Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA): Proposals for Assessing Local Authority Services

SPI08(04)03

Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA): proposals for assessing local authority services for children and young people (CSN)

21/10/2008

Author: Simon Bird

Reference No: PB 1993/08C

This covers: England

Overview

This 33-page consultation seeks views on proposals for assessing children's services and Ofsted's inspection of services for children in care and safeguarding as part of the new Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA).

The Education and Inspections Act 2006 requires Ofsted to provide an annual performance rating for each local authority's children's services. This is currently undertaken through the annual performance assessment (APA) of local authorities' services for children and young people. APA and Joint Area Reviews (JARs) of local children's services come to an end in December 2008 and are replaced by CAA which begins on 1 April 2009.

The Ofsted consultation remains open until 3 December 2008.

The main characteristics and proposals can be summarised as follows:

LAs to receive an annual rating for children's services from Ofsted
LAs to submit an annual self-assessment for children's services to Ofsted
LAs to receive an annual letter from Ofsted in November
Ofsted to introduce a new ‘performance profile' for LAs updated quarterly
new performance profile used to arrive at a rating and trigger inspection
new ‘performance bands' based on fixed cut-off points, rather than quartile distribution
overall rating subject to new thresholds e.g. where indicators for either staying safe or enjoying and achieving are in the inadequate band
new three-yearly programme of thematic inspection of services for children in care and safeguarding carried out together from 1 April 2009
Ofsted to apply thresholds to key judgements for thematic inspections
notice period will be set at four weeks in the first instance
Ofsted will carry out pilot inspections from January 2009
short unannounced safeguarding visits to social care services carried out annually.

Briefing in full

Background

CAA will focus on people and places, with inspectorates jointly assessing how well local services work together to improve outcomes for local people, and the effectiveness of individual organisations in delivering those outcomes.

Assessments will draw on new national indicators (the National Indicator Set), findings from inspection and regulation, and evidence of progress against targets in local and multi-area agreements. The first CAA reports will be published in November 2009.

The joint inspectorate proposals for consultation, published in July 2008, give details of the two main annual elements of the proposed new performance framework:

Area assessment (ungraded): looking at how well local public services are delivering better results for local people and how likely they are to improve in the future.
Organisational assessment (graded): looking at the overall effectiveness of individual public bodies such as local authorities, in managing performance and using resources.

Other inspection will be triggered only where the annual assessments or contributory evidence identify weakness and where effective countermeasures are not in place. The Ofsted performance profile for each local authority's children's services, which is being consulting on, will provide a basis for Ofsted's engagement in triggered inspection.

The first part of the consultation sets out Ofsted's proposals for discharging the duty to provide an annual performance rating for LA's children's services by introducing a ‘performance profile' for each LA area. The second part sets out Ofsted's proposals for inspecting services for looked after children and for safeguarding.

Ofsted will carry out pilot inspections from January 2009 and undertake consultation with users through focus groups. It will also publish a report on the responses from this consultation on the Ofsted website during January 2009.

Part 1: Ofsted's assessment of children's services

Ofsted will play a full part in CAA by contributing to the area and organisational assessments as set out in the joint inspectorate consultation document. To do this Ofsted will develop a performance profile, which will set out its assessment of strengths and weaknesses in outcomes and services for children and young people.

To meet the requirement for an annual performance rating for each LA's children's services as set out in the Education and Inspections Act 2006, the profile will be used to arrive at a rating, updated annually, for the performance of the LA's children's services.

Performance profile

Ofsted's wide range of inspection and regulation of services for children and young people provides a unique and comprehensive insight into the quality of services within an area. The local profile will bring together judgements on the quality of inspected settings, institutions and services with an assessment of performance against a wide range of Every Child Matters (ECM) indicators for children and young people, including the new National Indicator Set.

Performance bands

Ofsted will update the profile four times a year on its website, in September, December, March and June. This will make sure that evidence is up-to-date and transparent. Ofsted intends to publish the first performance profiles in September 2009 so that they can be used for the first area assessments, which report in November 2009.

