey there are one and half social workers for every child on the child protection register, yet despite the focus on paperwork no one seems to have been properly responsible for Baby P. Has the heavy bureaucratic load come at the expense of accountability?

Christine Gilbert: Some of what is being asked is simple stuff, but it is not being done well, and it needs to be done well. Managerial supervision in social care is intended to focus very much on practice, to pick up and talk about individual cases, to explain why you have not seen the child alone, and so on, since the previous visit, and to consider what support could be provided.

 

Q303 Mr. Stuart: Is it your finding that those on the front line believe that the paperwork required is proportionate and reasonable?

Christine Gilbert: We have not asked that question, and I have seen no evidence to enable me to answer it honestly.

 

Q304 Mr. Stuart: Given the nature of what you are dealing with, is that not important? I think you said that you would try to take more cognisance of information from those on the front line. Will that be an urgent priority for you?

Christine Gilbert: It is an urgent priority. The survey is a longer-term issue, but it will be part of the safeguarding no-notice inspection visits. It is likely that we will do the questionnaire before we go in. We will have to do it in such a way that they do not know that we will be coming next month. The questionnaire will accompany the assessment of whether we need to inspect a certain authority now, next month or whether it is safe to leave it until next year.

 

Q305 Mr. Stuart: I am trying to square what you are telling us as chief inspector. You are effectively saying that paperwork is important, and obviously everybody would accept that; broadly speaking, you are suggesting that the paperwork is proportionate and reasonable. That is not what social workers tell me. You have not surveyed them yet, but are you stating to us today as the chief inspector responsible for this area that you are broadly confident about the amount of paperwork that front-line social workers have to put up with?

Christine Gilbert: I feel confident about the safeguarding requirements put in place after the Laming inquiry. I have seen those working well and not so well. I do not know whether you are referring to additional paperwork over and above that. We do not have the evidence for that additional work. I am confident that social workers up and down the country are not being asked to do too much because of the requirements placed on them as a result of the Laming inquiry.

One thing that we will ask about in the questionnaire will relate to that and to the work load issue in the Haringey case that has been described. People were allocated families, so it would not have been picked up that four children were part of their work load. That would be picked up in a questionnaire.

 

Q306 Mr. Stuart: You said that you planned to do more on the issue of whistleblowers, with a whistleblowers hotline. In a sense, that answers my first question of whether you think enough is being done to allow whistleblowers to warn us of these tragic cases. In the Baby P case, the whistleblower's warnings were repeatedly ignored and she ended up being bullied and ostracised at work instead. Is there something inherent in the culture of children's services that needs to be looked at?

Christine Gilbert: I hope not. I said earlier that we are scrutinising the proposals we made in September to ensure that they are rigorous. We are ensuring that any piece of evidence that would have been key in that tragic case will in future be picked up. Such things will be built into any system that we establish. The consultation closed last week so I have not read through it. We will go through the responses from wherever they come in great detail. I do not think that we have had that many. We had far more on schools. We have had fewer than 50 responses. We will look at those and build any that we think sensible into our proposals.

 

Q307 Mr. Stuart: Of course, the context for the Baby P case is the Climbié inquiry, which took place after that case traumatised the whole country. That case could not have had greater national attention and political focus, and yet in the very authority in which it took place you have found that the findings were not implemented. How can we give confidence to our constituents that the lessons learned from this new terrible case will be implemented?

Christine Gilbert: I have spoken to a number of chief executives and directors of children's services over the last few weeks. There can hardly be a place in the country that is not looking at its procedures and asking itself those questions. We can give further guidance to councils on how they can scrutinise such work more effectively.

 

Q308 Mr. Stuart: If I may, I will move to a more general issue. It is unlikely that these councils have been indifferent to the welfare of children. What are the systemic reasons for their failures? Is it a lack of funds? Is it because social services do not rate high enough on the political priority list? Are you in any position to make any comment on that? Social services departments and social care workers are basically being hung out to dry as the great villains of the piece. Perhaps it has happened once or twice too often for us to want to blame the individuals concerned, and we should be looking further up the political system to find responsibility.

Christine Gilbert: The safeguarding review that we published in July stated that there had been some improvements locally and that most partners were round the table on the local safeguarding children boards, although not all of them were. A number of agencies were still not attending, and we recommended that they should. Those boards are meeting and talking, but in too many instances the serious case reviews show that they are working in parallel rather than focusing sufficiently on the needs of the child or young person.

 

Q309 Mr. Stuart: To come back to their practice, do they have the resources and support to do the job? Is there something systemic that means that they are destined to keep failing, and that we can berate them for their failure when in fact it is not their fault? The quality of social care and perhaps of social workers is a real issue to consider.

Christine Gilbert: More resources are always helpful, but that point has not emerged in our work as a major issue. The major issues are such things as the use of different language to describe things, the use of different systems and so on. Agencies focus on getting things right in their own organisation rather than on the child herself or himself. It is very much about the different organisations.

There are really good examples up and down the country of very good practice involving multi-disciplinary, multi-agency work that is absolutely focused on the child and support for the child. We are doing some work, although maybe we could do more, to share best practice in those areas and give examples of what really good practice looks like.

 

Q310 Mr. Stuart: But yet again, you have failed to answer my question, which is really about the bigger picture. There are pockets of better practice, but are they properly supported? You are the chief inspector; do we have an adequate system within which we can expect most social care cases-or 99% of them, given the seriousness of the matter-to deliver proper care to some of the most vulnerable people in this country?

