Dr Jacqui Jensen, executive director of adults, children, education and public health at Bristol council, talks to Community Care about the ‘requires improvement’ judgment the service recently received from Ofsted.
The council was praised by Ofsted for the “considerable” progress senior leaders have made in “developing an environment where good social work can flourish”. Ofsted saw that “practice improvements were most evident” in a number of areas identified as weak in the council’s previous inspection, but some “pockets of weaker practice” remain. Jensen discusses with Community Care how the council is working to continue its journey, highlighting that the council is aiming for ‘outstanding’.
The full list of questions, posed by Community Care associate editor Sarah Dennis, is:
1)What would you say were some core turning points for the council over the past few years and do you think these were borne out of the inspection findings?
2)How would you say that Ofsted’s findings compared with the service’s self-assessment – do you think Ofsted was broadly in agreement?
3)How were staff communicated to about the report – and how does the senior leadership team maintain contact with the frontline overall?
4)How were services ‘changed’ in the way they were delivered, and how were workloads significantly reduced?
5)How were the teams restructured and how was this managed? In particular, the children with disabilities team appears to have u-turned from a weakness to a strength according to Ofsted – what has been put in place to achieve that?
6)What work has been done by senior leaders on recruitment, retention and workforce development – what has been the shift in vacancy rates and turnover in terms of figures over the past year?
7)What are the next steps for continuing the improvement of case recording and the capturing of management oversight in supervision records?
8)Finally, what’s next for Bristol children’s services?