Banding indicators in the performance profile will identify where there are specific concerns about the well-being of children and young people. Such concerns may lead to consideration of triggered inspection

Annual performance rating for children's services

The annual overall rating will derive from the three sections of the performance profile - inspected services, ECM indicators and direction of travel. The overall rating will be subject to the application of thresholds - for example, where ECM indicators for either staying safe or enjoying and achieving are in the inadequate band then this must be reflected in the overall annual rating for children's services. The overall rating may take into account improvement over time, comparison with similar areas and performance against local area agreement targets.

Ofsted will report its annual performance rating for children's services by letter to each LA in November each year. It will be reported also through the CAA organisational assessment, published in November each year.

Organisational and area assessments

The quarterly profile will also form the backbone of Ofsted's contribution to the new annual CAA organisational and area assessments. It will form part of the cross-inspectorate evidence file and be shared with the other inspectorates as part of the CAA process.

The organisational assessment and the area assessment are linked and Ofsted does not propose to contribute to the two assessments as if they were unrelated. A distinctive feature of the organisational assessment is its focus on the organisation's role in improving outcomes (for example, the LA's role), as opposed to the combined contribution of the wider local strategic partnership in improving prospects in the area.

Ofsted proposes that each LA undertakes an annual area self-evaluation for children's services, which will include a commentary on the effectiveness of Children's Trusts, or equivalent, in promoting and improving the well-being of children and young people, including those in care and who are in particular need of safeguarding. Ofsted will not prescribe any particular model but will provide guidance to ensure self-evaluation is rigorous.

Part 2: Inspection of looked after children and safeguarding

This part of the consultation paper sets out Ofsted's proposals for the new three-yearly inspection of services for looked after children and for safeguarding children and young people from 1 April 2009. This is one element of the CAA.

Findings of the three-yearly inspections of looked after children and safeguarding will provide significant evidence for CAA. Similarly, findings from the annual CAA will in turn guide the scope and extent of three-yearly proportionate inspection of looked after children and of safeguarding. In this context, proportionality means variation in the breadth and scope of inspection fieldwork according to the needs of the local area. It does not mean that those areas assessed as having good or better outcomes and services previously will not be inspected. But it does mean, for example, reduced fieldwork in those areas where the evidence shows that good outcomes are being achieved.

The proposals in summary

The three-yearly programme of inspection of looked after children and of safeguarding will focus directly on the experiences of children and young people and will be undertaken as a single inspection event.
While all LAs must be inspected within a three-year cycle, inspections will be tailored and proportionate. Fieldwork will be targeted where outcomes or performance are weakest or where there is only limited evidence available.
Ofsted will involve senior managers of services being inspected more directly in the inspection process. Self-evaluation will be central to the way the inspection is focused and conducted.
The notice period will be set at four weeks in the first instance but Ofsted will look at ways of reducing this further to reduce any unnecessary preparation.
To help make sure the approach is proportionate, a short unannounced safeguarding visit to children and young people's social care services will be carried out annually to look at thresholds, referral and assessment processes. Where this visit identifies concerns about safeguarding, the three-yearly inspection may be brought forward.

To help reduce the differences in outcomes between groups of children whose circumstances make them vulnerable, and children and young people as a whole, Ofsted will apply thresholds to key judgements. For example, the overall effectiveness for looked after children will be judged good or better only if educational progress and safeguarding are also judged as good or better.

Annual safeguarding visit

Ofsted believes that safeguarding is of such importance that it cannot simply be left to be inspected every three years. Ofsted is proposing an annual safeguarding fieldwork visit to areas that are not due a three-yearlyinspection in order to make sure that annual risk assessment for safeguarding is robust, both for the CAA process and for determining the scope of future fieldwork as part of the inspection programme. This fieldwork will focus on child protection and is not intended to gather evidence about universal safeguarding services or outcomes. The latter will be available from new national indicators and findings from Ofsted inspection and regulation of a wide range of institutions, settings and services.

