Stuart Carlton, director of children and young people's services at North Yorkshire, discusses the services' 'outstanding' Ofsted judgment.
The council is the first to receive an across-the-board 'outstanding' rating under the new Ofsted inspection framework. Carlton explains some of the keys to this success, including no longer using agency staff, having a clear practice model and making sure social workers have reasonable caseloads.
The full list of questions, asked by Community Care associate editor Sarah Dennis, is as follows:
1. North Yorkshire saw a great result in its latest Ofsted inspection, the first council to be judged outstanding across the board, and the leadership team were strongly credited for their ambitious, forward thinking approach. How has North Yorkshire’s senior leadership team been able to achieve such oversight and knowledge of the services, and how does it communicate with the frontline teams and their service users?
2. Given Ofsted’s note regarding your move away from ‘auditing’, we’d be interested to hear about the approach to performance monitoring and management within the council – how has this been implemented and maintained such consistency?
3. How has North Yorkshire’s stable workforce been maintained and what has it taken to get to this point?
4. In terms of the environment for social work teams to work effectively, what would you say are the core requirements, based on the experience at North Yorkshire?
5. Ofsted were particularly complimentary about the council’s No Wrong Door initiative – can you offer some background to this and how it has been so successfully implemented?
6. Similarly with making psychologists available to all fieldwork teams under the PIPA service – what was the rationale behind this and the core benefits – and how is this being further developed?
7. What challenges did the council encounter in incorporating such services – were there risks to compliance and ‘the basics’ in performance in being creative?
8. Finally, what’s next for North Yorkshire – what are you looking at to further develop and maintain performance?