Christine Gilbert: I said last week that Haringey was exceptional, and I do believe that. Even in other places where there have been serious case reviews that we considered inadequate, the safeguarding arrangements are often as good as they could be made but there has been a problem in a particular case or a human error. That does not mean that the whole set of arrangements for safeguarding vulnerable children is poor. I hope that you do not feel that I am not answering your question, but money has not emerged as an issue. It is the practice of applying some policies that seems the key issue, and I do not feel that most authorities in the country are in the same state as Haringey.

 

Q311 Mr. Stuart: But you said earlier that 50% of staff being agency workers was quite normal across London-so normal, in fact, that it was not even worthy of comment, regardless of its contribution to the poor service levels. As the Chairman mentioned, if those service levels were in a school, we would assume that it had serious problems. Yet because that is so common, it was not worth commenting on in your report to give us an idea of what was going on in social care. Surely if that is happening commonly across London, there must be something going wrong with what is being done to attract, motivate and retain really good social workers.

Christine Gilbert: I did not mean to say that we do not mention the stability of social workers. That is very important, and we mention it in both the APA and the JARs. London authorities have certainly done a number of things to try to attract social workers, but in some ways it is a thankless profession. What has happened in this tragic case will not encourage more social workers into the profession. We need to give some attention to recruiting, supporting and training social workers, and to make that a high priority.

 

Q312 Mr. Carswell: Chief inspector, I should like your perspective on a slightly broader area. Yesterday, I spoke to a social worker with 20 years of experience, who told me that there is a slight danger that we have created social workers and children's services who are almost encouraged to look on the bright side when they should not, and encouraged to see progress and positive things where there are none. Similarly, we have created a so-called multi-agency approach in which everyone is responsible, but no one is actually in charge.

Do we need a separation between those who make the assessment of the vulnerable child at risk and those who can take a hard-nosed, tough decision about whether something needs to be done? If that had happened, surely someone within Haringey would have had the wherewithal to say, "Enough: this child is going into care. If we need to take it to court we will, but this child is going to be removed from this situation." Do we need to ask whether we are doing something fundamentally wrong by placing an onus on social workers to see something positive where there is nothing?

Christine Gilbert: Our July safeguarding report, and the serious case reviews, point to the optimism of social workers about what parents are saying, or promising, as a real issue, so that certainly is not encouraged. We have highlighted that as a significant problem, because the focus is very much on the parent rather than being sufficiently on the child. That links to my earlier point about focusing on the child and listening to them, where possible, if they are old enough to engage in debate. The optimism of some social workers is an issue that needs to be discussed and countered in debates about practice at local and national level.

On your other point, our reports also pointed to difficulties with accountability, which is not always clear and needs to be clearer in some organisations. In the safeguarding work that we looked at, and in work on the serious case reviews, it is not always clear, in the police, exactly who is accountable for what in particular cases and with safeguarding issues more generally. I know that they are looking at that.

 

Q313 Chairman: Chief inspector, a member of the public who had been horrified by recent events and who was listening to us questioning you this morning might have heard some very plausible explanations from you for where we are. You have acquitted yourself very well this morning. However, you have just said that Haringey is an exception, and many of us might believe that, but many of us know social workers who cannot sleep at night because they worry about their cases. They work hard and are not well paid, and they do a fantastic job that many other people in this room and on this Committee would not want to do, so they should be given the support that they need in the job.

To a person outside this Committee, looking in, you have revealed a higher percentage of child deaths than I have been given by the NSPCC or any other charity, let alone the official figures. You have presented figures that are quite astonishing and unacceptable. If we are to try to bring down the number of child deaths, something more radical has to be done, but in your responses to the Committee you seem to be floating over the surface of that. You have given the most horrific figures that I have ever seen in the public domain, but you are also saying, "More or less, we are doing the job alright." Many social workers might say, "If only Ofsted had been there, trumpeting from the highest of heights that something is deeply wrong in our society if we have this number of child deaths a year and a child protection system that does not save those children." I do not want to say that you are complacent, but is not there an air of complacency around this, from either the Government or yourselves?

Christine Gilbert: I am really concerned if I have come across as complacent, because I hope that we are not complacent and are examining every part of our practice. We have done that in the past year and again because of recent events. I think that social workers are absolutely key, and we need to think harder about the support, training and status of social workers. With regard to the number of deaths we reported, of the 50 children we looked at in detail in the serious case review, for instance, not all were seen by social workers, particularly the babies, and only two out of 21 were on any form of child protection, so this is everybody's responsibility. All those babies were known to health services, for instance, because they would have been born and been in a hospital and perhaps been seen by a health visitor, so it is everyone's responsibility and we have made those recommendations about increasing awareness.

 

Q314 Chairman: But does that not refer back to Douglas's point and the criticism of Laming-I do not know whether you share those criticisms-for making it more complex, rather than focusing on real accountability across Departments? There is a lack of accountability, which Douglas Carswell asked you about in his question, so do you recognise the criticisms of Laming and are they justified?

Christine Gilbert: I feel that the criticisms are not justified, actually. Applying and doing some of the very simple, straightforward things that he has suggested would allow us to pick up and make the connections across. At the same time, I want to stress the work that we have done. Yes, specialist services are sometimes involved, particularly as children get older, but of the babies that died, only two were known to social services. We make the point in the recommendations about the responsibility of what we describe as universal services, such as health and education, for recognising the signs.

Chairman: Chief inspector, we started this as a scrutiny of your annual review, but I did not want to stop anyone asking questions about this very important aspect. You will know that the Committee is about to start a major inquiry into the inspection process, so I will now call a halt to the questioning. We have not asked many of the questions that we would normally have asked you, but earlier in the new year we hope to have you back to finish today's job and start our inquiry into inspection. Thank you very much for your attendance.