Comment

This consultation follows the joint proposals for CAA published for consultation by the Audit Commission on behalf of the inspectorates over the summer. Thus it appears to be a timely response from Ofsted to mark out its territory and reassert its legitimate role as the dominant regulator for children's services (as enshrined in statute) in the new emerging world of CAA, which begins in earnest from April 2009. However, it is difficult to see how separate consultations from separate inspectorates, with more planned in the future, and an apparent compartmentalising of services, will deliver the main objective of CAA, as laid down in the introduction to the joint proposals published over the summer:

"For the first time, it will bring together the work of the seven inspectorates to provide an overview of how successfully the local organisations are working together to improve what matters in each place. It will be linked to the streamlined assessment of these individual organisations to provide clear accountability (p. 3)."

In several key respects, the new arrangements now being proposed by Ofsted closely resemble the existing APA framework: each LA will continue to receive an annual rating for children's services from Ofsted; be able to submit an annual self-assessment for children's services to Ofsted; and receive an annual letter from Ofsted. Even the proposals for the inspection of LAs where the greatest change is proposed, the introduction of a 3-year cycle of inspections of services for children in care and safeguarding builds on a shift to increasingly focus on these two critical areas instituted through the outgoing Joint Area Reviews. This sharper focus on the most vulnerable children and young people, especially children in care whose plight warrants top priority, is to be welcomed.

However, it would be naïve to overlook the potential significance of what could be characterised as Ofsted giving itself a range of new and carefully crafted levers of power and influence over LAs. At the heart of this lies the introduction of the new Ofsted ‘performance profile' for each LA's children's services, which will set out Ofsted's assessment of strengths and weaknesses in outcomes and services for children and young people. Crucially, the profile will also provide the basis for Ofsted to trigger an inspection. Updated four times a year, the local profile will bring together judgements on the quality of inspected settings, institutions and services with an assessment of performance against a wide range of Every Child Matters indicators, including the new National Indicator Set (NIS). Given the wide-ranging scope of the indicators and the frequency with which the data is refreshed, not to mention the speed with which the NIS is being implemented despite the new and untested nature of many of the indicators, any LA in the country could potentially get a triggered inspection. This, together with the introduction of thresholds, thematic inspections and an unannounced ‘annual safeguarding visit', could increase - rather than reduce - the bureaucratic burden on LAs and, in turn, lead to a downgrading of scores and an increase in LAs being subject to intervention.

It is worth noting that Ofsted proposed the introduction of thresholds for staying safe and enjoying and achieving in this year's APA process. Were it not for the successful lobbying by the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS) and others, 25+ LAs would have been at risk of their children's services score being downgraded with, in most cases, a knock-on effect for their overall CPA score. Fortunately common sense prevailed, although one has to question the motive behind the proposal given its known impact.

Comments are sought on how to use views of children and young people but no mention is made of the TellUs survey which has recently provoked considerable disquiet!

Together with its main partners - including ADCS, Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) - CSN is organising its annual data conference on the 3rd February 2009 at Congress House in London around the new CAA and its implications for children's services (click here to download the flyer).Among the speakers will be Mike Cladingbowl, Ofsted's Project Director for CAA. As part of CSN's work on data, a publication will be launched at the conference that will draw on the findings of a current survey of DCSs (endorsed by ADCS). DCSs are strongly encouraged to complete the survey, if they have not done so already. The survey will highlight the health warnings which need to be attached to the new CAA framework and, in so doing, will help to improve the rigour and transparency underpinning its implementation and development.

Additional Information

N.B. Simon Bird is the new Chair of the Performance Information Group for Education and Children's Services (PIRGE) which is overseeing the above conference and survey. PIRGE has a broad membership, including CSN, DCSF, Ofsted, Audit Commission, NFER, Education Management and Information Exchange, Virtual Staff College and LAs.